3093. The Thing is Communicating


 
Expert in learning a second or foreign language H. D. Brown stated that we teachers and learners of those languages should imitate a native speaker. And for that we could listen to podcasts and radio stations through the Web, where you can find radio stations from all over the world. Also at YouTube you can find interesting videos. Some days ago I found an interesting video about cockney English.
Some learners, and some teachers too, have gotten an accent and pronunciation close to a native one. Even I know a man of a Spanish origin but who has been living for many years in the US, and his friends and the people who know him say he sounds like a native speaker, even they don’t find any difference at all…
There’re people with more aptitude to imitate but every one of us can go far in this thing of imitating.
Anyway a field where I think it is more difficult to imitate a native speaker is in writing. I notice that my American friends write in a Spanish which you can easily note they’re foreigners. And the same happens to me regarding English. Learning and acquiring a foreign language is a life-long task!
My adult students are acquiring a level of English where they already have the so-called sense of the language, by means of which they can have a nice intuition both at understanding texts and producing nice language samples! Also they can for example more or less easily distinguish the difference between “special” and “especial”. / Photo from: people-talking

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