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Pronounciation-Grammar-Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6387 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes  Speaks: Latin* | Message 9 of 16 02 December 2007 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Danish is an acquired taste yet delicious for those in the
know. 'Reconstruction' is capable of plunging one into a depression for days and comes highly recommended to those who have not been converted to the language yet, as are the early works by Lars von Trier (notably, 'Riget'). And Copenhagen is a lovely, lovely place (even though the rest of the country is a disaster). Yet we stray away from the main subject. Allow me to brutally oversimplify the matters once more. It's late at night and I'm making these things up so you'll have to bear with me once more. There are 'showmen' and 'scientists'. 'Showmen' will want to excel from day one, they really care about the impression they make. The only way to do that is to have perfect pronunciation (for even your grammar mistakes shall go unnoticed if you sound authentic). Grammar is important, of course as blatant errors are uncool. As for the vocabulary... I have seen people work wonders with very limited vocabulary. It's all about being creative. (A useful skill for those aspiring to a career in interpretation, by the way...) Then there are 'scientists': people who strive for a very deep knowledge of their subject matter. (These make excellent translators.) Their vocabulary may surpass that of an average educated native speaker. They typically retain thick accents and are generally insensitive to peculiarities of the modern spoken language. They even may occasionally excel in public speaking yet at the expense of everyone thinking that they sound... well, a bit old- fashioned, maybe... or geeky. This comes with using too many words that general public does not understand. We should be grateful that both kinds are around, I guess. Edited by furyou_gaijin on 02 December 2007 at 7:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 10 of 16 02 December 2007 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
I find myself disagreeing with your categorization. I'd say that there are also 'pragmatic' speakers of multiple languages; I know a few professors in this category. They tend to speak fluently but somewhat imperfectly, but if they have any scientific interest in languages whatsoever, it's well-hidden. Some of these people are scientists (professionally), despite taking this approach. I also have known a few people who don't fit your classification, as they combine both possibilities. One falls closer to the scientist end, but has a perfectly native accent in every language he speaks that I can judge, and if anything, focuses too much on the peculiarities of modern language. I've met a few others, but too briefly to be sure if they are similar exceptions. I suppose you could sweep away all of this with "well, the original post was an over-generalization"; still, it seems worth noting types of counter-examples. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 11 of 16 02 December 2007 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
This may be true of the learning stage, but in my own experience pronunciation may stop improving at some point after that, and that point may be when one still has a depressingly heavy accent.
That's the question, is it really out of one's control? Native-level perfection may well be out of reach for most learners, but is it clear that significant improvement over what happens when things are left to their own devices (i.e., to "gradually improve over time") is not a possibility? Quite a few folks here have been drooling over shadowing - there must some fire behind all that smoke, and there may be other helpful techniques out there. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 12 of 16 02 December 2007 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Accent can indeed be a problem for this type of language learner, but lack of sensitivity to the peculiarities of modern spoken language comes from not reading enough trashy lit. A big mistake, in my most humble opinion. Edited by frenkeld on 03 December 2007 at 9:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zhuangzi Nonaglot Language Program Publisher Senior Member Canada lingq.com Joined 7029 days ago 646 posts - 688 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese, Swedish, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 16 02 December 2007 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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frankeld,
Yes, after a long period of intensive listening I believe it is possible and worthwhile to make a deliberate attempt to improve one's pronunciation. I would recommend listening to short phrases. It is our intention at LingQ, if we ever get our present backlogs of fixes and improvements done, to enable the learner to chunk sound files and then tie them to the word cards that have the meaning and phrases, and to create lists for download. The learner will be able to control the speed of these chunks, all of which have come from the learner's listening and reading. He should first slow them down and work on listening and repeating, and then recording and comparing, at slow speed. Then he should do the same at normal speed. I did something similar in Mandarin and I was able to identify and improve areas where my pronunciation differed too much from the native.But the big improvement in my rhythm and tones came from massive repetitive listening to Xiang Sheng comic dialogues, even when I did not understand. But all of this is best done after one has attuned oneself to the sounds of the language and hopefully not ingrained too many bad habits. As to the improvement in vocabulary and grammar, I believe this comes from lots of input and improving one's ability to notice what is happening in the language. That is what we try to do at LingQ. As you are aware, our system is not perfect and we are working to improve it, but that is the intent. I also think that certain amount of writing and speaking help in the process of becoming more observant of the language, but should not be the main emphasis, input should. As to shadowing, to each his own. I find that I just cannot keep it up. I can listen for hours on my MP3 player. I can read and enjoy it. I can read and save words and enjoy it. I can review vocabulary in various ways and enjoy it. I cannot shadow for more than a few minutes. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 16 03 December 2007 at 4:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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I still see the "100% - 50% - 1%" as completely nonsense. A person with that profile reminds me of a taperecorder: perfect rendering, zero comprehension.
The central issue in my opinion is whether you need to be perfect from the beginning, or in other words whether you are doomed if your pronunciation isn't correct from the beginning. It is clear that you have to learn how to pronounce the language even if it is only for reading silently and maybe thinking in the language, but you don't even need to open your mouth to achieve this - and in principle you could commit all kinds of pronunciation errors without being 'discovered'. The test must be whether you can correct the errors in this abominable worst-case scenario later when you have to communicate with other people. Contrary to some theories I think this is possible, and one reason is that I know from my own experience how much my own pronunciation changes even within the first couple of days during a travel. While I'm at home I hear English, French, Spanish, Portuguese et cetera spoken by people from all over the world with all sorts of accents, and they all go into the same melting pot. If I wanted to achieve a perfect pronunciation I would have to focus on one variant of each of these languages and imitate that to the exclusion of all others. But I don't want to limit my choice of sources in that way. As a result my 'homegrown' accent will be a compromise, based on the sum of everything that I have heard - though influenced by a few conscious choices. For instance I tend to think in 'lisped' Spanish, so when I recently visited South America I had to remind myself to use the s-pronunciation instead - but after a day or so it had already become an automatic reflex to say s instead of lisped z. Now that I'm back home I have returned to the European kind of Spanish lisp simply because I prefer that sound. I'm fairly sure that my 'home' dialect is different from every single kind of authentic Spanish on the planet, but it is the result of the very same imitation process that permits me to adapt to any specific Hispanophone environment within a couple of days. If I had learnt to perfection, say Spanish from Andalucia I would be totally out-of-place in Bogotá. Adaptability comes at the price of perfection. In quite general terms I think that the best time to focus on your pronunciation is at the time where you can deal with vocabulary and grammar in a more or less automatic way, not when you are still struggling with the basics. Edited by Iversen on 03 December 2007 at 7:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6387 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 15 of 16 03 December 2007 at 5:15am | IP Logged | |||||
I can and I will. :-) Well, not quite. Exceptions only confirm the rule, they say. Also, the tags are not meant to be taken literally, they point to character types rather than actual occupations. But in fact, you're right: there are a lot of people (including professional linguists) who ride on both horses, so to speak. I came up with this classification as an analogy for the purposes of the 100%-50%-1% quote discussion, it is probably of limited use outside of this context. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 16 of 16 03 December 2007 at 10:27am | IP Logged | |||||
Zhuangzi, I would characterize all of these activities as a rather focused and intense study of pronunciation. I was just thrown off by your remark about "gradually improving over time", which to me implied no study at all, rather than delaying these activities to allow for a long "silent period" of comprehensible input.
Do you approach grammar study similarly to what you do with pronunciation, i.e., delay it until after receiving a lot of input, or do you actually avoid it altogether? Edited by frenkeld on 03 December 2007 at 10:28am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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