When I teach only in Spanish (like last semester, for example), get a very noticeable accent in English. But when I teach only in English (like right now), my English becomes perfect and the accent is nearly imperceptible.
What makes this curious is that I teach online this semester. This means I don’t actually get to speak English. I only write. I speak a lot less English now than last semester because I’m mostly at home alone or with N. Yet, my English pronunciation gets better.
Curious, indeed! It reminds me of the fact that mental practice of something physical, such as sports or singing, improves performance as well as actual physical practice.
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I’ve actually always wondered what you languages you spoke for different facets of your life. Do you and N speak Russian or Ukrainian at home? Do you feel different when you speak in different languages? My grandmother who was multilingual used to say that English felt more clinical to her while Spanish felt more romantic and Russian felt elegant. I’m not sure if you feel that way. But since you are fluent in the same languages as my Grandmother, I was always curious. 🙂
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N. doesn’t understand a word of Ukrainian. I sometimes say things automatically but the I always have to translate for him. 🙂 So we speak Russian.
I become a different person with every language I speak. I think it always happens with languages in which you are really fluent. Every language has its own persona. I remember how my first husband was really traumatized when he heard me speak English. “Stop being mean!” he said. “Why do you suddenly have such a mean personality?” (I was speaking on the phone about a translation job and laughing, so there wasn’t any actual meanness.” My mother also felt weird whenever she heard my father speak English in their early years together. She said it made him look fake and dishonest. 🙂 🙂
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Out of curiosity, if you saw something was written in Ukrainian (or Belarusian and Rusyn, to cover other ES languages), would you be able to understand it, or at least get a pretty good idea of the general gist of it?
“Every language has its own persona.” Reminds me of how musical keys are generally held to have different connotations or associations.
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“Out of curiosity, if you saw something was written in Ukrainian (or Belarusian and Rusyn, to cover other ES languages), would you be able to understand it, or at least get a pretty good idea of the general gist of it?”
– I do read Ukrainian, obviously. Belarusian and Rusyn, not so well. I’ll work it out eventually, I guess.
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I prefer to think of it as accent shifting as what’s considered unaccented differs from area to area.
I’m sure you’ve seen (and heard) this but I want to link this anyways: Speech Accent Archive
Interesting. I’m pretty sure I’m monolingual, but when I’m speaking to my parents (who speak two Indian languages and English), I’ll mix words from the languages in and my accent changes to bring out consonants. I actually have to change my accent to speak English to my grandfather.
If I’m speaking to a Southerner, my accent changes. If I’m speaking to someone who speaks Spanish primarily my accent shifts even though I know about five words in Spanish.
Do you notice this?
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Yes! All the time!! People even think I’m ririculing them when I adopt their accent 2 minutes into the conversation but it happens in an entirely involuntary fashion.
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“Every language has its own persona.” I would love to hear about that sometime. What are you language personas? Of the languages you are fluent in, what are the beauties/limitations of each? I know people have asked you to blog about language/language acquisition. Maybe this can be the subject of a future post. 🙂
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I’ve added it to the list.
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