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The "flow" of fluency - by Idahosa Ness | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5271 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 38 09 December 2011 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was tempted to ignore the latest guest post on fluentin3months.com by Idahosa Ness just because it mentions Rap in the title but upon reading it, I found it quite interesting and even affirming of some conclusions I had already reached.
In the recent thread here on using recordings I spoke of the difficulty of mimicking native speech at the same tempo and the use of recordings to practice this. Quote: The challenge of mimicking foreign speech is a challenge of developing ear sensitivity and speech organ motor memory. His ideas on the relation between sounds and words is also something I noticed long ago when studying Yabla videos. In a video of rapid speech, native speakers would tell me that all the words are there when in fact careful analysis with Audacity proved that they were not all there - their brain seemed to instantly expand a 'sound' into a common sequence of words. Quote: This is how you can learn a thousand words of vocabulary and still understand nothing that a native speaker says. It’s not that you don’t know the words, you just don’t have the ability to recognize them in real time. This article also seems to support Arekkusu's contention that speaking helps listening more than the reverse. Anyone have any other thoughts on Idahosa's article or his web site ?? mimicmethod.com Edited by Fasulye on 10 December 2011 at 7:15pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5181 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 38 09 December 2011 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're right -- we simplify sounds when we speak, and different languages do it differently.
I’ve mentioned before on the forum how speaking AND listening are a little bit like writing on a cellphone – you start typing some letters and the more you write, the less possible words there are, so the phone is capable of suggesting plausible endings. The brain does the same thing all the time. When someone starts a sentence, the number of possible structures and meanings decreases, and if we know enough about the grammar of a language, we can anticipate what comes next or we can understand that a specific spot needs to be filled by a given lexical category, and the number of possibilities decreases further if we understand the acceptable relationships between the sounds (eg. this consonant cluster doesn't exist, so there must have been some vowel in between). This is so efficient that it even allows speakers to simplify certain sounds (skip, assimilate or modify some or all of their features) and still be understood – the listener’s brain fills in the gap and we barely realize it. I’ve contended before that speaking better means understanding better. Well, I’ll push it one notch further – being able to simplify sounds the way natives do will allow you to better understand them when they do the same. [Generally, the better your pronunciation, the better your skills at guessing and understanding pronunciation.] I've only recently made this realisation. The other day, I recorded myself speaking Japanese with a friend. As I listened to the recording, I was first a little disappointed: I found that I was always trying to speak too fast, so a lot of what I said was not very well enunciated. Still, my friend always seemed to understand what I was saying right away. Then, I was reminded of another recording I had made when I was much younger and was still learning English. As I listened to the recording, years later, I had the same impression – that I was just trying to speak fast, skipping or simplifying many sounds. Yet, since I occasionally record myself doing interpretation, I know I can speak clearly when I need to. I only just realized what's happening: I’m probably (subconsciously?) testing the limits of how much can be skipped or simplified while still being understood. I know instinctively that if I can do it well, I can understand speakers when they do it too. This kind of acceptable pronunciation deformation is obviously never taught anywhere, but I feel like it's part of what allows us to better understand native speakers over time. Edited by Arekkusu on 09 December 2011 at 6:57pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4665 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 38 09 December 2011 at 6:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Early on in my Spanish study I tried out LoMas TV. The concept is great, but at that time the videos were mostly beyond my level so I really couldn't get anything out of them. The first level videos were even challenging to me, so I grabbed the soundtrack of one and went to Audacity to see if I could match up the transcript to the audio.
I was in for a surprise. A lot of the syllables that were supposedly there according to the transcript were actually missing. I discovered the same thing when I tried to write down my own transcription of the Spanish soundtrack to the Disney movie "Enchanted". I was eventually able to figure it out, but to do so I had to learn how to interpolate the missing syllables. The very first words of the soundtrack: "Éra se una vez en un mundo magico..." were unintelligible until I did some research and found "Éra se una vez" was a stock phrase for "Once upon a time." Only AFTER I knew that phrase, and guessed that this might be what she was saying, that I was able to actually HEAR that this was, indeed, what she was saying. Picking those four words apart in Audacity, slowing them way down, and stretching out the waveforms, the necessary syllables simply weren't there. My mind had to anticipate what was supposed to be there so it could fill in the missing parts. It was only by learning to SAY the lines that I was finally able to HEAR the lines, so I think there is a great deal of validity to what the author has to say. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5811 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 38 09 December 2011 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree completely with this -- as I always say, we seem to understand things by comparing what we hear to what we say.
A great example of this is when I was working on some listening materials with a Spanish couple, and after playing a clip about "house prices" a dozen times for dictation, they were still hearing "prices of houses" -- same meaning, but in the form they themselves would have used if trying to produce the sentence in the first place. The only I problem I have with what he says is when he claims that "as an English speaker, you already know 22 of the 25 phonemes of Spanish" -- there may be 22 similar phonemes, but they're not identical, and if you want to get a truly accurate model of pronunciation, you really want to go the whole hog and get (for example) a Spanish T instead of an English one. Edited by Cainntear on 09 December 2011 at 7:43pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6239 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 38 09 December 2011 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Understanding native speaker's omissions and distortions is crucial to listening comprehension.
Speaking isn't the only way to develop this skill, though. I tend to develop it through listening. The critical thing is to not only listen to very clear material for learners, or to only study words in isolation, in my opinion. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5181 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 38 09 December 2011 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||
Similar phonemes AND very different phonology. T is not only different, it behaves differently too. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4834 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 7 of 38 10 December 2011 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know if it adds very much to discussion, but I find this speaking learning to happen in my native language, too.
I have noticed with myself and others around me in various places that sometimes we hear a word strangely pronounced, and often we repeat the word to make it make sense to ourselves. It just happens naturally in conversation, and there's no real reason to do that from a conversational standpoint. Yet I've noticed that after doing so, the word, whatever it was, does tend to stick in the brain more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5230 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 8 of 38 11 December 2011 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
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When we look at transcriptions of actual spontaneous casual conversations, we see that they are always very "messy" because of all the things that people have pointed out. Native listeners can fill in the blanks.
This is not all surprising. That is the nature of much spoken speech. The issue is that as language learners we are starting out with the written form and usually standard grammar to approach something that can be quite different. On the other hand, if you listen to professional radio announcers, you will hear a manner of speaking that is closer to the written form. This is why learners always say that announcers on the radio or television are easier to understand than ordinary people. One way to alleviate the problem is to work with authentic materials and accurate transcriptions. They do exist although they are not easy to find because most of the materials used for language training is artificially produced. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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