I mean specifically when the American is speaking Japanese that is.
I was listening to someone just learning English, and started thinking about how the sounds differed from the way I speak (in reference, the words sounded much more like they were in the front of the mouth, and sounded as if the person was kind of slowly “throwing” the syllables out with a kind of slur, almost like they’d been to the dentist), and it made me wonder about the opposite side of things.
Ive often thought about how strange my accent must sound to other people around the world (southern US accent, Texas), so if I could get a different perspective I’d really appreciate it!
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It must vary from person to person. If you want to know how your accent sounds, the best thing to do is recording yourself speaking Japanese and listening to it.
When I listened to my English(which was not my native language) greeting message on my phone, i was shocked how different it was from what I thought I sounded.
Not a native speaker, but us foreigners sound different. Just like when you speak to someone in English from another country you can tell where they come from.
When I’m speaking to foreign people in Japan in Japanese, I can tell very easily if they are from the USA, India, China, or Korea. Other places are less easy to tell, but you can tell they are not native – just harder to pinpoint for me.
I’m British, and to me Texan accents don’t sound strange – just different. I like the fact that there is a wide variety of English dialects and accents. Variety is the spice of life and all that.
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If you watch Japanese TV, you can hear various people try to do foreign accents. They are wildly exaggerated, very enthusiastic, very sing-songy.
From what I’ve seen/heard, even the most native-like speaking people still tend to either go-overboard on the wasei-eigo and gairaigo “styling” or tend to simple say them in correct “English”. Comedians in the US have long (for better or worse) used similar examples of people who would use perfect standard American “News” accents right up until their say their name, where the suddenly pronounce it “correctly.”
My kids are pretty much fully bilingual and generally sound native in both English and Japanese, but their English accents are actually much more “Southern” than mine (or any of our family). As far as I can tell they got it from the the oldest who started going to school in America.
I’m Japanese who lived in 6 different countries and what I found is that they all have their own language left when they speak Japanese. Same for us speaking another language. But Spanish speakers can pronounce Japanese well because we share the same pronunciation. So it’s easy for us Japanese to speak Spanish too. American English is way too different to Japanese pronunciation so it might be difficult for you to speak like us. It’s all about movement of our mouth that we grow up with. What I wanna to say was that I can tell easily if you’re American when you say ARIGATO ! 🙂
Not Japanese, but I’ve learned a lot about how English compares to Japanese pronunciation-wise. A few common mistakes that (American) English speakers make in Japanese:
* Using rounded lips when saying “u” or “w” sounds
* Using relaxed, English vowels that don’t exist in Japanese (especially schwa)
* Using harsh English consonants instead of softer Japanese ones (k and t come to mind)
* Making the glidey English “ouh” sound (as in “no” or “low”) instead of a pure “o” sound as found in Japanese
* Intonation-wise, English is practically a roller-coaster compared to Japanese
Altogether, I think that Americans who don’t speak proper Japanese sound sharp in their consonants, overly relaxed or even slippery in their vowels, and sing-songy.
Like in general? I find them annoying. But, my opinion could be biased as I am an Australian Japanese. My Japanese is native level though.