by Jeff Martin
Not only is sounding like a native attainable, it is also necessary. One characteristic of a language is that if two or more native speakers of the same language are engaged in verbal conversation, they sound like they are speaking the same language. If they are from Japan and are speaking Japanese, they sound like they are speaking Japanese, using Japanese language sounds, with native-like accent and pronunciation. If it doesn’t sound like Japanese, is it really Japanese?
If you are determined to really learn a language, then all your preconceived doubts with regards to your ability to sound like a native speaker need to be dispelled. Whenever those doubts creep up in your mind, remind yourself that you are human, with a similar anatomy to that of a native speaker of the language you are learning. Also remember that the only reason that most of the people you know are not bilingual is simply the approach to language learning that was sold to them.
Up to this point in the book, we have mainly been discussing how to put yourself into a process that is similar to the way you learned your first language. First you listened. Then you learned to mimic native speakers. With coaching you gradually learned how to sound like a native speaker. The key to learning another language will be to allow your amazing mind and body to naturally learn how to speak from native speakers, just like you did once before. Your brain was already programmed as a child to be able to learn language. However, some may still find it difficult to produce the sounds of the language that they are learning. If so, the problems will mostly be awareness issues. In the words of one of my interpreter colleagues, Ron Vasquez, who moved to the U.S. as an adult and learned English without an accent, “It’s all about paying attention.” It will take some time for you to sound like a native, just as it takes children time to no longer sound like toddlers when they speak. Remember that you also once sounded like a toddler.
To sound like a native, you need to adopt the mindset that the language you are learning is in fact foreign, and therefore must contain mostly language sounds that you haven’t learned to produce yet. Don’t expect the sounds to be like those of your first language. If you do happen to discover sounds that are like those of your native language, then simply consider yourself fortunate to not have to struggle with said sounds. All other sounds are foreign, or unknown to you, and should be approached as such.
The skills that you learned in chapter three, “Clean Slate”, need to be applied daily. Quiet your mind, and simply observe. Try not to compare what you hear with known sounds. Pretend that your brain is recording the new sounds for later playback. If listening to a recording of a native speaker’s voice, try and picture the way they are moving their mouth. If you are face to face with a native, watch their mouth intently.
There are many things to pay attention to when observing a native speaker talk. First of all, pay attention to the vowel sounds. In English, our vowels are quite unstable. Just look at the letter “a” in this paragraph. How many different versions of “a” sounds can you find? Fortunately, in many other languages, the vowel sounds are constant, or at least change very little. When observing, ask yourself the following questions: Are the vowels being produced with an open and relaxed throat, or tight and restricted? Are the vowels being produced with the speaker’s tongue raised in the front or back of the mouth, or is it flat? Is the sound being produced with a lot of air flow? Does it sound raspy by friction being produced in the back of mouth? Do the sounds seem to be coming more out of the nose, producing a nasal sound, or is the sound mostly directed out of the mouth? Does it seem like the tongue is being depressed, forcing the throat to be exaggeratedly opened, such as with some sounds in Arabic? Are the vowel sounds being produced by opening and closing the jaw, and or changing the shape of the lips, or is the jaw fixed in one position? Are the consonant sounds being produced with the lips, tongue, or teeth? If they are being produced with the lips, does it sound like the lips are loose, allowing a lot of air flow, or are they tight, and pressed together firmly to create the sound? If the consonant sounds are produced with the tongue, where is the tongue being placed? Is it relaxed or is it being pressed firmly against the back side of the upper row of teeth? Are the sounds being produced by the tongue touching some part of the front or the back of the mouth? Is the sound produced by making a buzzing sound? Is there a trill or a flicking of the tongue involved? Do you hear any glottal stops (obstructions of airflow in the vocal cords)?
That may seem like a lot to pay attention to, because it is. Language is quite complex, as are we as human beings. Just always remember that the native speaker’s mouth is a human mouth, like the one which you possess. If they are physically able to produce those sounds, then you can learn how to do so as well. Fortunately for you, you’re the one who controls what you say and how you say it. When you speak, the sounds that come out of your mouth are programmed by you. You hear those sounds in your mind, then reproduce them with your speech organs. You probably rarely ever catch yourself accidentally speaking your native language with a foreign accent. You speak it like a native speaker. Likewise, when you speak a foreign language, you control how you sound.
Another thing you need to be aware of about your accent is that it’s adaptable, even in your own language. If you were to move to New York, after some time, wouldn’t you adopt a New York accent, even if it were slight? What if you were to move to the South? Wouldn’t you eventually adopt perhaps a bit of a southern accent? It is likely that you would. Even if you don’t think so, close family and friends often pick up on the changes when you come back home to visit. As humans, we adapt to our environment. Being exposed to speakers from a certain region causes us to adapt to the way they speak. Likewise, constant exposure to native speakers of a language will have the same effect. Trust your abilities, as hopefully by now you understand that you are a language learning machine.
