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leosmith
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| Message 25 of 31 12 January 2011 at 3:02am | IP Logged |
slucido wrote:
| Don't you think that learning pronuciation first is good before studying any language. |
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Absolutely. And when I use Pimsleur, that means I should be at least far enough along to correctly pronounce the
words on the transcript before starting.
slucido wrote:
| By the way, how do you recommend to study Mandarin pronunciation? |
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I'll assume you mean as a precursor to Pimsleur. I recommend you get a good handle on pinyin. I found a Mandarin
initials/finals table with sound online, spent 30-60 min per day mimicking and chorusing the sounds, and then
reading the items before playing the sounds to see if I got them right. I used tone drill sites too, but not as much.
Then I did the pronunciation unit on FSI, which has a very nice description of the tones. I also read the blog at
Sinosplice, which I found helpful. I spent 2-3 weeks doing this before Pimsleur, and about a week after Pimsleur 1 to
fine tune.
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| slucido
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| Message 26 of 31 12 January 2011 at 10:03am | IP Logged |
leosmith wrote:
slucido wrote:
| By the way, how do you recommend to study Mandarin pronunciation? |
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I'll assume you mean as a precursor to Pimsleur. |
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I mean as a precurso to study Mandarin. Maybe is a good idea to start with pronunciation, prosody and so on.
leosmith wrote:
I recommend you get a good handle on pinyin. I found a Mandarin
initials/finals table with sound online, spent 30-60 min per day mimicking and chorusing the sounds, and then
reading the items before playing the sounds to see if I got them right. I used tone drill sites too, but not as much.
Then I did the pronunciation unit on FSI, which has a very nice description of the tones. I also read the blog at
Sinosplice, which I found helpful. I spent 2-3 weeks doing this before Pimsleur, and about a week after Pimsleur 1 to
fine tune. |
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Thank you. Sinosplice's website seems very good.
What do you think about the DIY chorusing method?
I mean to use 30 or 40 audio sentences in Mandarin and chorus with them around 2,000 or 3,000 times total for 3 or 4 weeks. Or maybe listening a lot of times this 30 or 40 sentences for one week and chorus with them the next tree weeks (2,000-3,000 each).
I mean doing this before starting any other method.
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| leosmith
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6351 days ago
2365 posts - 3804 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Tagalog
| Message 27 of 31 14 January 2011 at 1:49am | IP Logged |
slucido wrote:
What do you think about the DIY chorusing method?
I mean to use 30 or 40 audio sentences in Mandarin and chorus with them around 2,000 or 3,000 times total for 3 or
4 weeks. Or maybe listening a lot of times this 30 or 40 sentences for one week and chorus with them the next tree
weeks (2,000-3,000 each).
I mean doing this before starting any other method. |
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DIY chorusing method - Is that what Olle suggests? That would probably cover the tones and prosody pretty well.
But I'm not sure you'd get all the subtleties of every single initial and final. There's a lot more going on with Mandarin
pronunciation than the average language, for a western learner, imo, so it may take more than 40 sentences.
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jeff_lindqvist
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| Message 28 of 31 14 January 2011 at 10:45am | IP Logged |
leosmith wrote:
| DIY chorusing method - Is that what Olle suggests? That would probably cover the tones and prosody pretty well. |
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From what I've seen, Olle's method doesn't mention how you should do on your own, nor does it suggest thousands of repetitions per phrase. Not that you can't try it on your own, or that more repetitions would do any harm.
leosmith wrote:
| But I'm not sure you'd get all the subtleties of every single initial and final. There's a lot more going on with Mandarin pronunciation than the average language, for a western learner, imo, so it may take more than 40 sentences. |
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The method is more about prosody than initals and finals. OK, Mandarin is Mandarin, but it isn't uncommon to hear persons pronouncing isolated words quite well(even "perfect"), but as soon as it comes to sentences, the prosody is messed up.
I think Maxb (forum member) worked with a couple of dozen phrases. If Olle and Max see this thread, they can speak for themselves.
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| slucido
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| Message 29 of 31 14 January 2011 at 5:11pm | IP Logged |
leosmith and jeff_lindqvist, I asked prof Olle Kjellin in this forum. I asked him how to adapt his method to self learning.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4261&PN=1&TPN=7#258662
okjhum wrote:
slucido wrote:
Is it possible to practice your chorusing method with recordings?
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Yes, that's how I do it myself, in the absence of a teacher & chorus or other live interaction. Commuting by car about 45 minutes each way, I spend most of that time listening over and over again on a small number of utterances that I've recorded from any source, even old language courses on cassettes, and burnt on a CD with very short tracks, each the length of one breath group. I set the player on "repeat 1" and have my ears and brain "saturated" with an utterance. Then I'll start saying it in chorus with the CD. Initially with a very large sound that "pushes" my speech apparatus the right way (mirror neurons, I presume). Then with gradually softer and softer CD sound, until I'm saying it by myself. While the quantitative progress is rather slow, the qualitative success is inevitable, unavoidable. What little I can say, I really CAN say.
