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Reading TL May Delay Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4700 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes  Speaks: Czech* | Message 49 of 73 22 January 2012 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Of course you need to know what sound you're trying to make, but otherwise it's only training.
This is certainly true about pronunciation, but I was talking about listening.
This is actually an argument against using abnormally slow speech. When you ask people to speak slowly they often pronounce words according to how they think they're supposed to sound rather than how they really sound. For example many English speakers often add a sound to words where it's spelled but not pronounced or omit some contractions. It's arguable whether it's correct to call it "missing information", native speakers can obviously do without it. And it's necessary to copy this fast speach if you want to sound natural, overpronouncing things will result in an accent.
Anything within the normal range is good. It doesn't have to be especially fast.
Listening to material that is hard for you is more efficient, you won't learn much from easy material. Edited by LaughingChimp on 22 January 2012 at 3:29am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 50 of 73 22 January 2012 at 6:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
That would be true if there was one single way of pronouncing a certain word. Ever taught non-natives? If you have any talent for it you might have found yourself carefully exaggerating your speech until the other person could mimick the sounds a native speaker perceives to be there, and then reducing them to what is actually there in a natural sentence. Parents do that when talking to their children. Speech therapists do it to help stroke victims. Not only that, in my language people do it all the time when they want to stress a certain word. Of course you could argue that it should be possible to learn a word from either rendition. But starting with the slow one is much more efficient: When your mental representation of the language and its phonology is still so bad that you can't just infer the enunciated version from the slurred one and vice versa, it is also so bad that you don't have phonological chunks available that allow you to efficiently encode target language words as you hear them. In which case you have to encode single phonemes, some of which you might not even yet be able to perceive correctly. Meaning, you waste a lot of time on superficial and even wrong learning. Of course it is important to work with natural speech and to copy it, but not exclusively, and especially not as a beginner. It doesn't particularly help that not all contractions are present at all times and as a beginner you can't judge which register a certain contraction pertains to and what effect it has when it's used out of register.
Define 'hard', 'easy' and what exactly you expect to gain from either kind of material, based on whose experience or research. Also, sock puppet? Edited by Bao on 22 January 2012 at 6:57am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| FamusBluRaincot Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 5562 days ago 50 posts - 114 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 51 of 73 22 January 2012 at 8:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Laughing Chimp is arguing against things I never said. Bao gets it and explained it better than I did-pretty
impressive for a guy whose native language is not English. I was moved to write that first post because because I have suffered through too many bad educational materials written by the "fast is better" crowd. Of course everyone wants to be able to speak and understand quickly in the long run. The point is that, as in many other areas, it may take hundreds and perhaps even thousands of hours of slow and careful practice to build a solid foundation for these advanced skills. I try to avoid getting into long involved arguments on this site and others. Its an unproductive use of my time and never solves anything anyway. Whatever methods you use to study, only the final results, as judged by native speakers will tell you whether you used good methods or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4702 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 52 of 73 22 January 2012 at 11:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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JPod101 does it correctly, I think. They deliver a dialogue in natural speed, then slowed down, then fast again, with translation. After that, when they explain the vocab, they also pronounce the words syllable by syllable and fast.
What no course for self-learners can do, however, is give you feedback on your pronunciation or intonation. If you think you got a sound right, but in reality don't, you'll train it the wrong way until someone can help you to fix it. I had trouble with sounds I perceived as being easy. While the Japanese R sounds were supposed to be hard, I prodeced them correctly from early on, while the supposedly easy Z-sounds, the nasal N of the Kantô region and SHI are where my weaknesses were. I fixed my pronunciation to NHK anchorman level now, but still sound weird, due to intonation issues. This is also fixable. Edited by atama warui on 22 January 2012 at 11:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 53 of 73 22 January 2012 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Considering the amount of language courses with slow audio, I'd be surprised if anyone in the world would eventually speak "naturally"/learn how the language actually sounds. I have yet to hear a language course that has dialogues in natural speed. Everything can happen when natives speak fast, so I think it's better to get used to that right away.
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| aloysius Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6241 days ago 226 posts - 291 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: French, Greek, Italian, Russian | Message 54 of 73 22 January 2012 at 1:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I'm not sure what works best in the long run, but I prefer the faster speed of the second
generation Assimil Russian to that of the much slower one of the third generation. This might require more analysis of the written text (like Ari's approach to working with native material). I can certainly see the usefulness of slow audio for absolute beginners. I've also experimented with speeding up audio books when doing LR (as described by Volte in her Polish LR thread) and have found it really beneficial when later listening to speech at natural speed. /aloysius 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6126 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 55 of 73 22 January 2012 at 1:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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With Finnish I think it's a bit more than just speed. The language is a bit diglossic -- how do you learn the
spoken language if most books and learning products are based on the written language? Right now, I'm kind of ignoring this, but eventually it"s going to be a problem. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 56 of 73 22 January 2012 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Certainly easier than learning the written language if you only know the colloquial language of one region.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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