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There's probably a corollary to that: first you have to get comfortable, but to get really good (fluent) you probably have to get pretty self conscious. It seem
by mseebach 9y ago
There's probably a corollary to that: first you have to get comfortable, but to get really good (fluent) you probably have to get pretty self conscious. It seems to me that most adults learning a new language will retain a fairly heavy accent and some clumsiness more or less permanently (while of course being perfectly articulate) unless they work really hard to get rid of it.
- kzrdude 9y agoA related thing: I'm skeptical of the popular claim that it's impossible to lose an accent as an adult. I think adults can still learn to speak very close to a native accent, if they keep on trying.
- jackvalentine 9y agoI didn't realise that was something people thought! With deliberate practice and a dialect coach you can pick up an accent, I don't see why the inverse wouldn't also be possible.
- bitwize 9y agoIn his "Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds" recording from the 90s, Linus has a pronounced accent. These days he sounds American.
- photojosh 9y agoI learned Spanish as a kid/natively, and stopped speaking daily at 17. Now mid-30s, I've lost a significant chunk of my vocabulary, and there are adult topics of conversation with vocab I haven't learned. But I went back to South America for work in 2009, and apparently I just sounded like someone from a different Latin country. Someone even asked if I was French.