I wasn’t thinking of a dropdown menu with all cities in UK, US etc. but rather broad categories and, if possible, a note about the city (as Astamoore suggested).
I think there should be an option (for the provider) not to attach any accent information to the content. Or at least (for the learner) to be able to uncheck the accent box. I’m not obsessed with accents and mainly want the content. If the speaker has a particularly interesting accent, I might want to look it up, read more, search for content in other places and so on.
I can’t tell the difference between Canadian and USA accents.
I can tell the difference between scottish and english, but putting them under UK would be ok.
So North America, Uk and Australia would be just fine. Then with the preview you can narrow your search to an accent that suits you better. And you usually know that certain provider has certain accent, so you can look for that too in your next search.
For Spanish:
-Spain
-General Latin America
-Argentina
Those 3 accents pronounce the words the same way.
I wouldn’t put Mexico on its own because the difference is just a difference in the tone from the General Latin America ones; just like the caribean.
But people from Argentina do really pronounce very different from the rest of Latin America, having a very different way of pronouncing even some letters.
The country of origin of the speaker should be enough for languages that are not continent-wide like Spanish (e.g. for Latin America the listeners will find out the differences on their own - geographical information should be kept to the description). Any further sub-divisions will hamper the search in the library.
As for ‘dialect’ - if I spoke dialect, very few learners of German would understand and I would have to create a new language - like Steve suggested for Swiss German. ‘Accent’ should refer to the standard language, which may have some dialectal or regional traits (words, phrases, preference of grammatical structures). LingQ should not offer ‘dialects’ unless as separate languages if they have a written form (Swiss German, again - but not Austrian German). Nonetheless my pronunciation of standard German may sound like a dialect to learners or natives of northern Germany. Even professional speakers (TV, radio) have different accents - so the distinction for German is actually only Southern versus Northern German. By the way, Austrians speak Bavarian dialects or have Bavarian accents except for the westernmost province Vorarlberg where they speak Alemanic dialects like the Swiss. But of course the ‘dialects’ of Munich, Insbruck, Salzburg or Vienna (all in the South) differ. It’s rhythm and intonation which help to distinguish southern from northern German (say Berlin versus Vienna).
Even for French the difference between northern and southern French is minimal, unless again you go for ‘dialects’ or regional languages (chti, gallo, wallon). Québec of course has to be indicated for the learner (it’s like British versus American English - even if there are Irish, Scottish, Canadian, Southern USA…).
I like the idea of being able to search by general categories, as many people have already said. For example, for Spanish I would like to be able to search Spain, Latin America, Argentina. For Portuguese I would like to be able to search Portugal, Brazil, African.
I agree that searching by regional dialects doesn’t really seem practical at this point in time, though I do like the idea of it for eventually. Maybe after the broad, general country categories are implemented and after we get lots more content in the library, then you could create a SEPARATE search criteria for REGIONAL DIALECT, in which the categories can be more specific. For example, for Spanish you could have Castilian Spanish vs. Andalucian vs. Catalunan. For Portuguese you could perhaps have Southern vs. Rio de Janeiro vs. Sao Paulo, etc. This would be a cool way for users who are truly interested in certain regional dialects to narrow things down even further. I agree that this is not crucial right now and poses several complications, so for now I would be happy just being able to search by broad country category.
Janna,
I was under the impression from one of our members from Mozambique, tomaSito, that in Africa they speak more or less like the Portuguese. I am not sure that we have that much content from there either. However, we may in the future. Maybe he will comment.
I have no problem calling it Argentinean… but on the matter specifics… I think on top of all the other accents in English we could also use a “Chris Sarda Southwestern but not Arizona or New Mexico” accent.
That is after all the accent growing the fastest among ESL teachers…
I’d like to see african as a part of the portuguese accents as well. I wanted to learn portuguese for staying in Mozambique and never knew how in the end it would really sound like. Already after some months there, I see that it is indeed different from “português de Portugal”, at least in the melody of speech. I know that it will be difficult to find content at first, but I think having an extra part for african portuguese will help for getting more content from there, which I was really missing before coming here.
I can only tell what I think would be the best for someone trying to learn Swedish - and that is that the different accents should be divided. I think it would be very hard for someone to listen to the southern accent the first few times and then listen to someone from the north for example, it’s huge differences in pronounciation, tone, speed etc. There are tons of Swedish accents of course and they are quite different (even Swedes sometimes have trouble understanding eachother!) so I guess we can’t be to specific but something like:
Rikssvenska (which is spoken in news broadcasts and quite similar to the Stockholm accent)
Northern accent (Norrländska)
Southern accent (Skånska)
Island of Gotland accent (Gotländska)
Western accent (Västkusten, Göteborska)
Other distinct accents (e.g. Värmländska, Småländska)
All other Swedes, help me out with this one! I might forget or mix up something here
I don’t know how this is to be done but at least when someone uploads a podcast or so, they can name the file with the name, level and accent. E.g. "Sommarlov (summer holidays). Beginners 1. Rikssvenska. That’s an easy way to do it, right?
As someone who has learned Swedish, I took a long time to notice the different accents. I am not sure it is such a big deal for beginners or even intermediates.
That said, it would be great if you would create some content for us, and you can certainly tag it with an accent.
I would like to hear from the Swedes here but as a non-native speaker I can not hear differences between villages in Smaland or Darlana, but would only use the following larger categories. Again I would not encourage learners to only listen to one accent. I really do not think it matters very much.
Southern Swedish (Smaland, Skane)
Standard Swedish
Darlecarlia
Just today I asked a girl who works at the hostel here in Stockholm for a broom. I anticipated she wouldn’t know the word, so I looked it up beforehand — sopborste.
The standard pronunciation (if there is such a thing in Swedish) is soop-borsh-tuh (with the retroflex sound). I said soop-borsh-tuh to the girl, and she repeated it saying, “Ah, soop-borss-tuh!”
Oh, well, I thought. Maybe I misheard it. When I returned the broom to her and said thank you, she replied, “Var så god.” Again, she said vah-saw-gewd, instead of vah-shaw-gewd.
I didn’t want to nag her about dialect differences, but I took a note of it.
I meant to say “I can now hear the differences between villages in Smaland or Dalecarlia”. There are a lot of accents in Sweden, as astamore points out, and I would not be in favour of listing them all.
Steve: I can create something I guess, what would you like for me to create? I don’t know what kind of Swedish content there is today? I speak more or less “rikssvenska” (which is spoken around the Stockholm area and in news-broadcasts etc.) so you’d probably hear some differences between my Swedish and the Swedish spoken in Dalarna and Småland but the difference is much bigger with the northern or southern parts as well as some parts of Värmland and Gotland.
Please check out the content in our Swedish library or in the Spanish and German library.
I think that easy beginner content is best. Check out Ana Paula’s diary in Portuguese. If you could have simple content about your daily life in Stockholm, or your views on things, or your plans or the like. Typically for beginners 1 minute more or less is enough. For intermediate learners 3- 5 minutes is fine and for advance learners 10 minutes is still OK in my view.
I suggest you ask on our Swedish forum as to what people would like to have.
You can check at the Community page and search the list of learners by language to see who is studying Swedish ( or Portuguese for that matter.
But , I don’t learn Spanish.