Rant about native speakers

[Hofmann]

Just for my curiosity, in your opinion, what do you think we actually do?

If I were to give them grades, I would say that only 53% of the population of PRC (about 700 million people) get a D or higher. A certain Mandarin teacher at the University of Utah probably got a B or higher, but sometimes she pronounces 這 as ze4.

[flameproof]

But the people who correct them should be other native speakers, not us who learned it as a second language, not because we're always wrong, but because of face.

Disagree completely. Language learning is about learning and not about saving face. I am often ask to correct locals, and they seem not to mind. However, I usually don't correct people out of the blue, not because of face, because I don't care.

But right, getting a correction from somebody that just wants to show off is annoying and counterproductive.

Mt rant is not about native speaker - we are all native speakers in something. My rant is about the perception that a learner sees a native speaker as a god, no matter how pathetic his knowledge transfer ability may be.

[gerri]

I sure can second the rant, not least when it's something like those job announcements saying that you don't have to have any qualification whatsoever except to be a native speaker... okay, my spoken English is accented (in the way a German speaker's English tends to be), but I don't confuse "their" and "there" or things like that. Not even on a BBS or in an e-mail...

Plus, I had classmates in Austria tell me I speak abnormally, because I have always spoken standard German, and I get Germans tell me "oh, hehe, one of those funny people speaking with an Austrian accent."

That way, you get students who only ever study the "high" language, but immediately fail when the language is slightly non-standard; only going for native speakers, you get people who have the feel for how they have been speaking, but may not know anything about any other language varieties.

[Lu]

My rant is about the perception that a learner sees a native speaker as a god, no matter how pathetic his knowledge transfer ability may be.

Well, with this I agree. Being a native speaker doesn't mean speaking the language perfectly and being able to explain its every detail.

[YuehanHao]

It was a news story during the last administration when an alternate pronunciation was added to a well-known dictionary for the word nuclear. I forget which, but see one that includes it here:

Main Entry:

nu·cle·ar

Pronunciation:

ˈnü-klē-ər, ˈnyü-, ÷-kyə-lər

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuclear

It is true that if enough people think wrong is right, it becomes right. I think one sees this too in the evolution of Chinese characters over time, when certain characters were miswritten or mispronounced, and then took on alternate versions, which in some cases supplanted previously correct ones.

I think of language as an idea, not a law of nature. I worry much more about folks adding 1+1=3 than saying ain't. Although I attempt to adhere to rules of grammar, it does not bother me too much when the vulgar masses create new "correct" uses by accident. I like the idea of language as a free market (as it has been for most of its history), rather than as this quite recently thought up authoritarian, centrally planned and controlled construct with absolute rules, such as schools see it.

约翰好

[jade-]

If I were to give them grades, I would say that only 53% of the population of PRC (about 700 million people) get a D or higher. A certain Mandarin teacher at the University of Utah probably got a B or higher, but sometimes she pronounces 這 as ze4.

Ah, your teacher from University of Utah must have been from either Taiwan or southern China.

You have a good point though. In China, only a few types of professionals work diligently on their Mandarin: elementary school teachers or the teachers who teach foreigners Chinese in university; newscast anchors and reporters; actors and actresses. In fact, we Chinese are pretty lenient to how correct a person’s Mandarin is. If we say so-and-so’s Chinese is excellent, generally this excellence has nothing to do with his/her Mandarin. We rarely correct each other’s Mandarin unless either we are in this homonym game or the pronunciation is so wrong that cannot be understood. If you have a western face but speak fluent Chinese, most of us are only amazed. However, it sounds you have been incorrectly corrected by the native speakers, then you have my sympathy. Please do rant.

Edited March 29, 2009 at 02:41 AM by jade-

[skylee]

Ah, your teacher from University of Utah must have been from either Taiwan or southern China.

Somehow I find this not funny at all.

[jade-]

skylee wrote:

Somehow I find this not funny at all.

Sorry for misleading you, Skylee. I was actually laughing about what Hofmann said he/she rated “only 53% of the population of PRC (about 700 million people) get a D or higher.”

I went back to edit my previous post and separated these two lines, hope that could make you feel better.

[calibre2001]

In fact, we Chinese are pretty lenient to how correct a person’s Mandarin is. If we say so-and-so’s Chinese is excellent, generally this excellence has nothing to do with his/her Mandarin. We rarely correct each other’s Mandarin unless either we are in this homonym game or the pronunciation is so wrong that cannot be understood. If you have a western face but speak fluent Chinese, most of us are only amazed.

I think this applies to 'native speakers' of any language.

But just to set the record straight - how do we define 'native speaker'?

[Hofmann]

how do we define 'native speaker'?

It is difficult. Claire Kramsch in Language and Culture says

"The 'native speaker' of linguists and language teachers is in fact an abstraction based on arbitrarily selected features of pronunciation, grammar and lexicon, as well as on stereotypical features of appearance and demeanor."

[Lugubert]

Related to the problem of correcting is this quote from the introduction to Tung, Pollard: Colloquial Chinese (1988):

The grammar notes have been difficult to write, as Chinese is a language notoriously resistant to generalizations. When we are incautious enough to say 'always' we mean 'nearly always', and when we say 'never' we mean 'hardly ever'.

[atitarev]

My general observation:

The best teacher may not be the native speaker but a foreign speaker who has mastered the language, it includes native speakers who lost but then reacquired the language by a conscious effort.

