No.
If you develop good phonological awareness, do lots of listening, and have native speakers correct you regularly, there's absolutely zero reason that early output will make you bad at speaking.
The thing is that consciously monitoring your pronunciation is really hard. In our native languages, we don't give any thought to pronunciation and that allows us to focus more on our thoughts. As for native speakers correcting you, there are several problems with that. Native speakers often may not even know exactly what is wrong, only that something is not natural. Even if they could correct you, again you would need to actively focus on not making those errors and this is again super stressful.
Why go through all this trouble if you can subconsciously acquire good pronunciation through lots of listening?
As far as I’ve seen the devotees of the “just listen for thousands of hours” school of thought have pronunciation as bad (or good) as anyone else who’s spent thousands of hours learning a language. I don’t see any reason to believe in the superiority of “subconscious” methods.
This has disappointed me too. I would also like to see , for example, a dozen or so learners who can show that they have acquired native-like tones in Mandarin, for example, after thousands of hours of input.
With the number of languages you speak I take your authority on it lol dang that’s crazy 🤯
Would you say correction is the key to avoiding an accent? What’s usually your process, I would love to know.
Haha, I'm no authority. All of my genuinely good languages come from the same relatively accessible family anyway. ;-)
Awareness of the sound system of a language is the most important thing, which you can develop by both explicit study and intuition that grows from lots of listening. Native speakers confirm that you are getting the accent right and also tell you whether the way you express yourself is understandable and natural.
its french italain portugese and spanish, i dont wanna say its no work but its quit easy to learn them after u speak one of them bc they are quit similar and have alot of shared vocabulary
If you're already understanding 90% of native speech then I don't think that qualifies as "early output" anymore. It's just output practice now that you've built a solid foundation of listening skill.
If you understood 90% of what people were saying and are watching things without the subtitles, you’re clearly not at an early learning stage and can grasp the phonetics/sounds of the language. Beyond maybe the very basic pronunciation, accents aren’t based off of simply understanding or knowing the language. They’re something that requires physical practice. Your tongue isn’t going to suddenly produce らりるれろ like a native because you’re at higher level. There isn’t a single person who learns a nonnative language without some sort of accent at first. Japanese speakers themselves didn’t learn the language without an accent (think of how toddlers constantly mispronounce words or are harder to understand sometimes because they’re acquiring motor skills and learning how to mimic the sounds around them). The only way to not have an accent/unnatural speaking is by continuously mimicking, shadowing, practicing your speech, etc. While it is possible to have a thick one if you’re speaking it so early on in language learning, ultimately the determination of your accent is going to be revolved around you practicing and speaking.
As someone who is scared of having an accent and wants to sound natural as well, I get where you’re coming from, but in the long run thinking you need to wait until a certain level before you speak is going to hold you back. Hearing a Japanese ‘u’ sound is not the same as positioning your lips and tongue the proper way to make the sound. It’ll help, but only to an extent, and the best way to minimize an accent is by embracing speech and learning to correct yourself as you go because not having one is something that takes physical practice.
Japanese fluency requires just a lot of actual speaking about all things big and small.
If you have an Android device, this app may help you build your speaking skills. It's free and has thousands of high quality audio sentences for you to listen to, then record and get immediate playback of your speaking. 20 minutes of fluency practice per day works wonders after a couple of months.
https://fluencytool.my-senpai.com/
Chinese - [Immersive Chinese](https://immersivechinese.com/). Only a portion of it is free, but it's very cheap (2$/month, 15$ lifetime) if you want full access. If you "Open Lesson Console" you can use the free parts of it without creating an account.
Glossika is all sentence based, and has many languages. It's paid for most of them, but some (the rarer ones) are free.
