thomas leverett weblog

language learning & the musician's ear

I've been recording music in a studio, deeply unsatisfied with my own production, and thus reminded of my sister, a truly professional musician, who used to say that she detested shopping in stores that played muzak which was supposed to serve as background to the act of shopping. For musicians getting a precise sound and no extraneous clatter is important; it 's worth a special trip to the studio on a cold day.

But for most of us, there's too much else going on to worry about perfect sound. If we are in a culture to which we are not native, we have to concentrate on social graces, not to mention the content of what we are hearing and saying; thus, we tend not to worry so much about our pronunciation after it reaches a certain point of comprehensibility.

In order to explain, I'll have to beg your allowance, that comprehensibility is somehow quantifiable, so that as you approach sounding like a native speaker, you pass through 85% perfect, 90% perfect, and on up to 100% perfect. Yet, as I mentioned, very few people reach 100%; they give up when they reach a point where they can function well and concentrate on other things; they retain some accent and just live with it, even if they're a language professional and know full well that they should be able to do better. I was discussing this with a friend, and assured her that I could live with her accent just fine, and that I even had a theory for what she was going through, which I will explain below.

To reach that 100% you have to convince yourself, like the musician, that nothing is more important than getting the perfect sound. Retaining an accent is a way of hanging onto a psychological piece of not only your native language, but also your native culture and native frame of mind; though it is possible to keep these psychological things, you know they are reflected by your accent, and are thus stubborn about eliminating that accent entirely. Besides, you're functioning just fine; people understand you well, so you've lost your primary motivation for improvement. Deep down, you don't want to be entirely absorbed by the target culture. That is, unless the sound is more important to you than anything else.

One thing she said remains unresolved to me, though my theory, of course, is entirely unproven by empirical data. She said that she has good days and bad days, some days when her speech is near perfect, and other days when she has to have her husband make her wishes known. She has no ready explanation for this variation except for tiredness. Others have mentioned this trait also. As language professionals they are aware of their shortcomings. They are competent, sometimes extremely competent in the target language, yet their performance dips sometimes, and even on good days never reaches 100%. The voice carries our deepest identities, betrays our true inner needs, and thus never becomes exactly the same as everyone else's.

posted by tom @ 7:33 PM