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Foreign alphabets and new phonetics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| windy214 Newbie United States Joined 5654 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 21 27 January 2011 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Currently I'm studying french and Spanish, both of which I study in a classroom setting
as well as extra stuff I do outside of class. (I'm a senior in High School) Personally I like learning in a classroom and I find it works well for me. I'm a fan of the structure it provides and the instant access to assistance, particularly with pronunciation. Obviously though if I want to continue learning languages I will have to do it all on my own. I don't have an issue with learning grammar and acquiring vocab. The problem that I'm worried about is learning different alphabets(greek, russian, arabic, etc.) and different pronunciation of the latin alphabet(german, Italian, portuguese etc.) So my question goes out to anyone who has taught themselves another language. (especially those that use a different alphabet than their mother tongue.) How did you learn the phonetics and pronunciation on your own? I think this is the key to opening up the doors to eventually being a polyglot for me. And by different alphabet I'm including kanji and other symbols. I'd be very interested to hear how anyone was able to teach themselves a tonal language actually. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sanghee Groupie United States Joined 5060 days ago 60 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Korean | Message 2 of 21 27 January 2011 at 3:06am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not anywhere near fluent in Korean yet, but within a week of hearing and loving my first kpop songs about 3 years ago, I decided to try to learn the Korean alphabet. One of the things that helped me determine to start studying Korean (although I went about it in a very poor manner and didn't learn much until I changed my methods not too long ago) was actually how easy it was to learn to read. I started with doing a matching game, and it only took about 1 hour until I was able to recognize approximately what each Korean letter sounds like. For example, I could be shown ㄷ and knew right away it made a sound kind of like a d.
Understanding how they sound in the context of actual sentences took many audio clips paired with reading Hangul and practice as well as written explanations. One method that helped me a lot was I'd look at a word, say out loud how I think it sounds, then play the audio and see where I made mistakes. I still make mistakes sometimes with complicated combination's of consonants/vowels and I have to slow down my reading and try saying it a few times until I get it right, but I no longer have to think about how each letter sounds because it comes right away just like with reading English. I attempted to learn Hiragana and Katakana a while ago, but eventually gave up. They seem pretty easy to pronounce though. I think that learning languages with different alphabets (not including things such as Chinese characters) seems easier to me pronunciation wise because I don't look at the words and have an idea that's been ingrained for my whole life on how to pronounce them. When I was learning French in school, even with having an instructor, I pronounced a lot of the words just like how I would for English. Understanding in general how words are pronounced came quicker with Korean. Edited by Sanghee on 27 January 2011 at 3:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Didgeridoo Newbie United States Joined 5145 days ago 28 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish | Message 3 of 21 27 January 2011 at 3:29am | IP Logged | ||
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The Spanish alphabet is a walk in the park compared to some other languages, because everyone in the US knows how piñata and quesadilla are pronounced.
Finnish, however, is much harder. Y and j take on different sounds than in English, and ä and ö are completely new letters. But eventually you get used to the different sounds, even though I still have trouble differentiating between u/y and a/ä. I was randomly reading the Japanese Wikibook one day, and in the lessons on the kana showed you how to draw them and gave little tips on how to remember them - like one of the kana looked like an apple with a stem, which would help you remember that it was an "a" sound. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| windy214 Newbie United States Joined 5654 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 4 of 21 27 January 2011 at 3:36am | IP Logged | ||
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What I mean to ask Didgeridoo is how did you even find out what the ä and ö sounded like?
did you have to get audio tapes? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6134 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 5 of 21 27 January 2011 at 3:59am | IP Logged | ||
You can also take a look at the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) transcriptions listed on the page for the language on Wikipedia or Omniglot. Then you can just find the corresponding symbols on a chart like this and listen to how they sound. Although not nearly as accurate, text-to-speech demos (like this one) can be of some assistance. Otherwise, simply reading a description of the sound compared to similar ones in your native language will do as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6574 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 21 27 January 2011 at 4:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Any language learning course that's not crap is going to have audio. That's where you get the pronunciations. Whatever you do, don't read the "like the 'a' in 'father'" descriptions in the books!
Also, search on this forum for "shadowing". That's the main method I used for learning Mandarin pronunciation. I studied Mandarin for years without having a single encounter with a native speaker. Coming to China I found that I could, after a few days of adjustment, have conversations without problems. And people commented that my pronunciation was better than theirs (this is, of course, because I was in the south and talking Mandarin to other second language learners)! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5218 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 7 of 21 31 January 2011 at 3:31am | IP Logged | ||
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First I get all the rules or, rather, a set big enough so that any reading mistakes would be menial and could be worked on later.
For Russian, I gathered all the relevant information from the Princeton Russian Course: -I didn't follow the course order because as a grown up I can be told how 33 simple symbols are drawn and sound in one go, without the need to artificially group them because they do or do not sound like or look like others I know. Descriptions like 'a as in father' are actually very useful if you take for what they are--approximations. Now, Russian has several features that further complicate reading: -A 'backwards sound system' that gives some consonants two possible pronunciations depending on the following vowel. -'Vowel reduction'. -Some spelling rules that apparently contravene the above. So you got all the letters, all the phonemes, and how they are related. The important thing is you get enough to start to do some meaningful practice, let the rest slowly sink in along the way, and get back to the rules for reference when needed. Second, I check all my stuff with someone knowledgeable, like an educated native, a teacher, etc. After that I begin to read aloud until I get the hang of it. For Russian I got text-to-speech software that I checked for quality with some friends (I got their seal of approval), which relieves me from bugging them too much. An alternative would be to get some reasonably good audio/text pair(s) and compare yourself to the speakers. When you're good enough get to a native-level speaker for further polishing and external feedback on possible mistakes you're still making. Remember: you probably won't be able to do everything right soon; the important thing is that you're aware of every possible issue as soon as possible, and that you get references to get back to when needed. The rest should go slowly sinking in as you focus on other aspects of the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| thecrazyfarang Diglot Newbie France thefarangsdiary.blog Joined 5043 days ago 18 posts - 25 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Thai | Message 8 of 21 31 January 2011 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Like Ari, I do not recommend to read the descriptions in the books.
I'm learning thai alphabet (44 consonants and 37 vowels). In that purpose, I use a book with (very) easy sentences and audio recordings. It works well for me... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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