I'm writing this post off the back of a bunch of discussions in this sub recently about pitch accent, and have had this thought bouncing around my head for awhile so I thought I'd take the pulse of this community.
I was thinking recently about how the Japanese learning community seems to be overrepresented in what I could call '100%ers' (trying to sound as native as possible, though this may just be due to certain influential figures like MattVsJapan). It reminded me though, of when I was working in my lab at 東大 and there was this one grad student who was a little shy and told me she was so embarrassed by her English because she spoke with a Japanese accent. In fact, not only was her English perfectly comprehensible to me (even with the occasional r-l mixup), but I actually found her Japanese accent rather cute and endearing. I told her that on the contrary, her accent has a charming character and she should not only not be embarrassed by it, but she should not even bother trying to lose it, noting the fact that native English speakers do tend to profess an enjoyment of (certain) foreign-accented speech. For example, it's not uncommon to think that a French accent sounds elegant, or that an Italian accent sounds romantic, despite the fact that these English speech patterns are phonetically 'incorrect.' I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like such foreign accents add character and distinction to a person's speech as long as they don't sacrifice comprehensibility.
It made me wonder whether the opposite is also true. Do we Japanese learners place an exaggerated emphasis on trying to speak Japanese with as little accent as possible while native Japanese speakers might not only not mind about our accent, but even like it?
One follow-up question is: do you think we place different standards on the importance of eliminating accents in non-native languages vs our native language? What I mean is: as a native speaker of English I find Japanese-accented English speech to sound charming and full of character, but as a Japanese-learner, I find English-accented Japanese (imagining a tourist saying "koh-knee-chee-wah" in the most exaggeratedly non-heiban and drawn-out way possible) to sound max cringe. But what my ear finds cringe may be charming to the Japanese ear, just like my former colleague cringing at her own English accent while I actually found it quite pleasant. Thoughts?
by Deer_Door
15 comments
Given how much French people hate French accented English, I wouldn’t be surprised if English accented Japanese sounds better than we assume.
Peter Barakan has been a radio dj in Tokyo for 40 years and his Japanese has a discernible English accent to it. Doesn’t seem to have done him any harm.
I think the truth is that whether we’re talking about music, accents, or anything else, the vast majority of our response to these kinds of sounds is socially conditioned. We only think that song with its major key sounds happy because we live in a culture that has put happy lyrics to major chords and put major chords in happy points in movies for so long (it’s completely flipped around in rural Pakistan: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nyas.14655), and we only think that Italian sounds romantic because it has been presented to us that way in movies, etc.
So these things aren’t really “inside of the sounds.”
English is pretty unique among world languages. People from two different non-English speaking countries will learn English to communicate with each other. This means compared to most languages, the average English speaker is going to be familiar with and have heard for most of their life, far more foreign speakers speaking their language than average. Accents from every language group in the world. In Japan, there simply isn’t this kind of social conditioning to “tell people how to feel about” whatever your accent might be. They might have never heard it in real life or media anywhere once in their life. They might have zero practice even comprehending it, and when you take for granted the amount of practice of that you have had in your life, it’s easy to underestimate how much it influences your perception.
This doesn’t mean, “go hard-ass right now or quit.” Of course it’s going to differ from person to person too. But the things that make accents generally romanticized by so many people in English are unique, and it’s understandable why the situation isn’t just exactly the same everywhere in the world.
I’ve come to understand that a lot of accents make foreign speakers sound child-like, including Japanese with an English accent. And unless you’re uptight, it generally does sound endearing.
I think learning to speak in a way that is easy to understand is a laudable goal. That said a lot of people here are young perfectionists and place an outsized emphasis on other people’s opinions of them or there way of speaking. A lot of language learners come a place of embarrassment and shame when they should be less self cautious, especially when talking with native speakers.
I mean it depends. Sometimes the foreign accent sounds charming, particularly in a casual setting. Other times, when you really just need to solve a problem, it can be super frustrating (ever get tech support from someone with a strong accent? can be a challenge).
And to add to that what someone else said, that for English speakers we are super used to all kinds of accents, but that’s really not the case for many people in Japan.
Also sometimes they seem to be making fun of the foreign accent… like on TV when the foreigner has the really dumb sounding tone on purpose
I think the “accent” part of pitch-accent is confusing you (and many people). That is a tiny portion of what makes up a foreign accent. Pitch-accent is actually much easier to eliminate or improve than foreign accents in general imo.
