> Although Dutch sounds gutteral to the casual observer, it's in fact > the vowels that seem to be impossible to get right for foreigners. > Only when learnt as a child do they acquire the ability to produce > (and maybe hear) the right sounds. Maybe an impersonator can fool you > for a little while with a few catchy lines, but I don't believe one > bit they can fool you in a conversation of even a few minutes.
I agree; one difference between accent in mother tongue and accent in a language learned as an adult is that the latter requires concentration. In my own case (with Japanese) I can start off sounding at-least-close-to-native, but after 30 seconds I tend to get absorbed in the topic and forget about keeping my accent clean. But as with anything, practice makes things come more naturally, and I've been lucky enough to meet people who have proved that if you make more effort than I have, then you can keep the good accent all the time. > As to language, I have never met a foreigner who learnt Dutch as an > adult who didn't have an accent. Or you didn't realize they were a foreigner ;-) Darren _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