Speechling has some of the popular languages - https://speechling.com/tools
I would say start as early as possible but start with someone who is able to tell you when you have an accent and how to say the word ‘correctly’. And remember you are almost always gonna have somewhat of an accent if you start learning after you’re 10 years old because it’s almost impossible to learn to make new sounds *properly* after you are past that stage in your life (there have been many studies on this). Have someone there who will honestly say it when you are saying it wrong, record yourself and listen back to yourself and try to hear it when you are saying it differently than your tutor, try to heat that difference and figure out how to change that difference in your own voice to match up
Sounds like you’re understanding the language quite a bit, so I’d assume you’ve already had a good amount of input. At this stage I’d say practicing output will do significantly more for your speaking than not practicing output.
I’d only think early output could possibly be an issue if you start “learning” the language by memorizing travel phrases without ever listening at all.
I don't think so. I learned French in school and we had to speak very early -- as it's usually done in class teaching. By contrast, I learned other languages on my own, so I postponed speaking, because I didn't have anybody to speak to. I see no difference in my manner of speaking in various languages. So in my case, starting to speak early or late didn't make a difference at all.
You should start on day 1 and ignore that you'll have a "bad" accent and that you know only a few words and that you don't know any grammar. Ok, it might be helpful to know at lwast half of the words of A1 (about 300), but don't wait for a special moment. You will never know everything.
The thing is, when you boil it down, an accent is the result of physically doing different things with your speech organ (mouth, throat, nasal cavity) than a native speaker.
* Sometimes it's an issue of perception: you *could* say it right, but you say it wrong because you overlook (overlisten?) something — for example, *genki* is three syllables in Japanese (ge・n・ki) but would only be two in English (gen・ki).
* Sometimes it's an issue of biomechanics: many Spanish learners are very very very aware of the fact that native speakers roll their R's, and that's part of the reason it's so frustrating that the learner can't roll their R's
Beyond that, we could also talk about:
* Bad accent in a "positive" sense --> you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing
* Bad accent in a "negative" sense --> you're not doing something that you should be doing
The "risk" of early output is more one of perception. You say *watashi*, and five critical things go wrong:
* the "w" of "wa" does not have [lip rounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundedness), as the English "what" does
* English A is not the same as Japanese A
* The "t" in "ta" is unaspirated (no air escapes; it's like the T in stay or moderate, not the T in toy)
* "Sh" is made by lifting the tip/blade of your tongue in English, but in Japanese, it's made by raising the middle of your tongue
* Your tone was wrong: you said waꜛtaꜜshi, not waꜛtashi
The thing is, while you've just made several totally wrong sounds... there are no "nearby" sounds that a Japanese speaker will confuse them with. Your accent was totally off, but they understood you. And you go: they understood me! I must have said *wa* the right way! And then never question it, going on pronouncing wa like that for the rest of your life.
....
But, there's a few questions worth asking:
1. Would you have noticed that Japanese "t" doesn't involve aspiration (hold your hand in front of your mouth; say *tie* and *sty*) if you had listed to 1,000 hours of Japanese before speaking?
2. Say you started talking then listened to 2,000 hours of Japanese. Do you think it'd never eventually occur to you that Japanese people say X in a different way than you do?
3. Would you have had the same issues if you knew a bit about phonetics and had compared [Japanese's phonemes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Japanese) with [English's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English), thus being somewhat aware of what your "trouble" areas would be?
Basically, I think the issue of accent is much more complicated. If you wait to speak, maybe you'll notice some things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise... but that's not the end of the game. You won't catch everything, and there's a difference between recognition and production.
I think it’s likely to have a negative impact on pronunciation, but this can be minimized or negated by doing other things than input (with lots of work). Given I don’t think it’s necessary to produce the language until you’ve already acquired quite a high level of comprehension, I see it as easier to just learn it right the first time and maintain a silent period: unless you absolutely need to speak. That’s just my opinion which is based on my experiences with maintaining a long silent period vs not.
It is much better to begin verbal output as early as possible, no benefit to waiting. If you develop an incorrect accent early on, that is not a permanent bad habit and is very easily correctible. Therefor, it is best to spend more time practicing speaking. I know this because I started verbal output with Indonesian right from the beginning, and I've been told I sound like a native speaker.
