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Spanish/Portuguese Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| nicozerpa Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 4268 days ago 182 posts - 315 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, Portuguese, English Studies: Italian, German | Message 9 of 24 26 August 2013 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi, Chris! I'd recommend that you pronounce the "Y" and "LL" a little stronger and
shorter, specially between vowels. For example, when you say "leyes", sometimes it sounds like "lees" or "le-is". That's very common in English-speaking people :) BTW, have you tried shadowing? I think it will help you pick up the accent and not sound "robotic" as you said, although you should choose your accent first. Regarding this point, I would prefer Mexican rather than Colombian, but the latter is also an excellent choice. Keep up the good work! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5149 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 24 26 August 2013 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not familiar with these languages so I don't have much to contribute, but it's good to see someone else who's interested in improving pronunciation. I'm one of these people who doesn't pick it up naturally, so it's been an ongoing project for me, especially for French. Now I'm tempted to do what you did and put up some recordings to get feedback.
I'm reluctant to give any advice since I still have a long way to go, although I have made some noticeable improvements. A few things that come to mind from my experience: - Prosody (rhythm, stress, intonation) is at least as important as getting the individual sounds correct. Luca's series on "phonetic analysis" (that jeronz already linked to the videos of) talks about this and is worth a read. I've not watched the Arguelles videos but I will if I find the time. - I've been experimenting with a "chorusing" method described by forum member okjhum for a few months. The basic idea is that you take a short phrase/sentence and listen to it repeatedly, then speak along with it repeatedly, with the idea being that you get feedback from hearing yourself. That mostly aims to improve prosody, but I've also found it useful for "training in" tricky sounds that you can produce in isolation but have difficulty using in actual speech (the rolled R was one of those for me). - A few people have said that exaggerating native speakers to the point where it seems as if you're making fun of them can be a good idea. You feel like you're exaggerating, but you're really just doing it right and it feels weird because you're not used to it. But this can be easier said than done if you're like me and you don't have the "ear" for accents. - Shadowing: some love it, some hate it. I maintain that it's another technique that can be useful for improving at things that you know how to do but aren't good at actually doing when you speak. Repeated shadowing of short texts seems most useful to me. Edited by garyb on 26 August 2013 at 4:58pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4685 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 11 of 24 27 August 2013 at 12:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Medulin: Interesting! I guess I'll have to remember that when I travel to Colombia, that could be a bit awkward.
Good call on the y/ll nicozerpa, I never would have realized that. I do need to do more shadowing, it's definitely one of the next steps that I'll need if I want to continue to improve. When people do that, how specific/specialized do they get? Should I try to pick a single person (like a celebrity or news anchor) with a similar vocal pitch to always imitate? Garyb: Yeah, Luca's material is really great, I'll try to diagram out sentences like he does when I get a chance, maybe this weekend. I think I need to do it with conversations instead of the news podcasts I tend to listen to (stuff like Democracy Now), because those tend to say everything as fast as possible without much pause or intonation. The chorusing sounds interesting as well, but I don't really feel that I get feedback on how I sound while I'm speaking, because I hear my own voice very differently from how it really sounds. Would be good to get the timing down though! Also, I thought my previous recordings were a bit nasally (maybe even more than my usual American accent), which is a trait I don't really associate that much with Spanish. For today's clip I experimented with decreasing that and speaking with a more "relaxed" throat and jaw for lack of a better term. I messed up a couple of vowels and r's (check out the first rr for an example of what happens when I mix the French and Spanish R :) ), but hopefully I'll bring that all together soon. source (3rd paragraph): http://mexico.cnn.com/opinion/2013/08/26/opinion-podra-zucke rberg-conectar-a-5000-millones-de-personas audio: https://soundcloud.com/fordm48/26aug13 Edited by Chris Ford on 27 August 2013 at 12:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4685 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 12 of 24 30 August 2013 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, after looking at jeronz's links from the last page, I've been trying to improve my pronunciation of d and t. I noticed that I pronounce these letters with the tip of my tongue reaching up to at least the alveolar ridge if not higher, which I think is pretty standard for an English speaker, but higher than the "tongue touching the back of the top teeth" pronunciation. Hopefully this will help me bring pronunciation more to the front of the mouth.
It's kind of amusing to me how hard it is to focus on improving more than one feature at a time while speaking. I think I've spoken enough that my mistakes are burned into my brain, and in effect I speak Spanish not in a native or American accent, but in my own bizarro version. :) So today I mostly focused on the d's and t's, hopefully I'll be able to bring everything I'm learning together at some point. article: http://mexico.cnn.com/mundo/2013/08/30/el-desgaste-humano-y- politico-de-la-guerra-iraqui-advertencia-para-siria audio: https://soundcloud.com/fordm48/spanish30aug13 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5824 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 13 of 24 30 August 2013 at 4:18pm | IP Logged | ||
I've known americans living in Brazil for a long time who still sounded close to you. Even some brazilians who have been raised in USA in early age come back sounding this way. If you normally can speak like that, you'll be easily understood by almost everybody. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4685 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 14 of 24 30 August 2013 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Obrigado, Flarioca! It makes me very happy to hear that.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4685 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 15 of 24 08 September 2013 at 5:40am | IP Logged | ||
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As for the pronunciation of the n, it seems that based on the University of Iowa phonetics page the n is either alveolar when preceding certain consonants (r, l), or dental (as in tongue at the back of the top teeth) when preceding others (d, t). It seems then that the type of n is anticipating the pronunciation of the consonant that follows (i.e. r and l are alveolar and d and t are dental). It's an interesting little detail, because as an English speaker I would have just always used the alveolar one no matter what, and never would have noticed a distinction without reading that!
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| Chris Ford Groupie United States Joined 4685 days ago 65 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese | Message 16 of 24 08 September 2013 at 6:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Obviously I'm spending a lot of time with U of Iowa phonetics page that jeronz linked (http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/#). Also noticed that apparently n before f (enfermo, inferior, etc) should also have a sort of "blended" pronunciation where the upper teeth touch the lower lip producing a sort of "m" sound in anticipation of saying the "f."
A similar effect seems to happen with "l" in that the pronunciation of the letter shifts slightly depending on what letter is following (d/t, ch, s/vowel). Pretty cool to see all these subtleties. Edited by Chris Ford on 08 September 2013 at 6:17am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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