There are some mental tricks that you can employ when learning how to sound like a native. One thing you can do is speak English but impersonate a foreign accent. It’s just like trying to sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Speedy Gonzales, or Pepé Le Pew. Another good technique is to try to match the pitch of the native speaker’s voice as closely as you can. If the speaker is a member of the opposite sex, simply adjust the octave of your voice to match their pitch, either one octave lower or higher. Also, pay close attention to intonation. If a word or phrase rises or falls, or a certain part of a word is emphasized, mimic it exactly.
Language speed is also a very important factor when it comes to sounding like a native. The difficulty with language speed is that in the beginning, your speech organs are not used to producing the language sounds. Therefore, you will have to speak slower than a native at first. It’s important not to rush your rate of speech if it means sacrificing your pronunciation. Speak slowly enough to say each word perfectly. Muscle memory will work to your advantage, and after enough slow practice, speed will come naturally. When you’re by yourself, practice saying words that are difficult for you. Analyze each sound of the word. When you realize which part of the word or word combinations are causing you trouble, pronounce the difficult sounds repeatedly like an exercise. Train your speech organs to sound the way you want them to.
Go ahead and accept the fact that this process will be a challenge and may take longer than you want it to. It’s simply a matter of persistence coupled with self-critique. The only real way to prove to yourself that you are kindergarten ready in a foreign language is by recording your own voice and truly observing yourself sounding like a native speaker. You must record yourself regularly until you have reached the point at which you can honestly say that you sound like a native.
06 Personal Experience
Once you have learned how to sound like a native speaker and have become conversationally proficient, at least on a basic level, your next step is to learn how to read and write in the foreign language. The most effective way of doing this is to use different types of language courses. Yes, I really did just recommend the use of language courses
! As I stated previously, most language courses are not wrong in their approach, rather they are misplaced. However, once you have established the basic conversational skills in a language, and have mastered your accent and pronunciation, language courses can be highly effective.
Before diving into how to find the right set of language courses for yourself, I would like to share some of my personal experiences that helped me to develop into the language learner that I am today. My understanding of both the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of language courses developed after I had become proficient in learning foreign languages. I became fluent in two foreign languages well before I ever found a language course that worked for me.
Prior to my first trip to Brazil, I was unable to find a decent Portuguese course. Before I left the U.S., my dad gave me a pocket-sized dictionary filled with Portuguese words that I couldn’t read. When I boarded the plane, I was delighted to find a large group of Brazilian passengers that were returning to their country. I immediately began to interact with them in hopes that I would be able to learn some words before we arrived in Brazil. And so began my first foreign language learning experience.
Once we landed in Brazil, I immediately went to the airport bookstore in search of something that could help me learn. All I could find were some bilingual dictionaries and a small phrasebook. I purchased the phrasebook and started fumbling through it. I couldn’t read any of the Portuguese, and I knew that if I tried, I certainly wouldn’t know how to pronounce the words. At that moment an idea occurred to me. I was surrounded by native speakers. Why not have them teach me?
At the time, I had a horrible cough from almost drowning at the beach shortly before my trip. I wanted the people I met and interacted with to know that I wasn’t sick, so they wouldn’t be wary of speaking with me. I searched in the phrasebook to find the health section, approached the next Brazilian person that I saw, and had them coach me. I pointed to the words and phrases in the book that I wanted to learn, and made gestures hoping that the person would understand that I wanted to learn how to say the indicated word or phrase. After learning the basic greeting phrases, the next thing I learned how to say in Portuguese was, “I’m not sick. I have water in my lungs.” At last, I had something useful to say! Every time I coughed, if a person gave me the “please don’t get me sick” face, I would use that same phrase.
I literally used and abused that phrasebook and my pocket dictionary during my trip. I didn’t try to figure out how to read anything at that point, because I knew I wouldn’t pronounce it correctly. I would simply find someone to talk to, think of a topic, find that topic in the phrase book, and point to the words I wanted to learn. I would listen intently as the native speakers coached me, watching their mouths shape the words, trying to match their pitch, intonation, accent, and pronunciation the best I could. After I learned a phrase or two from one person, I would immediately go and practice what I learned with someone else. I would practice the same phrases with as many different Brazilians as possible. I had a great advantage, too. There were Brazilians everywhere.
After just three days of being in Brazil. I was able to hold long conversations with native speakers about a variety of topics. Most of the people complimented me, telling me that I spoke with barely any accent. When I returned to the U.S., I decided to continue learning Portuguese. I just happened to live in a town where several Brazilians resided, so they became my new best friends. I made phone calls as often as possible to my friends in Brazil and learned how to read and write by exchanging emails and utilizing online chat rooms. I searched constantly in book stores for Portuguese courses that would help to further my learning. I found some that I liked, but most of them were ineffective.
Later that year I began working at the turkey plant and decided to learn Spanish. Since I had figured out a way to effectively learn Portuguese, I simply repeated the process in Spanish. During my first day on the job, I was fortunate enough to have someone teach me the most useful phrases that I could have learned: “How do you say __?” and “What’s this called?” I purchased a phrasebook and a dictionary and did exactly what I had done in Brazil. I spent the entire time on the job learning words and phrases from natives. I became close friends with several of my coworkers and would spend plenty of time with them outside of work. This time, the process worked much quicker. I became fluent in just three short months.
