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Pronunciation rules | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| ibraheem Groupie United States Joined 5160 days ago 84 posts - 106 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Mandarin | Message 1 of 18 04 July 2010 at 8:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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One of the first things on a language course are usually generalized Pronunciation lessons.
After spending so much time learning and relearning pronunciations rules for my target languages I don't think it was worth spending as much time on it. After all when you learn your native language there are no pronunciation lessons. You learn pronunciation by hearing words, using words, making mistakes, learning new words on their own. I think I will skip the pronunciation lessons for the most part and learn to pronounce words on their own in my target language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5122 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 2 of 18 04 July 2010 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't like them much either, I'd rather listen to the language and compare it to the written language. That being said, I pretty much knew the pronunciation of Spanish beforehand, but pinyin can get kind of tricky for Chinese.
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| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5604 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 3 of 18 05 July 2010 at 8:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A knowledge of phonetics can be of great help when studying foreign languages. The problem of listening is that you tend to misinterpret
all the sounds that are not present in your own language (e.g., pinyin J, Q, ZH, CH all sound the same for me). After all the world is full of people who’ve lived in a foreign country for years and still have a very strong accent. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ibraheem Groupie United States Joined 5160 days ago 84 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Mandarin | Message 4 of 18 05 July 2010 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Obviously. However, reading pages of pronunciation guidelines doesn't automatically give you "knowledge of phonetics". As I stated in my post, I wouldn't rely on them too much. And they can only take you so far, giving a description of sounds. You need to hear it and repeat it.
Onviously if you are having such a hard time distinguishing the sounds you should familiarize yourself with them.
That is a bit of an exaggeration. Edited by ibraheem on 05 July 2010 at 2:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5248 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 5 of 18 05 July 2010 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The same thing can be said about every aspect of languague learning: grammar, vocabulary etc. For an adult it is very ineffecient to learn this way only. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ibraheem Groupie United States Joined 5160 days ago 84 posts - 106 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Mandarin | Message 6 of 18 05 July 2010 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Children who learn their native language do not acquire perfect vocabulary, grammar etc... the same as pronunciation, these things are also learned by reading and writing. Pronunciation is best learned by hearing and speaking, not by studying diagrams and descriptions of sounds. Edited by ibraheem on 05 July 2010 at 2:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5444 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 7 of 18 05 July 2010 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree. From my experience, the descriptions cause you to have more of an accent. In Japanese books, they basically say everything but f is pronounced the same (talking about consonants) and give the equivalents for the vowels. It's even worse in Korean, where they do the same thing, but they fail to mention tongue position, among other things.
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| astein Pentaglot Groupie Germany Joined 5063 days ago 80 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, French, Mandarin Studies: Russian, Dutch | Message 8 of 18 05 July 2010 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Of course that's true, but, unless you are in the country right from the beginning, it would behoove you to learn some ground rules. In the beginning, you really have to repeat things in your head, and even little mistakes can take root fairly easily.
While I think that language classes are not quite as effective as learning a language on one's own, I believe that the first several weeks are the most important of all. When the teacher helps with the basics of pronunciation, it is possible to get the baseline that you need to be able to effectively and correctly store vocabulary. Whenever I have learned words without having a good grasp on the pronunciation, I have found that I rely less on aural memory and more on visual, and that isn't always so effective. I later have trouble recalling the words, and my accent is certainly worse, because it is a matter of building a base from scratch, rather than simply polishing rough edges. That being said, most pronunciation guides in the beginning of language materials tend to be lacking. They are often written with no assumption of phonetic knowledge, and are therefore quite difficult to decipher. They sometimes trap the learner into false associations with English sounds, when it is really easier to think of the sound as an entirely new letter. To summarize, I would certainly agree that there are better methods to be found than pronunciation lessons, but I do not think that passive listening is one such method. In my opinion, the best and easiest method is, when available, to find a native speaker and just run through the sounds during a couple sessions. Find something to read and have the person correct you for a while. It doesn't need to be perfect, but this will allow you to make use of passive listening. The listening will begin thereafter simply to mold your mental representations of the sounds until you have heard enough that you can distinguish the sounds perfectly (pronunciation itself is another matter, as it is also a matter of the strength of certain muscles and the agility of the tongue). Edited by astein on 05 July 2010 at 3:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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