This is a post from a forum about pronunciation and mouth muscles. It is an answer to a question about how long it might take for a person learning English to get rid of their native accent to accommodate their idea of proper English.
Tue Apr 11, 2006 4:42 am GMT
The muscles of articulation are all used for all languages. If you have trouble with pronunciation, it's psychological, not physiological. Your muscles will articulate all sounds correctly if your brain tells them to.
You aren't Asian by any chance, are you? Asians are particularly prone to bizarre beliefs about muscles and tongue movement and other imaginary physical obstacles to correct pronunciation. I understand Koreans even undergo useless surgery in an attempt to improve their English pronunciation.
Anyway, eliminating a foreign accent is always possible, but it requires a lot of conscious effort. Studying phonetics can help a lot. Practice makes perfect.
Many people are able to SING without an accent. I haven't found a satisfactory explanation of this, but one possibility is that a different part of the brain participates in singing, and that it is better at imitating unusual sounds than the part that handles ordinary speech. But that's just conjecture. The fact that people can sing without an accent does demonstrate that it's not a question of muscles, though.
Some people are indeed very good at producing unfamiliar sounds. I have some students who can immediately pronounce something in English without an accent (although doing this consistently and instinctively in normal speech requires practice), and others who cannot produce unfamiliar sounds even after hours of effort.
People with open minds and an attraction to novelty seem to do better on pronunciation.
You aren't Asian by any chance, are you? Asians are particularly prone to bizarre beliefs about muscles and tongue movement and other imaginary physical obstacles to correct pronunciation. I understand Koreans even undergo useless surgery in an attempt to improve their English pronunciation.
Anyway, eliminating a foreign accent is always possible, but it requires a lot of conscious effort. Studying phonetics can help a lot. Practice makes perfect.
Many people are able to SING without an accent. I haven't found a satisfactory explanation of this, but one possibility is that a different part of the brain participates in singing, and that it is better at imitating unusual sounds than the part that handles ordinary speech. But that's just conjecture. The fact that people can sing without an accent does demonstrate that it's not a question of muscles, though.
Some people are indeed very good at producing unfamiliar sounds. I have some students who can immediately pronounce something in English without an accent (although doing this consistently and instinctively in normal speech requires practice), and others who cannot produce unfamiliar sounds even after hours of effort.
People with open minds and an attraction to novelty seem to do better on pronunciation.
People who strongly identify with their language and are afraid of new things do worse.
People who are afraid of sounding "stupid" have a lot of trouble with pronunciation.
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