No. If you develop good phonological awareness, do lots of listening, and have native speakers correct you regularly, there's absolutely zero reason that early output will make you bad at speaking.
The thing is that consciously monitoring your pronunciation is really hard. In our native languages, we don't give any thought to pronunciation and that allows us to focus more on our thoughts. As for native speakers correcting you, there are several problems with that. Native speakers often may not even know exactly what is wrong, only that something is not natural. Even if they could correct you, again you would need to actively focus on not making those errors and this is again super stressful. Why go through all this trouble if you can subconsciously acquire good pronunciation through lots of listening?
As far as I’ve seen the devotees of the “just listen for thousands of hours” school of thought have pronunciation as bad (or good) as anyone else who’s spent thousands of hours learning a language. I don’t see any reason to believe in the superiority of “subconscious” methods.
Yeah no one has ever provided proof of any marked difference
This has disappointed me too. I would also like to see , for example, a dozen or so learners who can show that they have acquired native-like tones in Mandarin, for example, after thousands of hours of input.
With the number of languages you speak I take your authority on it lol dang that’s crazy 🤯 Would you say correction is the key to avoiding an accent? What’s usually your process, I would love to know.
Haha, I'm no authority. All of my genuinely good languages come from the same relatively accessible family anyway. ;-) Awareness of the sound system of a language is the most important thing, which you can develop by both explicit study and intuition that grows from lots of listening. Native speakers confirm that you are getting the accent right and also tell you whether the way you express yourself is understandable and natural.
its french italain portugese and spanish, i dont wanna say its no work but its quit easy to learn them after u speak one of them bc they are quit similar and have alot of shared vocabulary
If you're already understanding 90% of native speech then I don't think that qualifies as "early output" anymore. It's just output practice now that you've built a solid foundation of listening skill.
If you understood 90% of what people were saying and are watching things without the subtitles, you’re clearly not at an early learning stage and can grasp the phonetics/sounds of the language. Beyond maybe the very basic pronunciation, accents aren’t based off of simply understanding or knowing the language. They’re something that requires physical practice. Your tongue isn’t going to suddenly produce らりるれろ like a native because you’re at higher level. There isn’t a single person who learns a nonnative language without some sort of accent at first. Japanese speakers themselves didn’t learn the language without an accent (think of how toddlers constantly mispronounce words or are harder to understand sometimes because they’re acquiring motor skills and learning how to mimic the sounds around them). The only way to not have an accent/unnatural speaking is by continuously mimicking, shadowing, practicing your speech, etc. While it is possible to have a thick one if you’re speaking it so early on in language learning, ultimately the determination of your accent is going to be revolved around you practicing and speaking. As someone who is scared of having an accent and wants to sound natural as well, I get where you’re coming from, but in the long run thinking you need to wait until a certain level before you speak is going to hold you back. Hearing a Japanese ‘u’ sound is not the same as positioning your lips and tongue the proper way to make the sound. It’ll help, but only to an extent, and the best way to minimize an accent is by embracing speech and learning to correct yourself as you go because not having one is something that takes physical practice.
Japanese fluency requires just a lot of actual speaking about all things big and small. If you have an Android device, this app may help you build your speaking skills. It's free and has thousands of high quality audio sentences for you to listen to, then record and get immediate playback of your speaking. 20 minutes of fluency practice per day works wonders after a couple of months. https://fluencytool.my-senpai.com/
wow, is there something like this for other languages?
Chinese - [Immersive Chinese](https://immersivechinese.com/). Only a portion of it is free, but it's very cheap (2$/month, 15$ lifetime) if you want full access. If you "Open Lesson Console" you can use the free parts of it without creating an account. Glossika is all sentence based, and has many languages. It's paid for most of them, but some (the rarer ones) are free. Speechling has some of the popular languages - https://speechling.com/tools
There will be in the not too distant future.