After I became fluent in Spanish, I decided to start learning some phrases from the other migrant workers at the turkey plant, most of which were Chinese. I did the logical thing. I purchased a phrasebook and began hanging out with the Chinese workers. Unfortunately, the only real time I had to spend with them was when our lunch breaks coincided, since we worked in different departments. Nevertheless, I was able to learn a lot of useful phrases in Mandarin. The few phrases that I learned in Korean and in the Mayan language called Mam, were from a smattering of conversations that I would have with native speakers.
At one point, I decided to learn French. I went to the bookstore several times, and purchased several courses, but I had no access to native speakers. I spent several months trying to learn French before I gave up for the time being. My pronunciation was horrible, and I didn’t feel like I was making any progress at all. I did the same thing with a few other languages, such as Hebrew and Greek, yet with little to no success.
One night, while I was desperately rummaging the shelves of my beloved book store, hoping to find the diamond in the rough, an old man who was in the same aisle picked up a language course and asked me if I had tried it. I replied that I hadn’t. He then began bragging that with that same language course, he had learned how to pick up women in five different languages. After I laughed, I took a look at the course and decided to purchase the French version of it. When I got in my car, I opened the course up and was surprised to find that it was only a set of tapes. There was neither a dictionary nor a course book. I was a little disappointed but popped one of the tapes into my tape deck anyway.
Throughout the lessons, I was being instructed to listen to the voice of the native speaker on the recording, and prompted to participate in mock conversations, paying close attention to my pronunciation. Surprisingly, this method proved to be quite effective. Using an all audio course was the closest thing I had experienced to speaking with native speakers. I learned more French over the next few days than I had during the six months that I had spent trying to learn with books. I gave up on French again shortly afterwards, since I didn’t have access to any native speakers. This was before the days of high-speed Internet, smartphones, and video chat.
Later that year, I was invited to take a trip to Europe. Our group would be going to Switzerland and Italy. I did some research and found out that six or more different languages were spoken in the two countries we were going to visit. I immediately returned to the bookstore to purchase all-audio courses in those particular languages, but was only able to find them in German, Swiss German, Mandarin, and Italian.
A few months before our trip, it just so happened that the Italian interpreter for our group was not going to be able to join us, so I was asked to learn Italian. I didn’t know if I could learn it in time to be of service on the trip, but I decided to try anyway. Almost immediately after I decided to do so, I had a very fortunate experience. I was working in the local mall at the time. One day, a teenage boy came into the store that could barely speak English. He said that he was from Italy and that he was in the U.S. visiting his uncle who owned the pizza restaurant at the mall. I immediately began to frequent the pizza restaurant every day and practiced Italian with the restaurant owner and his nephew. Once in Europe, I was thrilled to find native speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Swiss German, Mandarin, Japanese, and Italian. I was in a language lover’s paradise. By the time we got to Italy, I had learned enough Italian that we didn’t have any communication problems during our trip.
It was on that trip that I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my life learning
languages. I met several people who were fluent in five or more languages and began to believe that I could become like them. After returning to the U.S., I planned another trip back to Europe, but only to Italy. I spent the next three months studying Italian and practicing with the owner of the pizza restaurant. Once back in Italy, I enrolled in a daily Italian class, which lasted about five hours each day. I quickly began to thrive in the Italian language. After just six weeks of being there, I had become more fluent in Italian than I was in Spanish. I had finally become fluent in my fourth language.
Since that time, I have actively sought out language courses that would help me learn the languages of native speakers with which I maintained regular contact. When I was working in the mall, I had access to people from Israel, Pakistan, Vietnam, China, and Taiwan. I bought several different types of courses, but the ones that were most effective to start out with were audio courses. Additionally, the only success I ever had in any language came from practicing what I learned in the courses with native speakers.
I once spent two years studying Syrian Arabic with a course, yet with no access to native speakers. Once I moved to the city I live in now, I met several native speakers of that dialect of Arabic and found that my Arabic language skills were very limited. I struggled with even the most basic conversations. I only became proficient after having spent a sufficient amount of time with Arabs from that region of the Middle East.
I finally had success in French after having moved into an apartment a few doors down from a native speaker. Through daily practice with him and his family, along with the language courses I was using, I was able to become quite proficient in the language.
The reason I wanted to explain this much of my personal experience is to show you that my perspective on language courses is that of a person who learned how to become fluent in foreign languages with and without the use of language courses. I have been an avid language learner since 2001 and have purchased a plethora of different types of courses. I have seen and even bought into the advertisements claiming that their way is the best way, or their method is the fastest way to learn a language. I’ve found a few courses that I like, and many that I hate. Had I approached language learning the way most people do, by purchasing the language course with the most convincing advertisement without going through the experiences that I mentioned in this chapter, I doubt I would be fluent in anything other than English.