Can you really tell Asian English accent?

Hibiki Itano

Hibiki Itano

New member
I keep wondering if native English speaker could tell us Asian by singing accent?
For example, listen to this song:

PROMISES by Thai Trinh
http://mp3.zing.vn/bai-hat/Promises-Thai-Trinh/ZW6W7IUC.html
How do you think about her voice and accent? She is a Vietnamese singer.

THIS MASQUERADE by Nguyen Thuy Linh
http://mp3.zing.vn/bai-hat/This-Masquerade-Nguyen-Thuy-Linh/ZW6I8EDE.html

Another Vietnamese singer, but she sings English justice and better than Thai Trinh. This was recorded from The Voice Vietnam (Blind audition).
And this is the most important part of the day, my singing voice and accent (arggggggg):

ECHOES OF THE DEAD (My original song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh7UMqO9ns0

NATURE BOY (Nat 'King' Cole cover)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngSJPef7Ccw

Tell me tell me tell me! :(
I'm looking forward to reading your replies!
 
I think it all depends on the formalized education and training of the singer. In choral music, there are proper diction sounds for all consonants and vowels. Pure Vowels, Diphthongs, etc. are examples. For example, if you were to sing and hold the first letters of the word "eye", you would not pronounce an I sound, but instead ah-ee. Meaning you would hold AH. Regardless of accent, if you have formal vocal or choral singing training, you would be able to sing words and sound like a native speaking singer. However, if you do not have this training, you may not sing certain vowels correctly and your accent may come out more. This even happens with people who do natively speak English. If you listen to the accents of British people compared to Americans, it is quite drastic. However, if you listen to the Oxford choir compared to the St. Olaf choir, their pronunciation sounds the same and you cannot tell accents apart. This is also why when you hear many choirs sing Latin text, regardless of their native tongue, it all sounds similar.

Of the examples you posted, I hear much more accent in the Phu Nguyen - Echoes of the Dead song than in the Promises - Thái Trinh song. However, just by her voice and singing techniques it sounds to me as if she has had more formal singing training. So to answer your question shortly, the answer is that it simply depends. Accents naturally tend to be less obvious through singing because your are not saying words naturally, you are holding certain syllables and changing pitch from that of the normal spoken voice. However, technical signing techniques can help improve upon the singing and even further reduce accent.

Hope this answers your question.
 
English = Queens English (UK) or English = American English (USA) ?? ;)

Personally, being born and raised in England (where no-one actually speaks the 'queens english', that's all storybooks and disney films) then personally I can tell that you 'were not of native toungue'.

Not saying that I didn't like what I heard, or if it was VERY noticable, but I definately could tell. Maybe some of the words we're too pronounced correctly, some of the emphesis was on the wrong 'part' of the word. None of this is ever tought in schools, or from books, it's just something that comes naturally.

The only song that I wouldn't be 100% confident of saying that it wasn't sung by a native English-man would be 'Nature Boy'.

I think that the most obvious thing (without being remotely racist in any way shape or form) is the difficulty that the Asians have pronouncing their R's. No matter how much effort is put into the prononucination of the R's they always come out (of varying degrees) with a little twang of a 'W'.

I'm by no means thinking that I'm perfect - but you asked.

https://soundcloud.com/tim-summers/sets/random-tangents-best

Here's some of my stuff on soundcloud - all of it done with the Mic on my iPad, nothing special, just me messing around. People say that I have an accent when I sing - probably because I've been raised in London, so I do have an accent of sorts. Maybe this'll help as it's not some magically masterd peice that you searched for, this is raw, pronounced the way that I say things.
 
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Most of the time I can tell when someone isn't a native English speaker singing. There are a few factors involved.
First there's often unfamiliarity with the language, which results in unusual pronunciation, pacing, or syntax.
And even if you've mastered the language, depending on what you speak natively, there may be some phonemes that you just can't hear properly. A well known version of that between Asia and English-speaking countries is the Japanese l/r. Japanese just doesn't have those sounds, so most native Japanese speakers have trouble hearing and pronouncing those sounds. By the same token, I have a friend from Nigeria whose last name starts with "nwu". He's told me his name dozens of times, but I just can't hear that phoneme correctly.
 
Asian languages use an entirely different phoneme set than Latin-based languages (English is, primarily, a Latin-based language). Native Asian speakers, even when completely fluent in English, have not had the life-long practice necessary to produce English phonemes. It's the same as when I try to speak Mandarin -- I don't fool anyone in China. Now, this isn't to say that, with enough practice, a native Asian speaker couldn't learn English well enough to fool a native English speaker, and I know of native English speakers who have mastered Mandarin to the point where they could pass for native Chinese. However, the average singer who is not a linguist and hasn't studied English linguistically will not be able to do it. I only listened to the first clip in your original post. It was not only obvious to me that it was not a native English speaker, but I also knew that it was a Chinese-speaker -- apparently the phoneme sets in Vietnamese and the two dialects of Chinese that I'm used to hearing (Mandarin and Cantonese) are quite different, resulting a different English "accent."
 
The first has a couple of words pronounced a little unusually, the second, masquerade, is better but in the second verse the words are wrong it should be thoughts of leaving disappear each time I see your eyes. If I heard the tracks blind, I would have guessed the right part of the world, but it isn't awful by a long way, just tiny slips that tag the singer as "foreign".
 
Accents in singing make your singing unique sometimes I guess. :D
Actually, many Asian singers want to sing English songs without an accent, and I find it unecessary. Lily Allen has accent in her singing, and I think it's really sexy.
Don't make me wrong but "Echoes of the Dead" and "Nature Boy" were sung by the same person (me!), but they're not the same in accent. I don't know why and how it happens!
 
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