Showtalk said...

They can’t understand your accent? How do you speak Japanese with an American southern accent?

Ahhhh.... you've caught on to my little secret about speaking 5 languages.

I can speak French with an American accent, a Southern accent, a German accent, a Japanese accent and a French accent.

I can speak Japanese in an American accent, a Southern accent, a German accent, A French accent and a Japanese accent.

Etc. all the way down the line.

And oh, before I forget, I can speak English in an American accent, a Southern accent, a British accent, an Australian accent, a German accent, a Singaporean accent, an India accent, a Japanese accent and probably several other accents.

That's just it... it all boils down to pronunciation and whether you pronounce it properly so that they can understand or not.

Example: Pouvez-vous Français can be pronounced as Parlevou Fransay in English but the French will diss you for your pronunciation.

Ai canu speek Engulish uisu a Japanese akusento bato ito saunds sutorengi two Americans.

And there in is my secret for learning multiple languages. It's mainly in the pronunciation!

FWIW 

That would be fun to do.  I worked with a boy who was immersed in a Spanish public school,program but couldn’t read in English.  It became very clear almost immediately, he had learned to say his letters and to sound out words using a Spanish pronunciation for the vowels.  So I worked with him on English phonemes and taught him when he reads English words, to use English vowel pronunciations and when reading Spanish to use Spanish sounds.  The problem was fixed in three sessions.  He was 6 years old so young enough that it was easy to learn the difference.  He was also very hyperactive so the sooner I got done with him the better, not for me but for him.   

Now that you mention it... and because I had learned Spanish before I came to Japan, I realized this but vowel alignment for Spanish and Japanese are the same.

In English, it's A E I O U.

In Spanish, it's A I U E O.

In Japanese, it's also A I U E O.

FWIW

Spanish and Japanese use the same vowel sounds?

Not only the sounds but the ordering of the vowels themselves are exactly the same.

We say A E I O U

Japanese and Spanish say A I U E O and the pronunciations for both are exactly the same.

We pronounce "A" as our normal ABC's but Spain and Japan pronounce it as "ah" and so forth.

FWIW 

Do they come from the same root language?

No... but I just got off the phone with one of the oldest Japanese friends of mine and he told me something quite interesting about why they are similar.

Back in the days of the Samurai, one of the first foreigners who came to Japan by boat were the Dutch. They arrived at Nagasaki port. They were the first ever foreigners discovered to have made it to Japan. And when they left Nagasaki port, some of the Samurai wanted to go onboard with them to another country and so the Dutch allowed some of them on board. Their communications were very limited to just basic peace meal words strung together without any vocabulary what so ever along with drawing pictures to get their meaning across.

Well, when they visited another country, people would ask their names and they could tell it verbally, but when asked to write their names, all they could write was the Japanese Kanji which foreigners could not read. So they talked to their Shogun that they needed some way to write their names using the alphabet. 

After they came back to Japan, they mentioned about their visits abroad, new things they had seen and experienced and they brought back all kinds of fruits and vegetables which were never before seen or heard of in Japan and they planted them on Japanese soil.

Well, several years later Spaniards were the next group of people to arrive at Nagasaki. Several of them stayed in Japan for almost one year studying the Japanese culture and language. It was from these Spanish peoples writing down the alphabet pronunciations of Japanese Kanji that they decided to use the vowel ordering A I U E O, but there was still no standard for writing Japanese names using our alphabet, but they did have a list of words the Spanish had written down but it had a lot of discrepancies and inconsistencies in it.

Finally, in 1859, a medical missionary named James Curtis Hepburn with the collaboration of his long-time assistant Kishida Ginko, Hepburn published a Japanese–English dictionary in May 1867 which became the first official dictionary of a foreign language. But as the Japanese were already using the A I U E O ordering, Hepburn included that ordering in his dictionary too. 

So there you have it. 

Here is a Wikipedia link to James Curtis Hepburn: James Curtis Hepburn - Wikipedia

And here is the Wikipedia link to his romanization of Japanese: Hepburn romanization - Wikipedia

I have yet to be able to find anything in either English or Japanese concerning the first Spanish who settled in Japan for a while.

FWIW

The history of languages is fascinating.

Yes it is...

I went to Israel two times in 1985 and 1987 I think it was.

I asked one of the Israeli at the company I was visiting why Hebrew was written right to left. 

And his answer was quite astounding too.

He said that when Hebrew was first written, papyrus (paper) had not yet been invented. And so they used stones as writing tablets. And when you go to write something in stone, you have to hammer a spike into the stone to carve the letters. Most of the people are right handed and thus they hold the hammer in their right hand and guide the spike with their left hand.

When doing that, it's really difficult writing right to left, but much easier writing left to right!

That really amazed me.

FWIW

Showtalk said:

What body of water is closest to you?

The Gulf of Mexico is the nearest salt water body.

Probably the nearest permanent surface water (or semi-permanent) would be the Pecos River. Although during prolonged drought it runs dry, or narrows to a tiny channel you can just step across in many places.