Speaking quickly and clearly|Using accents

Speaking fast--in any language, with any accent--is probably the most difficult thing to do. I can't speak my native dialect of my native language (Chicago American English overlaid with fifty years of California influence) particularly fast. If I try, I just make a lot of mistakes.

I'm a singer and I don't even bother trying to sing songs that are quite a bit faster than the speed of speech. I can't do it.

American English is spoken rather slowly compared to British English, and even more so compared to many other languages, particularly Spanish, Italian or Japanese. I can speak rudimentary Spanish and people compliment me on my excellent accent, but I can't get up to the proper speed. This makes it really hard to sing Mexican pop songs. I'd love to do Selena's Amor Prohibido ("Forbidden Love" between two kids of different social classes) but I can't get halfway through the first line without falling behind and screwing up.

I much prefer Mandarin, which is spoken slowly, arguably more slowly than English because its sentences have fewer syllables than ours so there's just no need to talk fast. I have a good accent (maybe not as good as my Spanish but better than most anglophones) and I can talk at the correct speed.

Rapping is a special skill and we don't all have it. Yes, if you really want to master the art of speaking faster, a good coach and a lot of sincere dedication will certainly help you talk faster than you do now. But that doesn't mean one day you'll be able to duplicate a professional rapper. There's a reason those guys get those jobs!

It's partly a mental skill, but also partly a physical skill. Some people have muscles and nerves that can make their bodies move with incredible speed, strength and precision, whereas the rest of us are limited to what we can accomplish no matter how much we practice and how good our coach is.

In the same way, some people have vocal organs with shapes and musculature that can move a little faster than everybody else's, with perfect precision. But the rest of us are just the "everybody else."

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James Stewart was one of our most famous and beloved actors, yet he always deprecated himself for the fact that he could not talk fast. In his movies he was always carefully cast as a character who never needed to talk fast. And this is a guy who had enough money to hire any teacher on earth.

 

You're talking about cultivating a skill that is both mental and physical. Learning to rap is like learning to ski or to play the saxophone. Would you expect a "light and easy" way to do that? Depending on your age, it might take anywhere from two years to become a pretty decent rapper (if you're 15) to ten years to become good enough at it to get some applause in a karaoke bar (if you're 35).

It's grammar. Sometimes I feel like I'm talking to someone who's not a native English speaker. Didn't you go to school in an anglophone country? Don't you know the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections? (That's in English; other languages have different sets.)

Most adjectives can be turned into adverbs by adding -ly. Some can serve as adverbs without this suffix, such as "hard" and "fast." In a few cases different words are used, such as good/well.

 

The best way to learn any language, dialect, accent or style is through example and practice.

There are coaches who can teach people dialects, accents and styles. They work with actors, who already have a facility for this or they wouldn't have those jobs. But they also work with businesspeople and others who need to establish better rapport (or simply better understanding) with the people they work with, for example, after moving to a new region. They can even teach people to speak more slowly.

There was an obituary recently of one of Hollywood's most prolific dialog coaches, a Russian immigrant who found he had a flair for language after learning to speak English like a native and then teaching actors to speak flawlessly in many foreign accents. One of the people who hired him (for big bucks) was a high-powered attorney from New York who had to represent a client in a trial in Los Angeles. He found that he couldn't establish rapport with the people in L.A., and the coach quickly realized this was because he spoke too fast. (Almost all Americans speak more slowly than the average Briton, but within our country some regional populations speak slower than others. The Southerners probably hold the record, but we Californians are also slow-talkers and New Yorkers are fast-talkers.) The coach trained him to speak more slowly.

But heck, that's not so hard. It's much harder to speak faster, and I've never heard of any technique for learning it or any coach who can teach it.

I think you're going to have to find a group of people who talk fast, hang out with them, and pick it up by example. It's going to be a largely unconscious process.

I don't know where you live, but if you have a Latino community, they tend to speak English a little faster than we do because they're accustomed to speaking Spanish fast. You might also learn some Spanish in the bargain.

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Ironically although rapping, which is very fast speaking, is a motif from Afro-American culture, AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is generally not spoken very quickly, since it ultimately derives from American Southern with its slow cadence. So if you start hanging out with Afro-Americans it probably won't help you increase your speed, although they might be able to help you with your problem of not understanding the lyrics.

