ロバート Never seen this before. It’s really funny! Yet another example is the movie “Team America”, and a certain dictator from a certain country. “Oh no, Hans Brix!”

I agree that confirmation is a useful skill, but in my case, I often don’t have time to scan everything to find out what needs to be confirmed–I just assume I heard it right. Sometimes, confirming stuff can slow down the conversation to the point where the Japanese people are thrown off their game, looking at each other thinking ‘Did we do something wrong? What were we talking about…?’

As for accented Japanese, one (somewhat elderly) lady told me that she didn’t like a certain foreigner’s Japanese because it was too perfect. She said (maybe to flatter me) that she preferred my broken Japanese.

I had another person (middle-aged female) comment that my way of speaking Japanese was ‘chaamingu.’ (I use a lot of keigo, reflecting the preferences of my traditional music teacher and my fellow students.) Well, all we can do is keep going…

Regards,
JL

My wife’s friends back in the US were all from Japan and all had lived there long enough to get good at the language, but some clearly had a knack, and some had bad pronunciation habits that gave the impression of only being in the country recently. Like you said, having the perfect accent isn’t important, but there’s a point when one’s pronunciation is so poor, people get tired of listening to them. In the same way, having more natural sounding Japanese, as much as possible, gives the native speaker a more relaxed, less stilted conversation, and I feel they’re more likely to want to talk to you again. It pays to spend the extra effort to communicate well, even if it doesn’t relate to job, certification and such. That was what my Vietnamese teacher really honed in on us, and she was sooooo right.

I have noticed a rather wide diversity in accents in Ireland and the UK, more so, I believe than in the US, possibly because the population there is much younger, less entrenched. My wife only struggled in the US with strong “Southern” accents. She has more trouble here in Europe, though some of that is just acclimation.

Anyways, you’re definitely right about English being a harder language to mangle. We’re so precise with our words, that there’s little else to fill in the blanks. Japanese has a lot of subtlety, that’s real easy to miss when you’re so used to everything being spelled out. Trips me up all the time at home.

Yeah, I don’t know why women’s voices are easier to understand (same here), but in my JapanesePod101 lessons, they did mention that male Japanese is lower in tone and faster in cadence. This is certainly true as far as I can tell with the few male Japanese I can speak with.

I think English learners are too used to this redundancy when speaking other languages. Japanese certainly doesn’t have much redundancy and you can quickly change the meaning or become unintelligible. Japanese don’t cope well with accented Japanese either. (as distinct from a dialect) Usually they can’t discern a loanword not pronounced in the Japanese style, even when it’s quite close. I think there’s just not that much variance in standard Japanese (I could be wrong) as there is in standard English.

Possibly with people learning a language in an academic environment, reading and writing may tend to still carry the most weight as they are simpler to evaluate by exams.

In terms of listening to Japanese. I find women’s voices easier to understand. I’ve no idea why. I also tend to use feedback questions when I’m unsure.
I (blah blah blah) to the shops.
-was that am going or went- Are you going to the shops?
No, I *went* to the shops,

And sudden utterances when I’m just not in Japanese mode tend to throw me a lot. It takes a little time for me to switch.