The narrator is Chinese. He is definitely speaking in Chinese-accented non-American English, but I, being an uninformed American, was unsure whether it's British or Australian English. Some commentators on the comment thread believe it's Australian. So I guess you'd call it Chinese-accented Australian English? Chinese-accented Australian-accented English?
Anyway, I honestly don't think his pronunciation is that bad. He says something like /ɑndə/ or /ɑnə/ for 'and', and he definitely has a kind of stereotypical Chinese accent when it comes to vowels, but I can understand the words he uses if I listen closely. No, his pronunciation isn't what makes this announcer so difficult to understand. It's his intonation. As others in the thread say, it's almost like he's reading blindly from a phonetic script. His intonation is all over the place, muddling up my native perception of word boundaries. The intonation is what makes this narration so strange. It doesn't even sound like your catch-all Chinese accent anymore. Some of my favorite comments are
"Some times he nails it. Other times he's just a wee bit off. This guy is like the uncanny valley of voiceovers. "and
" its like scandinavian cockney"and the following thread, which you can click to see more clearly
What made me so interested in the affect of intonation in this video is that I'm currently working on my Japanese intonation while reading aloud. Let me tell you, pitch accent is difficult work. When in doubt, just stay flat! is my suggestion to you, as suggested to me by Mr. Masamune. How do you pronounce 不潔（ふけつ）ではないです? The accent is on the で, so it's something like fuketsudeha naidesu, not fuketsudeha naidesu, as I pronounced it originally. Although to my ears it sounds like fuketsudeha naidesu, as if the accent is rising to meet the high accent. Or something. Because flat accents aren't really flat? Or... I might have messed it all up again. Damn my native intonation, slipping insidiously into my foreign language just as my hard t's and k's do! For all I know, when I speak in Japanese I'm only a little better than Mr. Knife announcer.
You can use this dictionary to look up the pitch accents of words you don't know or are unsure of. A number next to the entry will tell you which syllable has the high pitch. 0 is flat pitch, and on. (Read the description for this numbering system here in Japanese here, in section 4.) Not all words in the dictionary have pitch information.
HOWEVER -- pitch accent of a word can change based on the pitch accent of surrounding words (so, when you put the words together into a sentence). So the best thing to do is listen and learn. Don't sweat intonation TOO much. Practice it, but don't let it get you speak-shy (that's like pee-shy, except with speaking, I guess). If you care too much about intonation you'll end up saying nothing at all, and what's the point of that?
This site, Shiawase, has some more information and interesting links. There's also the wikipedia article on Japanese pitch accent.
Oh my god I'm afraid to speak in Japanese now for fear of this.
ReplyDeleteWe did exercises like this one time at my study abroad and of course I've forgotten it all. I could've sworn I was told that Japanese was totally pitch-less before I started learning it; clearly that's not the case, but who knows if mine is any good.
Haha the deeper down the hole I go the more discouraging it all is...
No! No speak-shy! If anything, Japanese pitch accent doesn't seem quite as all-important as English stress is. People understood me before I started trying to get better reading intonation. Also, apparently there's a butt-ton of regional variation.
DeleteI feel the exact same way, though. Like for every year I study, my accent gets just that much worse. Really, it's probably more of a heightened awareness. There's a grace period between high beginner and middle intermediate where you get this sense of "I am pretty good at this and I'll be fluent in no time!" Then you get a little more savvy of the language and realize all the different crap that goes into it.