|
 |
Phonemic awareness: transcriptions | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6231 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 17 of 37 10 October 2012 at 3:57am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I've seen a native speaker of a couple of European languages do this on his first exposure to Tagalog and Thai. It's not a common skill, but it exists.
We agree about the necessity of phonemic awareness and competence. As for suprasegmental features, it's rather uncommon to hear a non-native speaker get them all right. I've met a lot of people with excellent English, but who always sound brusque due to their intonation, regardless of their actual mood and intent. I've met plenty of Chinese and Indian people who I can barely understand in English due to intonation, despite them writing English well, and in the case of Indians, even having English as their native language in some cases. More than vowels, this is what I find difficult when trying to understand Scottish speakers of English as well. On the other extreme, I know people who whistle or hum English phrases at each other, and for simple things it works surprisingly well. To make an analogy, if you want to write well, you need to learn how to put a sentence together and punctuate it, not just to spell words. If you have to pick one, pick the higher-level one. Olle Kjellin recommends starting with prosody, and I'm gradually coming to think he has a point.
There are lots of high quality audio files of the type you mention: professionally recorded audiobooks. It's not difficult to get hundreds of hours recorded by some of the more prolific professional readers, and some enthusiastic and talented amateurs. For the most part, for me, attentive listening alone has been a dismal failure, on par with the TV method: that is, it's better than nothing, but it's extremely inefficient and the results after a few hundred hours are quite poor.
The problem is, the small details don't all come later. Listen to the 's' sound of many Dutch speakers of English, for example. It's very often quite easy to identify the native language of a speaker from his/her accent, even if they catch a bit of the low-hanging fruit like distinguishing all the vowels and mastering the English 'th' sounds.
For specific languages: 1) Get a good manual for the phonology of the language, which includes recordings. “Phonetische Transkiription des Deutschen” is good. The Oxford University Press series “The Phonology of ...” is a good supplement, for instance, “The Phonology of Hungarian”, but I don't believe they include audio. Make sure that you know the details of the tongue and lip positions of the sounds: for some languages, there are ok online resources for this, and some books include them. Get a hand mirror, and use it. If all else fails, a manual for learning phonetics for students of phonetics who natively speak your target language can be useful, but only for diagrams at the beginning unless it's a language closely related to one you can read. Barron's “Pronounce it perfectly in ...” series can also be helpful. Quick start version: look on wikipedia. It has some basic phonological overviews of quite a few languages. See, for instance, English phonology and Mandarin phonology. 2) Find recordings of minimal pairs. Forvo is useful for this with a bit of patience. Generally: Get a solid grounding in phonetics (I like J. C. Catford's “A Practical Introduction to Phonetics”). Consider getting Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The latter has narrow and broad transcriptions for audio recordings of several languages, namely American English, Amharic, Arabic, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Igbo, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Sindhi, Slovene, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish. It's not much per language, but it's something. Be careful with IPA. Broad transcriptions lose a lot of detail, and the same symbols are used for sounds which differ subtly (and, especially with vowels, not so subtly) from what you might expect without also hearing the language. A good transcription does preserve phonemic contrasts, but it only goes so far. That said, it's still the most useful transcription tool I'm aware of. I think you're right to start with pronunciation to at least the degree you've indicated. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6231 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 18 of 37 10 October 2012 at 4:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
In rapid speech, I say [tɘ ðɘ], with the same reduced vowel in both words - but I'm not a speaker of RP, or any form of UK English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6389 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 19 of 37 10 October 2012 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Monty, there's a contrast between to/two and too :)
Don't worry about "meaningless" words. We often don't pronounce what we think we pronounce (e.g. the common example with the words doctor and driver). Of course it's good to be aware of what you really say, but if you're learning IPA in order to learn languages, it's enough to know how it correlates to the foreign sounds and what reduction happens. In Russia you basically have to learn IPA if you learn English, but we don't learn it by transcribing Russian (in fact using IPA for it would be really strange for me and I'd struggle a lot), we apply it to English straight away. We learn of the distinctions that don't exist in Russian, we (try to) learn the sounds that don't have any good equivalents - and every time we see how it's written down in IPA. If you (also :DDD) want to learn it via English, I recommend just practising with single words of 3-4 syllables :) One thing that confuses me like mad about phonemic awareness is that I sort of need to know what things are *supposed* to be pronounced like. Not in terms of standard vs colloquial or anything, but just simply: am I hearing it correctly? Many say that it's wrong to look at the written text because this way you'll be biased, but how can you be sure your hearing isn't biased due to your native language or other languages you have some knowledge of? This seems to be a good point to mention the two kinds of listening. When you're learning to understand, you're going from allophones to phonemes, grouping together various ways to pronounce the same thing, so that in the future you can see past the differences and recognize a familiar word and understand it. For example, if you attempt to write down a dialectal text, it will look far more standard than if a dialect scientist writes down the same text (not in IPA). On the other hand, when you're learning to speak you should go from phonemes to allophones, listening carefully to the sounds native speakers actually produce. (That's such a huge problem in Danish :( I think of English and German words when trying to understand Danish ones, but I can't really "unsee" the similarities when I try to focus on how the words are pronounced *in Danish*.