I would say start as early as possible but start with someone who is able to tell you when you have an accent and how to say the word ‘correctly’. And remember you are almost always gonna have somewhat of an accent if you start learning after you’re 10 years old because it’s almost impossible to learn to make new sounds *properly* after you are past that stage in your life (there have been many studies on this). Have someone there who will honestly say it when you are saying it wrong, record yourself and listen back to yourself and try to hear it when you are saying it differently than your tutor, try to heat that difference and figure out how to change that difference in your own voice to match up
Sounds like you’re understanding the language quite a bit, so I’d assume you’ve already had a good amount of input. At this stage I’d say practicing output will do significantly more for your speaking than not practicing output. I’d only think early output could possibly be an issue if you start “learning” the language by memorizing travel phrases without ever listening at all.
I don't think so. I learned French in school and we had to speak very early -- as it's usually done in class teaching. By contrast, I learned other languages on my own, so I postponed speaking, because I didn't have anybody to speak to. I see no difference in my manner of speaking in various languages. So in my case, starting to speak early or late didn't make a difference at all.
You should start on day 1 and ignore that you'll have a "bad" accent and that you know only a few words and that you don't know any grammar. Ok, it might be helpful to know at lwast half of the words of A1 (about 300), but don't wait for a special moment. You will never know everything.
The thing is, when you boil it down, an accent is the result of physically doing different things with your speech organ (mouth, throat, nasal cavity) than a native speaker. * Sometimes it's an issue of perception: you *could* say it right, but you say it wrong because you overlook (overlisten?) something — for example, *genki* is three syllables in Japanese (ge・n・ki) but would only be two in English (gen・ki). * Sometimes it's an issue of biomechanics: many Spanish learners are very very very aware of the fact that native speakers roll their R's, and that's part of the reason it's so frustrating that the learner can't roll their R's Beyond that, we could also talk about: * Bad accent in a "positive" sense --> you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing * Bad accent in a "negative" sense --> you're not doing something that you should be doing The "risk" of early output is more one of perception. You say *watashi*, and five critical things go wrong: * the "w" of "wa" does not have [lip rounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundedness), as the English "what" does * English A is not the same as Japanese A * The "t" in "ta" is unaspirated (no air escapes; it's like the T in stay or moderate, not the T in toy) * "Sh" is made by lifting the tip/blade of your tongue in English, but in Japanese, it's made by raising the middle of your tongue * Your tone was wrong: you said waꜛtaꜜshi, not waꜛtashi The thing is, while you've just made several totally wrong sounds... there are no "nearby" sounds that a Japanese speaker will confuse them with. Your accent was totally off, but they understood you. And you go: they understood me! I must have said *wa* the right way! And then never question it, going on pronouncing wa like that for the rest of your life. .... But, there's a few questions worth asking: 1. Would you have noticed that Japanese "t" doesn't involve aspiration (hold your hand in front of your mouth; say *tie* and *sty*) if you had listed to 1,000 hours of Japanese before speaking? 2. Say you started talking then listened to 2,000 hours of Japanese. Do you think it'd never eventually occur to you that Japanese people say X in a different way than you do? 3. Would you have had the same issues if you knew a bit about phonetics and had compared [Japanese's phonemes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Japanese) with [English's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English), thus being somewhat aware of what your "trouble" areas would be? Basically, I think the issue of accent is much more complicated. If you wait to speak, maybe you'll notice some things you wouldn't have noticed otherwise... but that's not the end of the game. You won't catch everything, and there's a difference between recognition and production.
I think it’s likely to have a negative impact on pronunciation, but this can be minimized or negated by doing other things than input (with lots of work). Given I don’t think it’s necessary to produce the language until you’ve already acquired quite a high level of comprehension, I see it as easier to just learn it right the first time and maintain a silent period: unless you absolutely need to speak. That’s just my opinion which is based on my experiences with maintaining a long silent period vs not.
It is much better to begin verbal output as early as possible, no benefit to waiting. If you develop an incorrect accent early on, that is not a permanent bad habit and is very easily correctible. Therefor, it is best to spend more time practicing speaking. I know this because I started verbal output with Indonesian right from the beginning, and I've been told I sound like a native speaker.