In this video, we can hear many foreigners speak Japanese:

http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=12371

Most speak very well! I know some use simple, child-like speech, and I know they sometimes make grammatical mistakes, but I’m particularly interested in their pronunciation.

I think most foreigners do a pretty good job at Japanese pronunciation in general, as it’s not a language that presents important phonetic difficulties. Either that or they only aired the best interviews. Anyway, I think it’s mostly sentence prosody and intonation that tends to be a problem.

I would like to know Japanese people’s opinion about these people’s speech. What is it that makes you say “Oh, this person is not Japanese”. What are the little things that they (we!) should watch for to improve?

Thanks! Really looking forward to your answers!

I think natives make up for Japanese not being “a tonal language” by adding an awful lot of micro-complexity in their speech patterns. A foreigner usually learns generic, polite or fairly polite forms of speech first, and often sticks with them like a safety blanket, so it’s either that, or someone who’s such a beginner that simply pronouncing the vowels properly isn’t quite working out. Maybe this is what you meant by prosody and intonation?

Plus you have regional dialects to muddy the waters.

By prosody, I was refering to whole-sentence phrasing, including pitch accent. I think.

Then I suppose you have a point with your statement. But I think it’s more the net effect of the whole, not problems with one specific part, that really identifies speech as “gaijin” or such.

What do you mean by “net effect of the whole”? We should be able to pinpoint and analyze at least a few of the elements that cause these people to sound foreign.

I mean that while you can pinpoint and analyze the elements, it’s more an issue of the overall style than any one element. Put another way, any given “foreign” Japanese probably has several elements.

But not being a native speaker, it’s a bit difficult for me to be an authority on which are the big giveaways, unfortunately.

Thanks for your help and time, Jeremiah. Hopefully, someone will come enlighten us!

Hello. I just saw this postings and I watched the video that foreigners talking Japanese, hoping I could be of any help. There are a few people who speak really good Japanese, but it’s pretty noticable that all the other people speak as foreigners and not as natives do. There are some factors that allow foreigners to talk like Japanese natives speak. You have to consider the use of consonant and vowel as well as a correct intonation and a correct beat (proper length of each word or how much pause you should have in each letter of a word). I believe that the pronounciation will become much better if you learn correct use of consonant, vowel, intonation, and beat, etc. Actually, as a newly registered tutor, I am trying to develop an effective, pronounciation improvement class, and it’d be a whole different, traditional class, which would usually focus more on vocabulary, grammer, etc. At least, I could help Japanese learners to point out that they are not saying words correctly as a native Japanese speaker.