Chris wrote:suntex01 wrote:When you listen to Spanish, French people speak english, they don't always use the correct pronounciation of the word. It is true the other way around as well. Why do you suppose this is? I can bet you this is due to fact that they visualized the word and learned the pronounciation of words from spelling rather than from listening. So instead of relating to the pronounciation of whatever language they were speaking, they related back to their own language.
But they're not relating it to the letters of their own language, but the sounds of their own language. There's a difference.
People grow up used to producing certain sets of sounds with their mouths, and that is carried over into their pronunciation of foreign languages. The result is "accent", and I don't think there's any difference in "accent intensity" between your average Frenchman speaking English and your average Chinese speaking English, all else being equal.
It getting to the point where its almost hard for me to explain it in writing.
You're narrowing it down too much and skipping too many steps.
In the case of Spanish / French / Italian speaking english, even if relating it to sounds of their own language.
It is still through the passage / training that they received associated with each letter inb their own respective language.
I understand that for people such as Japanese, certain Romanian tone doesn't come easy without extensive conscious training.
But that's not what I was addressing. I'm trying to point out the example that in the Spanish language there is only one pronounciation for most vowels.
This is not the case for English, in english just "a" has multiple pronounciations. But alot of Spanish speakers still pronounce it the one way in certain words.
Same with words ending in ing where G is the soft "g" sound, but non-native speakers tend to enunciate the G with the hard "g" at the end.
Thus this is not a problem of accent but rather, the word was most likely visualized before hearing it.