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Here you have maxb comments about his DIY chorusing method:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6281
maxb wrote:
I have looked through my old posts on the chorus method and see that I have left out some important information on why it is a good idea to use it. The idea of the chorus method is in principle to teach adult learners the prosody of a foreign language. Furthermore it is important that the prosody is learnt first. Even before the individual sounds are mastered.
Why? Because, according to research, this is the way small children learn their mother tongue and since the outcome of small childrens language learning is always successful (perfect pronounciation, grammar etc.) it would make sense to copy it. From what I have read, mastery of prosody is absolutely crucial for a childs language development. If the prosody isn't mastered the language will not develop normally. There is even evidence suggesting that the grammar of a language is connected to its prosody and that a mastery of prosody would make learning the grammar easier.
So how does Olle Kjellin suggest you go about learning the prosody?
He believes that the first month of language study should be devoted to pronounciation alone. He suggests selecting an A4-page of practice phrases and learning those perfectly. He believes that if these phrases are mastered to perfection you will have mastered most of what there is to learn when it comes to pronunciation in the language. Furthermore he believes that when you work on a phrase you should learn the prosody of it first. Primarily the rhythm. Skip any sounds that you can't pronounce for now. You can even resort to just humming along with the rhythm and melody of the sentence. Since the rhythm is very important he also suggest that you use material spoken at a natural speed since unnaturally slowed down "language learner speech" disorts the rhythm of the language.
Once you have mastered the prosody of the phrase, you can start working on the individual sounds. When doing that you only need to focus on the syllables that are stressed in the sentence, since he claims that those are the only sounds that are noticed by the native speaker. For instance in Swedish you only need to focus on getting the long vowels right.
Once the sounds and rhythm have been mastered and you are saying the sentence bascially identically to the model you should go repeating for a large number of times to fix the sentence in your auditory memory.
He claims that if you practice like this for about a month you will have an almost native like command of the pronunciation of the language. Which means that you will have acquired a very important skill which the native speakers posses namely the ability to repeat perfectly a word you have only heard once. For instance if you are listening to someone speaking in your native language and you suddenly hear an unknown word, you would be able to repeat that word perfectly, if required to do so. You don't even have to repeat it. I find in Swedish that if I listen to someone speaking and hear a knew word I instantly remember how it is pronounced, I don't even have to say it out loud at the time I hear it to remember it. The chorus method lets you acquire this skill for foreign languages as well.
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Other thread:Mandarin help
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=5096&PN=61
maxb wrote:
OneEye wrote:
To edit the audio for chorusing, I just isolate each sentence on a track, hit the repeat button, and mimic the speaker correct? Is it recommended to do this with every sentence you learn, or just certain key ones (maybe ones that give me difficulty) until I'm comfortable with the sounds of the language?
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For chorusing I'd say select a small number of sentences (maybe 20-30) and work very intensively on those for maybe a month until you feel that you can say them absolutely perfectly. Then when you learn new sentences keep using the chorusing method, but you will find that having spent so much time on the first batch of sentences the rest of them will come very easily. You will need much fewer repetitions on the new sentences.
Also I recommend that you use FSI or any other source spoken at a natural speed for you source of sentences.
Pimsleur is spoken much too slowly and unnaturally and doesn't let you learn the rhythm of mandarin properly. |
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Other thread: Perfect pronuntiation.
http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.a sp?TID=8232&PN=0&TPN=12
maxb wrote:
A method I believe in, and which I have used to success is to learn a fairly long audio piece in the language by heart. What I did for mandarin was to take a 6 minute podcast spoken at rather quick pace and split it up into several small chunks. Each chunk maybe 2-5 seconds. Then I practiced 1-2 chunks per day,using the chorus method, for a period of 2 months, until I had the whole podcast memorized. What I have done since is to use a modified version of the "10000 sentences method" where I use audio flashcards. I use a recording of a sentence as the "question" in supermemo and in order to consider myself passed on a flashcard, I not only have to understand the sentence, I also have to be able to chorus the sentence along with the speaker.
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Here the original Olle Kjellin chorusing method:
http://olle-kjellin.com/SpeechDoctor/ProcLP98.html
Edited by slucido on 14 January 2011 at 5:37pm
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| slucido
Bilingual Diglot
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| Message 31 of 31 14 January 2011 at 8:19pm | IP Logged |
legoland wrote:
Slucido, methods don't matter. All you need is emotions, input, output, and time. Oh, I forgot intensity. Don't forget intensity.
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Learning languages= REPETITION.
Keep it simple and sweet...
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