Most Important Natural Languages?

[installer_swan]

brandrinn: My point was sort of based on my experience of English in India. I think the problem is that mimicking "native" pronunciation is often seen as an end unto itself in a lot of ESL courses, which I've never felt as being worth the amount of effort that people seem to put into it.

This extreme focus on pronunciation tends to be stronger in languages which consist of largely monolingual L1 speakers. For instance in my experience learning other Indian languages, especially across the IE/Dravidian divide there's usually never much stress on acheiving a native accent, so long as you sufficiently distinguish minimal pairs. And I've known South Indians who've spent half their lives in Hindi speaking areas, and interacting with people in that language on a daily basis, who still have a clearly recognisable accent.

[brandrinn]

brandrinn: My point was sort of based on my experience of English in India. I think the problem is that mimicking "native" pronunciation is often seen as an end unto itself in a lot of ESL courses, which I've never felt as being worth the amount of effort that people seem to put into it.

This extreme focus on pronunciation tends to be stronger in languages which consist of largely monolingual L1 speakers. For instance in my experience learning other Indian languages, especially across the IE/Dravidian divide there's usually never much stress on acheiving a native accent, so long as you sufficiently distinguish minimal pairs. And I've known South Indians who've spent half their lives in Hindi speaking areas, and interacting with people in that language on a daily basis, who still have a clearly recognisable accent.

For what it's worth, only really shit ESL programs would ever focus on pronunciation. Pronunciation and fluency are very different things.

[Shm Jay]

And broken English

And Broken English