I wrote:
> . . . concentrating on what the way . . .
I meant:
> . . . concentrating on the way . . .
I agree - I went to a Dutch school for two years when I was 10/11. All my lessons were in Dutch and probably because it is such a similar language, was fluent in a very short time. Again this is immersion language learning. I can no longer speak or read Dutch but this early experience may have made it easier for me to learn Japanese. Which by the way, I thought I had an accent when speaking, but the telephone problem and the people I worked with confirmed that I didn’t. My own boss was totally thrown when I answered the office phone and he couldn’t work out who I was.
I learned the languages whilst surrounded by native speakers, so I just copied the way they spoke.
Are there any examples of adults successfully learning to use that African language with the click noise? (sorry don’t know the name)
There’s a bunch of such languages, almost all in the Khoisan or Bantu language families of Africa.
I don’t specifically know of any adults learning those languages but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be able to. The clicks aren’t really that difficult to make, with a bit of practice.
I was just going to ask a question real similar to this, thanks for starting the topic!
I notice I pick up accents quickly. When I lived down south I sounded like Scarlett O’Hara. When I moved to Maine, I said things like Bax instead of box, Walmahhht instead of walmart, and I lived next to Bah Habah(bar harbor). I work with two elderly scottish ladies, and by the end of the day I have a scottish brogue, I have no clue why this happens, and have to work at it to keep my “midwestern” accent in place.
I livved in Texas and picked up an accent, it took a long time to lose it. I revert back to it when I hear it. Perhaps I am trying to form a bond with the person I am speaking with. It works, if I dealt with people from the Northeast, I would have the nasal twang thing down pat.
People do change their accents depending on time and place. Some people are able to change their accents completely. But most people, for whatever reason, are going to speak with an accent.
I know from trying to explain Bengali words to Anglo-Americans, that there are certain sounds that they just never learned to “hear” at a young age and it would be like wrestling an elephant to teach it to them.
It’s like the recent thread on people who were blind all their lives and then gained sight – their brains never learned to properly interpret the input their eyes were giving them.
It’s not physiological and it’s not psychological, but it’s part of brain development. If your brain hasn’t learned to hear and reproduce certain sounds at some early level of development, chances are your brain is never going to be able to learn it perfectly at an older age.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Kizarvexius *
** If sounds originating from a particular point of articulation are not included in the languages you are speaking, the muscles that would have been associated with those sounds fail to develop.
That, for example, is one of the reasons why the United States has such a hard time with intelligence gathering in the Middle East. Arabic languages include sounds that originate further down in the vocal tract than anything in Indo-European languages. Which means that someone who has not spoken Arabic languages from a very young age can not be taught to speak that language without an accent. It’s physiologically impossible. The CIA and military intelligence groups have to recruit either immigrants from the Middle East or the (usually) first generation children of immigrants in order to have agents who can pass for locals in that part of the world.
[QUOTE]
Sorry, but you are wrong. When I studied for Arabist, I did that in Belgium. I had non- Arab language teachers who were as fluent and accent-free as I am. The same for Turkish… and that particular professor was also fluent in Arabic, Persian Japanese, Russian and other languages that have nothing to do with his own.
You don’t need to pick up a language as a child to be able to speak it without accent. You need to listen, you need to practice, you need to record yourself and listen to yourself. And especially: you need to become one with the language you study.
I always say to people: once you start thinking in your target language, you are on your way. Once you start dreaming in your target language, it belongs to you.
To give you one example: As as tudent I went often to Bayern with an other student who was from there. After being there a few times I could speak Bayerish in a way people asked me if I lived there. The same happens when I speak Swiss German with my Swiss friends.
It is only a question of willing to adapt yourself and find fun in learning it. And then you come to a point that you automatically, without even thinking, use the language or its dialect the minute you are in a place where it is spoken.
And when you are among friends who all have an other language as first language, you mix all those languages up without noticing, in a way that everybody understands everybody.
What is probably the case in your example of the difficulties of the CIA, is to find someone with the right background needed to speak/understand the Arabic dialect of a particular country, region, city.
Many people presume that the Modern Standard Arabic as is teached in schools in the West, is what the whole Arab world speaks.
Well no. It is the Arabic of TV, newspapers, official documents, official speaches, literature… And also then it is often mixed up with the local dialect.
It varies a bit depending in which country you are, but if you start speaking MSA on the street you risk that most ordinary people wont understand you or that you are looked at as if you think you are on TV making an anouncement.
Salaam. A
When I moved to Pakistan as a teenager, I had an Urdu tutor for a while. I don’t remember much of it now, but I used to do all the market shopping and was semi-fluent. My understanding was much worse than my speech, particularily if they talked really fast. There are 3 different “t” sounds in Urdu - I could prounounce them OK, but not always hear the difference when they talked to me. So I would sit there and try and figure out what they had just said.
As an aside, many people in the market knew I was a foreigner, but couldn’t figure out what kind. Eventually I found out that my tutor was a Pathan (one of the Northern Pakistan/Afghanistan tribes), so I was speaking Urdu with a bastard Pathani/Kiwi accent 
DancingFool
Mel Gibson was born in Peekskill, New York, USA. He emigrated to Australia. Kinda blows the wind out of the interesting example. Sorry.
Quote: Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson was born on January 3, 1956, in Peekskill, New York, USA as the sixth of eleven children to parents Hutton Gibson, a railroad brakeman, and Ann Gibson, who was born in Australia.
Cite: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000154/
PS: His dad is a notorious nutjob, in case you don’t visit the pit very often. Look him up - plenty of fun there.