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Old December 02, 2011, 10:45 AM
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wrholt wrholt is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
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Native Language: US English
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My own experience matches the comments of both Perikles and Rusty on all points. Through a combination of exposure to many varieties of spoken Spanish, practice, theoretical training and expert coaching I eventually reached the point of having native speakers think I was a native speaker "from somewhere else" for at least a few minutes until I made some error of grammar, vocabulary, or cultural knowledge that marked me as a second-language speaker.

I was able to do a lot on my own by simply paying attention to what I was hearing and mimicking it as best I could.

However, achieving a native-like accent is more involved than pronouncing the individual sounds correctly in context: meaning is also affected by patterns of pitch, stress, intonation and juncture (that is, the ways of pausing between different parts of an utterance); I needed expert coaching to improve them, and I never realized I needed it until I got it as part of a college course on Spanish pronuncation.
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