Maybe you can find some New Yorkers? Or better yet, British people! You might pick up their accent in addition to their (to our ears) machine-gun delivery, but that's easier to fix. And their slang is a lot of fun. You might start hoovering your house instead of vacuuming it and earthing your appliances instead of grounding them, using a spanner instead of a wrench.

If you want to learn to speak and write better, you should take advantage of every resource available. That includes formal grammar, which has the advantage of being extremely well-documented.

 

Indeed. Aramaic was the common language of the Middle East from 1000BCE up almost into modern times. Ironically, the Aramaeans themselves never had any power and in fact vanished as a distinct ethnic group rather early, but for reasons that are still unclear the Assyrian Empire adopted their language. Although Arabic eventually supplanted Aramaic and is still the lingua franca of the region, there are still Aramaic-speaking communities and they play a large enough role in the regional economy to have websites and be in no danger of vanishing.

The Roman Empire brought Latin to all parts of Europe. After the disintegration of the empire it continued to be spoken, but without a central authority it fragmented first into dialects and then separate languages. But it would not be unreasonable to say that Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, Italian, Romansh, Romanian, and a few others like Sicilian that we argue over whether they are languages or dialects, are "Modern Latin." Ancient Latin itself continued to be the language of scholarship and diplomacy in Europe long after it ceased to be a vernacular language, clear up into the middle of the last millennium, when French began to replace it at least in diplomacy.

Starting in the Age of Exploration, Spanish was--and still is--an international language. I would wager that it is the official language of more countries than any other. With more than 300,000,000 speakers it usually ranks as the world's #4 language.

The Age of Exploration ended with the British Empire being the world's largest and strongest, with its estranged daughter the USA poised to take over economically if not politically. More people speak Mandarin and (according to some lists) Hindi, but English is way more influential than the other two, neither of which is widely studied outside the countries of their origin.

I've never thought about it and it doesn't matter because no one will ever be able to direct changes to an international language. The various countries would never agree. It will just happen naturally, as it always has.

But to imagine myself as King Of The Universe, the one change I would insist on is phonetic spelling. English is far too difficult to read and write. Even the Chinese have developed a phonetic writing system and will implement it as soon as the old people die off and everyone who's left speaks Mandarin. People who speak Cantonese, Shanghai, Fujian, and all the other languages of China can all read the logograms, but they pronounce them so differently that they can't understand each other, so a phonetic system was never workable in the past.

We have a similar problem with English, although not quite so serious. If we spell the words the way Americans pronounce them, they won't match the way the language is spoken in the UK and Australia--or vice versa. But American English is the standard of commerce so if English were actually adopted as a world language it would almost surely be the American accent, so we could spell it our way: father and skejool, not fathuh and shedyool. (I would insist on a more precise spelling system than that, of course!) The Brits spent centuries happily dealing with a monetary system in which twelve pence made a shilling and twenty shillings made a pound but 21 shillings made a guinea, so I doubt that they would have any problem mastering a phonetic writing system that wasn't entirely phonetic but far better than the old one.

But choral music is almost never especially fast. I'm not saying that the discipline and the musical training wouldn't be valuable to him, but it's not going to help him talk faster. Just more clearly.

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All of those things are certainly necessary for someone who wants to speak faster accurately and understandably.

I haven't been able to do that with Spanish lyrics.

And/or start doing karaoke, where the lyrics are presented on the monitor. There are several different providers but some of the lyric screens have a color bar that shows you where you're supposed to be at any moment.

Yes. I remember a teacher telling us many decades ago, "Language does not follow the flag and it does not follow the holy book. It follows the coin."

 

I try not to because the microphone might pick it up, but I don't know how successful I am at that.

But breath isn't my problem in Spanish-language music. I know it is for some people but I have good lung power, I can hold my breath for 60 seconds easily, when my ashthma hasn't kicked in anyway. I just get my tongue twisted around my teeth when I try to make words come out so fast. I've been doggedly practicing Amor Prohibido and actuallly made it through once without any mistakes. But unfortunately it's not the right song for me. My style (tremolo, changing pitch without sliding, and other effects I don't know the names for) is much better suited for slower songs in which the notes are held longer.

They will certainly beat the "um" 's out of you. I'm embarrassed by the number of gifted writers who can't speak well. Saul Bellow used so many "um" 's that it was painful to listen to him.

I understand that "um" means that you can't think as fast as you can talk. So think further ahead before you start talking in the first place, then pause between sentences. It's like they don't want the other person to have a chance to butt in and speak while they're taking their time figuring out what they want to say next.