Native speakers: seldom slow down; don't know, which word to focus on to explain words/grammar; usually say - we just say so, don't know why. Specific to Chinese - fear of losing face is too big, don't like even a mild criticism or corrections from non-natives.

There are too many exceptions, though. The trouble is, there are not so many foreigners who have mastered Chinese and can teach it. But I also learned German and English from non-natives and I am happy with the result

Also, it's still extremely useful to be exposed to native speakers's speech, provided they speak the dialect you want to learn, even if they use some regional variations but some students prefer to practice speaking with fellow students, not natives.

Edited March 31, 2009 at 07:19 PM by atitarev

[Lu]

A non-native speaker who has mastered the language to a high degree makes a good teacher, but also a native speaker who has learned at least one other language, and who has been taught about their own native language, and likes to think and read about the whys of it.

I had a great teacher in Taiwan who could explain in detail the differences between similar words, she was great. I once had a Spanish teacher who had obviously never learned a second language himself, and probably had little interest in languages, and for the most part he was a lousy teacher.

[fissionesque]

So, I guess native speakers work both ways. I think for grammar and the more technical parts of a language, it's better to have someone who has studied and mastered it as a second language and therefore can tell you about all the troubles of it, or someone who is native and has a good background in linguistics and the finer points of the language.

However, I think that native speakers are definitely valuable in learning the pronunciation and probably the colloquial expressions as well. Definitely, the best person to copy pronunciation from would have to be a native speaker. Even if they may have some "incorrect" pronunciations sometimes (pick your dialect!), those are actually pretty valuable to copy if you don't want to end up speaking like a dork.

Examples like "should of" instead of "should have" (spelling should only be should have, though) and "talkin'" versus "talking", etc. generally happen in regular speech of many English speakers (I think mainly in North America, but correct me if I'm wrong) and are not actually incorrect, but the speaker is simply gliding over certain sounds, it happens in every language to some extent and definitely shouldn't be ignored. I don't know if you can really teach it too much, though. I think it just naturally happens, that's why mirroring native speakers without accents is very important. But you really need someone who understands the why's and how's in order to understand grammar and such.

[末將糾結腦]

Ahh, of course not all native speakers are really good at their mother languages. Many people just babble. My only suggestion is that don't trust a native speaker lightly unless you know his/her language using ability(?) well enough.

[stonelee]

Talking about Mandarin, I always wonder how many Chinese speak Mandarin as their native language. Must be around 5% or less. All locals I know speak it as 2nd language. I never met any Chinese that spoke Mandarin as first language (to be fair, I didn't ask all, but the topic was often raised).

As a matter of fact, most of the people in the north of China speak Mandarin as their native language,although they have a little accent in theri Mandarin. For example,in Beijing and northeast China.

In the south of China,all the people have local dialect. It's true that Mandarin is spoken as 2rd language in most of Chinese. Two small adjacent cities in the south of China, they have different dialects,though only spend half an hour to arrive each other if you drive a car.

But almost the whole of Chinese can spoken Mandarin, and in my opinion,only some people in rural area and some of older men can't speak Mandarin.

[muyongshi]

Talking about Mandarin, I always wonder how many Chinese speak Mandarin as their native language. Must be around 5% or less. All locals I know speak it as 2nd language. I never met any Chinese that spoke Mandarin as first language (to be fair, I didn't ask all, but the topic was often raised).

Doesn't fully answer your question but it gives a good guage and some solid numbers, this BBC link was about a study the Chinese gov. did in looking at the usage of mandarin. [note: link has been brought up here before in other discussions]

[Madot]

The original rant about native speakers was not about the native speakers themselves but about what other people expect of them. Not all native speakers are capable of being professional writers or orators. Some of us are better than others at our own native language. In fact, rightly or wrongly, we tend to judge lots about speakers by the sorts of non-standard speech that they use. In fact, A REALLY good native speaker is capable of using non-standard speech WHEN S/HE WANTS TO, in order to create a certain effect. Second language learners should be exposed to all sorts of speech examples BUT these need to be explained as 'non-standard' 'academic' or 'lower register' or 'slang' or whatever. What this means, I think, is that just because a person is a native speaker does not make him or her a good example of speech or writing to be copied.

If they have some teaching talent, however, a seriously linguistically talented native speaker can be great at the high stylistics level. At lower level language learning where language rules are really important, the LAST person you want is a native speaker. And in particular, a native speaker who has not learned the native language of the students. As one silly example of this, any non-linguistically trained, monolingual English-speaker to explain when you should say: "I went there" and when you should say "I have gone there". (As a native speaker, I don't teach beginning level English and it took me 3 weeks to find out that rule!)

All this to say that I really, strongly agree with the original rant. Just being a native speaker is NOT of itself sufficient to make someone a good language teacher of that language and at the lower levels (immersion pre-schools excepted), it should absolutely exclude him/her.

Mado

[aljensen]

When I was going to a high school in Canada, some of the students were saying things like "I should of gave it to you". Many of them wrote it too.

Languages do change with use and new things become accepted, but sometimes wrong is just wrong, even if a native speaker insists it's right.

I feel exactly the same way with people who say "can't". It isn't "can't", it's "cannot" or "can not" depending on the context. Only famers use contractions. Also, it is terrible when native speakers end a sentence with a preposition. Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

[skylee]

Only famers use contractions.

Is that true? I didn't know that. What are famers anyway?