I went to a few potential kid private schools and wanted to talk to the teacher in English to sanity check their ability.
Man… I’m just shocked that so many teachers just completely skip anything remotely different than the Chinese tongue.
Anything with “uh” sound replaced with “ee” (Busy == beezee)
Avoiding the letter “L” at all costs (English == Een goo deesh)
Almost the end of every word == missing
Ping pong ball == pee pah boh
That’s a great idea == Thas a gray idea
Agent = asian
Dill == Deal
Study Abroad == Suh-tuddy a Bra
“Th” doesn’t exist (thank you == tank you)
Hard “I” doesn’t exist (ice cream == ass cream)
Ending with an “s”. (Yes == yessah)
The average person? Sure, I get it – but teachers? If I talked like this in my Chinese class, I would get SCOLDED by my teachers!
It’s the equivalent of being a Spanish teacher saying things like “grassy ass” for “gracias” with no effort to learn how to say things. Or the Chinese equivalent of dropping all tones and that fish “wu” and sean connery “ehrr” sound because it’s different from my native tongue.
Since English is going to become an “official” second language soon…
My Chinese classes did no phonics training whatsoever.
I had to develop it myself. My Japanese classmates couldn’t speak worth shit but because they test well and have a head start with Kanji, 90s all around for them.
Even then, that was probably to train you in Chinese for a general speaker (although they should’ve done some phonics, darn; mine did phonetics but went overkill with beijing accent lol; had to learn to undo that).
But being an English teacher! Surely there’s phonics there in the training.
I think it’s much harder for Chinese people to learn English than vice versa. We have a lot of sounds that are unfamiliar to them and (in my experience) they often cannot even hear, or hear incorrectly. Mandarin has only two or three phonemes that are truly awkward for English speakers.
However you are right that most teachers of English here don’t even try. One of the most difficult things I’ve tried (and failed) to convey to Chinese speakers is that the cadence of an English sentence is incredibly important. Chinese sentences are spoken word-by-word, precisely as written. English is spoken in groups of words (I think the technical term is “chunking”). The dropping of endings and addition of a spurious schwa (or other sound) between words is the way they deal with this fundamental misunderstanding.
The consequence of adding extra sounds to make up for the garbled pronunciation results in even more errors of pronunciation that can make the sentence difficult to understand. Add on a verbal salad of Chinglish usage and you have a whole new ‘patois’!
“The ruler is in my bag” becomes something “Havu derurein I bag.” There is also ambiguity of l/r sounds since in Taiwanese often mistake these even in Chinese. Native speakers would probably hear or say something like: “Tharuler’s inmabag.”
I’ve had job interviews where the interviewer spoke how you described then complained about my accent. I’m a native speaker, the only language I speak fluently is English.
Usually it’s because these ‘teachers’ can’t admit to themselves they have anything to learn.
I remember the first 10 seconds of one interview went like this
Me ‘Hi’
Them ‘Where are you from?’
Me ‘Australia.’
Them ‘Your accent so strong. No one will understand you.’
I don’t have a strong accent, I’m from Melbourne not the country. And even if I did have a strong accent, I had only said 2 words. She wouldn’t have even heard enough to be able to tell.
For θ it’s s, as in San Q for thank you. For ð it’s tsʰ, as in 脆 for thread.
I don’t think being an English teacher, and having studied more English in college would magically allow someone raised in a monolingual family to pick up those new sounds by the way.
For those who are able to pick it up eventually, that’s great for them. However, studies show that if you haven’t heard of certain sounds in a meaningful context, preferably in person, as a baby or a kid, it becomes exponentially difficult to learn to differentiate them as you age because your brain has deemed it unnecessary to put those sounds into different categories.
I’ve recently ran into a kid maybe around 3 to 4 years old, and she understood me when I spoke English, as I was instructing my kid to back up and give me some space while I made giant bubbles for the kids to play with, she was able to respond in English, in complete sentences as well. It sounds to me that her pronunciation isn’t perfect due to her age, and not due to having an accent. I asked her family if they spoke English at home, and her mom told me she learned it by watching TV. Whatever she watched, that’s some amazing TV shows…
This is giving far too much credit. I came here to study Chinese, and I had to learn the difficult new ways to speak. Again like Spanish, your first attempt will be “grassy ass”, but will surely practice to get that tongue click to say “gracias”.
Same with Japanese (they also have the tongue clicks). I don’t say AHRRII-GATO, you eventually learn to say “Adigato” (arigatou).
All languages have different ways to pronounce something, but when I learned both, I was forced to learn it. It just boggles my mind that it’s not reinforced to folks learning how to teach English.
Heck, I wasn’t raised with any new languages and I’m mid 30s. No one gets it immediately, but it’s like people just give up after the 1st time.
Even phonics aside! 1/2 the word structures are just blatantly skipped.
Sometimes I’ll dumb down my native English (to Taiwan English) just so people can understand my English when a local is trying to practice. “HAAAAHHHLOWW” (hello)
Spanish and Japanese phonology are simple for English speakers though. Sure some people can’t trill to save their lives, but some people trill in English as well, even if just for dramatic or comedic effects. I would say for Japanese, the most difficult thing to say for English speakers would be the fake f ɸ, the u, and the pitch accents. I don’t speak Japanese, but that’s just my impression.
Mandarin on the other hand has a bunch of sounds that’s not in the English language, so for most people it would take a lot of repetitive training to get them to hear the difference in how locals say things, and how they initially thought things sounded. The same is true for Mandarin speakers, and I think telling the vowels apart is even more difficult than getting the consonants right, especially with all them diphthongs.
Oh yeah many tv shows are wonderful for learning English correctly. Professional voice actors with standard English with a few thousand dollar microphone.
(Not the Chinese shows that teach English like Momo, though – they’ll have 1 guy with 95% perfect English, then everyone around him is super broken; definitely need foreign shows. That’s where I gave the example for “Yessah” - Learn English tv show and can’t even say yes! without doubling the length of the word)
