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Practical phonetic differentiation?

 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery Post Reply
Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6440 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 1 of 2
07 December 2007 at 10:12pm | IP Logged 
Dear Professor Argülles;

In your opinion, does it make sense to study with isolated language-specific phonetic material, in addition to shadowing? Specifically, I mean material which contrasts minimal pairs, pitches, tones, vowel lengths, gemination, etc. If you think so, do you have any recommendations for sources of such material, such as existing commercial or academic offerings? I'd like to know about materials for any languages with relatively unusual features, as a practical supplement to the phonetics work I'm doing with J. C. Catford's "A practical Introduction to Phonetics". I'm especially curious about Hindi, Korean, and languages of the Caucasus mountains, due to their notoriously difficult to differentiate retroflex vs dental constants in the former, the tense and aspirated consonants in the second, and the consonant clusters in the last.

Thank you;
Volte

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ProfArguelles
Moderator
United States
foreignlanguageexper
Joined 7257 days ago

609 posts - 2102 votes 

 
 Message 2 of 2
09 December 2007 at 5:39pm | IP Logged 
Ms. Volte, if you find this kind of study in the abstract to be conducive to your overall perspective on languages, then by all means continue with it. Otherwise, I would put my energies elsewhere until I actually encountered these problems while engaged in the serious study of the languages in question. The kind of materials your refer to here may be of assistance then, but what you really need at that point is to sit down in face to face sessions with a native speaker whose speech production you can observe, imitate, and – under ideal circumstances – ask to have knowledgeably phonetically explained.
1 person has voted this message useful



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