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"Mispronunciation index" | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 9 of 15 17 December 2012 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't think you could give a language a number because it depends on the first language. For instance, French and German have a high number of vowels, fairly similar, so there will be little confusion caused by vowels between speakers of these languages, but a speaker of Japanese or Spanish will find that the risk increases manifold.
In addition, mistakes in pronunciation tend to be fairly easy to bypass in isolation. It is the compounding of errors that makes a big difference, such as using the wrong vowel AND the wrong stress. I can't imagine how you'd measure the likelihood of more than one error occurring in the same word as higher in one language than in another. If you are serious about developing such an index, your rules will have to be a lot more complex and detailed. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4774 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 10 of 15 17 December 2012 at 11:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Edited by vonPeterhof on 17 December 2012 at 11:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5734 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 11 of 15 18 December 2012 at 5:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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A language that fits #3 is Cherokee. There are only 23 consonants and 6 vowels, but there are almost
NO true minimal pairs in the entire language (!) because vowels vary in length and tone as well. But honestly I'd say the "mispronunciation index" is higher than Japanese because Cherokee is really, really slurry - almost as bad as Korean...almost. If you think I'm exaggerating, my reference grammar complains about the almost total lack of minimal pairs and uses near-minimal pairs in most every example...and each example has 5 lines (syllabary, actual pronunciation, actual elements of the word, gloss, translation) because the way it's actually pronounced spurs together or even totally omits certain grammatical elements. I don't know any more languages like #3 off the top of my head to compare the level of mispronunciation, but I think your index would need a LOT more factors to be truly effective - in the case of Cherokee, I think a large part of the higher index is that it's a polysynthetic language, which reduces the chance of misunderstanding the entire utterance even while allowing a more relaxed pronunciation. Edited by Astrophel on 18 December 2012 at 5:54am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4670 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 12 of 15 18 December 2012 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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(Mis)pronunciation is frequently mispronounced.
It should be /prəˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃən/ Some people pronounce it (mis)pronounciation ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6439 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 13 of 15 22 December 2012 at 9:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've heard Cherokee is quite difficult. Or was that Navajo? I just remember it was a native American language.
Yeah, the "hashi" example was bad. I couldn't think of any others offhand and that is the most common example so that's why I picked it. I've been told that Koreans won't understand you if you don't pronounce everything correctly. My experience speaking Korean to Koreans is minimal, though. My experience trying to understand spoken Korean is much greater (daily for years) and I still have no idea what anyone is saying. There are J-pop songs that I haven't listened to in 10+ years that I still remember most of the words to. I have no idea what words I am saying, but I am pronouncing them correctly because I remember the syllables. There are K-pop songs that I have listened to daily for years (my workout mix on my .mp3 player). I can't even sing it back or sing along. Sometimes I think I understand a word here or there, or a verb ending, but that's about it. Any vocabulary I might manage to acquire, I can't even put it to use because I can't understand what is being said. That's ok, though, because I can't really remember words because they're all so close to every other word. And now that I have the book "The Sounds of Korean" (phenomenal book, btw), I realize that the language isn't even pronounced the way it's written half the time, anyway. Spanish is another language that gave me a lot of trouble with word boundaries and understanding spoken speech, but at least with Spanish, I could remember the vocabulary words. Other than an occasional silent "h," spelling was pretty straight forward. I like to say (half jokingly) that with Spanish and Korean, I can know every word that is used in a sentence and still not understand the sentence when I hear it. That is part of what makes the language insurmountable for me. It's like trying to climb a wall that not only doesn't have any handholds, but has also been covered in oil. I have no idea why I still like it and why I still want to learn it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5651 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 14 of 15 22 December 2012 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Stop learning Korean if you're going to bitch and moan about it constantly. Korean has a lot of homonyms, yet 80 million people are native speakers and millions of people have learned it just fine as their second language. Japanese has even more homonyms than Korean, yet 120 million native speakers and millions of people who learned Japanese as a second language don't have trouble with homonyms.
It's called context. With Korean and Japanese, if there's a verb with 20+ definitions and a noun that has 10+ different definitions, learn phrases instead of just learning isolated words. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6439 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 15 of 15 22 December 2012 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Seriously? Well that might be true. I haven't compared them. But because Japanese's mispronunciation index is lower, it's not as much of an issue. And bitching and moaning about Korean is how I vent frustration so I can keep studying it :D 1 person has voted this message useful |
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