Anecdotally speaking, from what I’ve seen and ran across, they rarely discuss foreign accents at all. Almost never, so might be one of those things they don’t really think too much about until it hinders communication. They do talk about regional accents within Japan a decent amount. They do however like when things are a bit カタコト as I’ve seen a very significant majority finding that endearing and cute (might be a universal trait across all languages).
This is just my personal opinion: English is better suited for presenting foreign accents as the language itself has a significant amount of sound diversity and being the lingua franca, everyone is just used to it being accented and the different flavors of expressions and variety add to it. When it comes to Japanese, though, one of the reasons it does sound so aesthetically pleasing (I think vast majority feel this way; I’ve never heard anyone say it sounds bad) is the fact it’s diversity in sounds is relatively small and there’s a sort of “purity” to the vowels and consonants and way moras interact. When that purity is disrupted heavily it stops really sounding like Japanese and just like another language. I don’t think natives really care that much, though. There is probably some merit in having a bit of an accent though as long as your whole “intonation” package and expressiveness is on point.
Searching around I can’t even find discussions about it all that much.
I did find a blog about a teacher who found a bit of an accent endearing: [https://note.com/teachersachiko/n/n2939b1362cbc](https://note.com/teachersachiko/n/n2939b1362cbc)
追記: I thought about asking ChatGPT about this topic it and it gave a break down of negatives and positives, it’s not too distant from my perceptions. Although it’s ChatGPT so it could be making up 100% of everything. Since it wasn’t easy to find discussion I thought it might be trained on more data and thus have something that is accessible: [https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6876ad3d93d88191b9474d3b94c67bc3](https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6876ad3d93d88191b9474d3b94c67bc3)
To be honest, I feel like native English speakers are often strangely obsessed with “sounding native” in the foreign language they are studying. I think it’s a combination of not having much experience in studying languages in general, thinking that a native-sounding accent is the end goal, and on the other hand having a lot of experience talking to other people (usually online) who speak English as a second language flawlessly. I guess this sets unrealistic expectations.
I personally have never heard a foreigner speak my native language perfectly, even if they have lived in the country for 20 years, unless they moved there before they turned 15. And I don’t understand why they even should? After a certain point it doesn’t add anything to your language skills, and other people can understand you perfectly fine even with the accent. I myself am not aiming for “sounding native” either, in any of the languages I’m studying.
I always thought the reason for this was because Japanese is highly context dependent, moreso than English, therefore making sure you get the right pitch accent is more important. Further, Japanese culture has a reputation for emphasising propriety, meaning foreigners perceive the Japanese to care more about pitch perfect pronunciation. Idk tho.
>I’m writing this post off the back of a bunch of discussions in this sub recently about pitch accent, and have had this thought bouncing around my head for awhile so I thought I’d take the pulse of this community.
I don’t love the fact that the whole pitch accent topic is always lumped in with the idea of sounding “100% native.” Pitch accent is not just for perfectionists, it’s a part of the language and everyone would benefit from having some pitch accent knowledge.
>One follow-up question is: do you think we place different standards on the importance of eliminating accents in non-native languages vs our native language?
For sure. I don’t think much about it when a foreigner has a foreign accent in my native language, but if someone gave me the option to magically have a 100% native-sounding accent in any of my foreign languages, I’d take it in a heartbeat.
Well they do get the guy with a heavy accent to do ads or whatever so I guess maybe it has a positive effect to somebody
My personal goal is to not sound like the equivalent to this in Japanese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmh_6z9AWfc
Sounding native isn’t my goal because I know I won’t get there. I just want to be understood, man.
As an English teacher to Japanese students, I could care less about perfect pronunciation, at first. Unless it’s completely unintelligible, I don’t bother correcting the habit of adding vowels. My only exception is b/v and n/m when it’s the first sound in a word because I find it has the highest rate of changing the intended word.
Unless the student asks to be corrected on every small “error”.
I live in Japan, and I definitely retain a bit of my American/Australian hybrid accent. I used to worry about it but I’m generally understood and enough people have told me that they like the sound that I don’t stress over it. I honestly have no clue why it’s been made such a massive deal.
Obviously if you want people to hear you without seeing you and mistake you for a native then it’s going to matter, but for the average person that’s too high of a standard. And if it’s a matter of fitting in better…well, I have a beard and long wavy hair, language skills won’t make me seem like a Japanese person 🤣