People who speak Dutch with a foreign accent are just as easy to understand as native speakers. Listeners may need a while to adapt to the accent, anywhere from a few sentences to a few minutes.
Yesterday Marijt Witteman received her PhD for researching how fast listeners adapt to foreign accents. One perhaps surprising finding was that native speakers who were used to the accent, for instance, Dutch people living near the German border listening to Dutch spoken by Germans, understood words pronounced by language learners just as fast as they understood words pronounced by native speakers.
Even listeners who were not regularly exposed to the foreign accent only needed a few minutes of ‘priming’ to get up to speed. Witteman used reaction time tests in which subjects first heard a word, then saw the word written out on a screen, after which the subjects had to state if a word existed or not. Previous experiments had shown that people respond faster if they hear the word before they see it on the screen. The response times for words pronounced with an accent were just as fast as for words pronounced without an accent.
Witteman’s results could be useful in designing language courses. Course materials could be less about perfecting pronunciation and more about understanding a language. My personal take-away lesson is that Hollanders can stop pretending they don’t understand what the rest of the Dutch are saying. The game is up!
It’s funny and sad to think that some people in the Netherlands honestly believe that their country would be better off without any immigrants. As an immigrant myself, I’d miss my Turkish market and more than half of all my friends and aquaintainces. Oh, and my Dutch co-blogger would have to write all by himself.
The film projects are from Worldconnectors, a network of committed Dutch people who want to contribute in a positive way to the debate about social and cultural diversity and migration.
Filed under: Film,General by Orangemaster @ 6:33 pm
Sofia came here when she was 2 from Colombia with her father, went to school, speaks fluent Dutch and and when she turned 18 she automatically became an illegal immigrant and cannot go to college, get state assistance or a job.
The current Dutch government wants to declare illegal immigrants criminals and make it a crime to help illegal immigrants as well. The film is in English and has some English subtitles.
“Here in the Netherlands, they don’t care if you’ve been here 20 years, 2 years, 1 year, 2 months, you’re still illegal.”
Here’s a Web 2.0 plea that says ‘always update your intel’.
Yesterday in The Hague, the immigration police raided a hostel for mothers and children in the wee hours, suspecting it was being used by illegal immigrants (read = mostly men). The big scary screaming men busted down the front door, banged on bedroom doors and apparently freaked out little children.
“Junior justice minister Nebahat Albayrak, who was with the police on a fact-finding mission, witnessed events and helped comfort the children.” Why the cockup? Police used old information from the population registry. How stupid can you be? Some 20% of that information in every large Dutch city is false, everybody knows that.
This pic is the corner of my resident’s permit, as I thought the rushing bull was fitting.
People who speak Dutch with a foreign accent are just as easy to understand as native speakers. Listeners may need a while to adapt to the accent, anywhere from a few sentences to a few minutes.