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6495 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 20 of 37 10 October 2012 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Actually my problem is another one, namely getting a chance to listen in a setting where I don't have irritating sounds in the background which I have to drown out with white/brown noise, waterfall or rain videos or some other compatible noise chosen by myself (including music). The best place would be my office after everybody else have left, but at that point I also have to leave because I'm hungry and want to get home. So that has nothing to do with the intrinsic quality of attentive listening/notating as a learning technique, it's a purely practical problem which I only could solve by moving away from any human settlement. Having several competing pronunciations doesn't bother me - on the contrary. I have used the Acapela box to get several spoken interpretations of the same short piece of text which to boot was chosen by myself and could be modified on the fly by myself. I do write my interpretations down by hand and it takes unreasonably long time to mimic them on a keyboard, but you can see a Dutch example in my log thread. It is just like doing several related drills to learn a certain construction. Obviously I end up with some homebrewed interpolation between different dialects, but learning such a generalized koiné is in my opinion not the worst kind of result that could befell a language learner, and the variations are very instructive. The other question where I have less scruples than Lucasz is the one about the influence from the orthography and your expectations based on spellings. One of my current study objects is Irish, where you sometimes can't even see the connection between a written phrase and the sounds you hear from for instance abair.ie. I'm however fairly sure about my ability to listen and hear the real sounds without interference from the spelling - and of course it helps to know something about phonetics and knowing a few languages beforehand, but the main factor is your attitude. If your textbook says something is pronounced as /wwawawa/ and you hear /uououo/ then you should write /uououo/ on your paper. And afterwards you can always try to find an explanation, but even if there isn't one then you know with yourself that you heard /uououo/ and that's the way it is.
I think phonetic awareness is as important as phonemic awareness, and that's what I try to train through attentive listening. Without phonetic awareness you'll sound like a foreigner reading letters (or phonemes) one by one from a piece of paper. But obviously you also need to be able to recognize the phonemes even though each of them is represented by several different sounds. And then you have to be able to put those phonemes together to words and higher-order items. For that I use another technique, which I have dubbed "listening like a bloodhound". Again the trick is to ignore the level above: during this exercise you try to follow the string of sounds while you try to organize them into words and phrases. If you don't understand a word it doesn't matter, but you should learn to hear that there is a word and also what it consists of (in phonemes). And you should learn to identify phrases and sentences, even though you can't understand them because you haven't learnt the words and expressions they consist of yet. For me phonemic awareness is part of that project, not the one that teaches you how to pronounce things correctly. Edited by Iversen on 10 October 2012 at 1:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 21 of 37 10 October 2012 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|
1. I accidentally edited one of my own posts in this thread instead of quoting it. Doh! Anyway, so that something will show up on "active posts" etc, I'll put a link to that edited post here
2. To Volte: I see what you mean, but when I say "to the" (in the middle of other words of course), it may sound a little like "[tə ðə]" but if I listen carefully, the vowel sounds are different. Basically I think, the more stress you put on "to" the more it sounds like [tu]. I got my wife to listen to me and I listened to her and we both agreed the vowel sound was differentiated in "normal" speech, i.e. we weren't emphasising or stressing "to" at all. 3. To Serpent: (note that I'm not using Twitter format :-) ) Well, I just thought I'd dip my toe in the IPA water again, and thought it reasonable enough to have a look at what RP English was supposed to look like transcribed to IPA, and I've been rather surprised. If I cannot relate my native language back to (a subset of ) IPA, I don't see how I can possibly make much use of trying to apply IPA to a tricky language like Danish, for example. I think I will stick to recordings and transcripts/books. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6389 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 22 of 37 10 October 2012 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Does the transcription of individual meaningful words make sense to you though?
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6231 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 23 of 37 11 October 2012 at 3:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
If I'm enunciating clearly, the vowel sounds are different. In sufficiently rapid speech, I reduce them to the same vowel.
It has a learning curve. It gets easier. I had similar thoughts about IPA the first times I saw it applied to English, but I've come to appreciate it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5173 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 24 of 37 11 October 2012 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|
IPA is to pronunciation what a dictionary entry is to conversation. You look up the IPA
as a reference, just like you look up a word in a dictionary, that does not in itself give you perfect pronunciation or fluent speech. IPA a necessary point of reference, though, as it tells you exactly which sounds make up a word, but you have to translate that into muscle movements, into the feeling of how your tongue moves around and how you stress a given part of the word. It's this "routine" or succession of movements and processes that you need to acquire -- the IPA is just a reference point. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
