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Overcoming L/R for Japanese -- possible? | ||
Tags: Pronunciation | Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Andrew~ Groupie United States howlearnspanish.com Joined 5063 days ago 42 posts - 67 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 25 of 26 27 July 2010 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||
She started learning in middle school and had only been in the U.S. for a few months when I met her. I suspect a lot of this is due to the promulgation of American English by Hollywood--I hear that's how Swedes speak such good English, they have to watch a lot of their shows and movies without subtitles there. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5806 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 26 of 26 31 July 2010 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I speak English natively, and can tell the difference between a native and non-native speakers and between regional accents. I speak Spanish well, and I can tell the difference between a native and non-native speaker, and can distinguish some of the regional accents with finer granularity. I'm reasonably good at French, I can tell the difference between a native and a non-native speaker, but I can't tell where a native speaker comes from. I'm passable at Italian, but I quite often mistake non-native speakers for native speakers. So clearly, the less familiar I am with the sounds in question, the bigger the range of sounds I accept as being the same thing. So Asians start off not hearing the differences, but why do they get blocked from improving later in the learning process? Some errors stick. If you start learning English vocabulary when you can't distinguish the two sounds, it follows that your brain will learn them as one item. In this case, I'll use % to represent it. So "rue" is /%u:/ and "lie" is also /%u:/. Now the brain starts to look for how natives pronounce the /%/ phoneme, and it hits a problem: this phoneme has two different sounds - L and R - so it's pulled in two directions, irreconcilably. "But," I hear you cry, "they have the written word to tell them whether it's an L or an R." This doesn't matter at all. Even if at a conscious level you know how a word is spelt, language is pretty much defined by sound, so the internal model of the word is based on how you pronounce it. If you can't pronounce it, you learn it wrong. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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