
How Does American English Sound To Non-English Speakers? - jamesbritt
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/04/22/135625369/how-does-american-english-sound-to-non-english-speakers?ps=cprs
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owyn
The lyrics on the Melvins album "Houdini" are almost entirely gibberish, it's
mostly English but the words are half random and half nonsense. If you squint
your ears a bit, you can imagine what it's like to have brain damage. Classic!
Looks like the whole album is on yourube, check out some examples...

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwSOrd4E7yw> (Night Goat)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPkHP3a9WKU> (Lizzy)

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jinushaun
As a bilingual speaker with a love for linguistics, this thought often crosses
my mind. The broader question is, when does a foreign language stop sounding
foreign?

I taught myself many languages and I can definitely recognize a point where I
no longer feel like I'm just making sounds, but speaking actual words. It is
true in the other direction as well when it comes to listening. It doesn't
take years of study or anything remotely close to fluency to cross that
bridge. For me, I think it takes two months of immersion for a foreign
language to no longer sound foreign. I think unfamiliarity with a particular
language's set of pitch, volume and cadence is what makes a language sounds
foreign. Once you're familiar with them, it no longer sounds foreign. I may
not know the words, but I'm more familiar and comfortable with the cadence,
intonation, sound library, pitch, volume, etc of that language.

For example, every language has a particular native pitch. And if you're used
to one language, this pitch change might strike you as jarring when hearing a
foreign language. For example, my Japanese voice is deeper than my English
voice and my Cambodian voice is higher than both of them. When speaking
Swedish, my voice drops very deep compared to English.

Because of my meta-awareness of this phenomenon, I can actually "switch" my
brain off of English and hear what English sounds like to foreigners.

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michaelcampbell
As an American English speaker, I've always wondered this. I didn't find the
video "hilariously funny", but I was smiling; they did a good job. I couldn't
pick up any words, but my brain refused to believe there weren't any. It had
that right tempo, cadence, patterns, etc. Nicely done.

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quail_bird
The parrot video linked at the top of the article is also worth watching,
along with a follow-up read of the text related to the video (npr.org):

video: <http://t.co/M3qL1or> article:
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/04/07/135209962/watch-
lis...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/04/07/135209962/watch-listen-and-
wonder-the-mysteries-of-language)

I should also add that the top youtube comment for this video (a transcription
of the bird's conversation) is actually the most useful (perhaps _only_
useful) youtube comment I've come across.

