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Acquiring near-native pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5257 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 49 of 83 19 December 2010 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Looks like everyone missed the part where I say that at the end it wasn't the sound that was the problem, but the pitch. 'wo' sound was OK, but I pronounce 'won't' with a non-native pitch. And pitch is something I can't fix (or maybe I can, but with some ridiculous amount of time and effort), same way I can't sing well. Oddly enough, I think that pitch accent has actually helped me a lot in Mandarin. Once I realized that what we do in many Serbian words is kind of half-way or closer to using tones, everything was easier, both to distinguish and pronounce. Add to it that, unlike English, I'm learning Mandarin from native speakers, it is not a surprise that correct (I'm not saying 'native' :) ) Mandarin pronunciation seems easier to me than the English one. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5820 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 50 of 83 20 December 2010 at 12:51am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Actually, thinking about it, with Spanish I'd had to train myself to syllable-timing, and while I used a trick I'd learned through music, it's something anyone could do if shown how. (Again, stress- and syllable-timing is something that I was learning about in my university English language course at the same time as starting out in Spanish, which was a lucky coincidence for me.)
What I did was quite simple. I tapped a steady beat on my leg, and as I was learning a syllable-timed language, I made it quite quick. I would only start a new syllable on each beat. (I assume I was reading off my computer screen, but I can't remember.) If you're only used to speaking a syllable-timed language and you're learning a stress-timed one, the process isn't much different. You just start with a slower beat. Only stressed syllables are allowed to be pronounced on a beat -- unstressed syllables have to be squeezed in between. Two problems, though 1: It's not often noted whether a language is stress-timed or syllable-timed in language descriptions, so it's difficult to know. (At random, I selected Aymara as a test case, and five minutes in Google hasn't turned up anything useful.) 2: It's quite difficult to find a full description of where stress falls when learning. Even in a language where stress is quite straightforward, such as Spanish, it is rarely pointed out that clitics* don't take stress. This is a big component in the stilted rhythm of typical learner speech. This certainly makes it a lot harder to learn good pronunciation as a beginner... * Clitics are function words that cannot occur alone. They function a lot like affixes (prefixes, infixes and suffixes) apart from the fact that they can move about a bit. For example "the" is a clitic. It acts like a prefix to a noun (eg "the car") but as adjectives can come in between ("the green car") it isn't part of the word, so it can't be a prefix. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5239 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 51 of 83 20 December 2010 at 11:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I wonder if anyone has experimented with the phonetic waveform feature that one finds in most commercial language software products. You're supposed to try to match the waveform of the example recorded by the teacher. I've always dismissed this thing as a marketing gimmick of little value, but I'm starting to change my mind. It seems to me that for learning prosody it could be very useful as a visual chorusing tool.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6512 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 52 of 83 20 December 2010 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Jan Mølby's Danish doesn't seem to have changed since his early days in Kolding, Jutland (there is actually still a hint of the local Jutish subdialect in his speech)
No, because I haven't bought those products. But I have sometimes notated intonation patterns with a red line above a text when I could get an audio version - or for short passages also when I only had the audio. For instance this was necessary with Swedish and Norwegian, where there for a Dane is a great risk of keeping the flat Danish intonation OR making up some ridiculous fake Nordic intonation.
Smart, but is it really necessary? I just imagined a machine gun when I did my stint with with Italian... Edited by Iversen on 20 December 2010 at 3:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5820 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 53 of 83 20 December 2010 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I used the previous generation of software, and it was next to useless. (And all the courses that I was aware of at the time used the same licensed voice-recognition engine.) It was kind of indiscriminate in home it measured similarity, so you could improve your score without pronouncing any better. They were also designed to be used on computers with cheap, noisy sound chips and cheap, noisy microphones. No computer voice recognition is effective with that sort of equipment, so the language software left a very wide margin for error -- you could get full marks without being very accurate. Things have improved, and modern software has separated out the basic waveform envelope and the pitch of speech, but I haven't tried any of the newer products, so I don't know how effective it is. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5190 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 54 of 83 20 December 2010 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I've been speaking English for over 20 years. I'm sure my accent is better than it was 10 years ago. I'm sure my accent was far from perfect in the first years I was studying English.
It's also a fact that my current accent in Japanese is better than it was a year ago. It is, I hope, not as good as it will be next year or the following year. In other words, accents progress through time as we acquire knowledge and experience. Aineko, I don't know how long you've been speaking English, but wouldn't you say your accent is better than, say, 10 years ago? Isn't it better than it was 2 or 3 years after you began studying English? I'd bet your accent improved over time, whether or not you realize it. You say you spent 9 intense hours trying to distinguish want from won't. This is hardly enough to create any sort of change in the brain. After all, you just noticed that the two words ought to be distinguished. If you continued to think about this distinction, if you continued to try and produce the right pitch and sound over a longer period of time -- now that you are aware of the distinction --, do you not think that your production would improve progressively? I would have a hard time believing that it wouldn't. So if you had been made aware of all such dinstinctions in the language early on in your studies, if you had been conscious of them and had been trying to produce them correctly all along, would your pronunciation not be better today? Edited by Arekkusu on 20 December 2010 at 9:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5820 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 55 of 83 20 December 2010 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Necessary, no, but it's a tried-and-tested technique (in music at least). The only problem with the machine gun is that it's going to be fast. I did think about machine guns too, but I couldn't speak Spanish at machine gun speed at that point.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5257 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 56 of 83 20 December 2010 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
of course it is. English is my 'main' language for the last four years and my accent has improved since I came to NZ. Some things I corrected with the small amount of concious effort, some things have changed without me noticing how.
I said I heard the difference as soon as my attention was brought to it and was able to pronounce them differently after few hours.
I have a hard time explaining to people with even a slightest musical talent how the world looks like when you have none of it :). No, I don't think my pitch would improve without an amount of effort that I can't see justified.
as above. Yes, my production of the sounds would've been better. As for pitch and intonation (necessary for native-like accent) - no, I can't be so sure. I'm not saying it is impossible, but seems that it requires amount of time, effort and even money that would be completely disproportional to those required for learning other aspects of a language (in my case). In other words, it would turn into a project of it's own, totally disconnected from language learning itself and would probably kill my interest for that particular language. (not to mention the question 'why would I do it?'. I have no emotions related to being unnoticed among natives) Edited by Aineko on 20 December 2010 at 11:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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