A little background: I started taking French in 6th grade and continued on-and-off through high school. I’m by no means fluent, but I tend to read and write it much better than I speak it. I got around Paris okay with my limited speaking abilities, but it took effort.
However, last night I came across the lyrics for the French version of Les Misérables. I started singing some of the songs in French (again, first time I’ve ever seen them) and it was remarkably easy. I even had a good accent, which is very difficult for me to have when speaking French.
So what gives? I think I somewhere read that speech and singing use different parts of the brain. If it’s as simple as that, why isn’t music used more to teach foreign languages?
How did you judge that you had a good accent when singing in French? Was a native French speaker listening to you and commenting? I don’t mean to offend, but I can pretty much always tell when an anglophone is singing in French even if I’ve never heard them speak or sing in English before… there are distinct sounds that are mispronounced. Your judgment of your accent and ability may be flawed.
WAG:
Assuming, though, that your singing French is in fact better than your spoken French, it may simply be a case of forced rhyming or other “similarity” from line to line in a song that forces you to pronounce words you might hesitate on in the same manner as words you know, thereby forcing a more “average” and less accented French. This may or may not be the way the word is pronounced in spoken French; when you sing in English I’m sure there are some words that are sung differently than when you speak it.
I’m not a linguist, but I wonder if some of the answers in the “Standard American Accent” thread applies here? That discussion touched upon how vowels became monophthongal when singers of various accents sing; perhaps a similar process is happening in your singing?
I think matt_mcl would be a very useful poster in this thread…!
I suspect its just because its slower. French people tend to talk pretty fast, and so people learning the language tend to try and match them, making their speech come out garbled. Singing gives you time to think about what is about to come out of your mouth.
It probably also helps that when singing, your repeating an already prepared text, while when talking your brain has to come up with what to say at the same time as it has to figure out how to say it.
Probably that and the fact that singing already gives you a clue to the flow. You dont have that when you’re talking, you have to make up your own flow sentence after sentence (that would be the diff between singing and say a prepared speech in French).
Singing uses different parts of your brain than speaking (although with quite a bit of overlap). I don’t know it that’s a factor here, but it’s a data point.
Well, maybe when you sing you generally say a lot fewer words in any given time frame than if you were to be speaking regularly, with longer holds on syllable and pauses which allow you to stay on top of things a lot more easily mentally,maybe the accent sounds better because you are singing and are able to put care and focus in each syllable more easily than when speaking, because it would sound ridiculous to speak with a cadence that sounds fine while singing.
