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Mute vocabulary | ||
Tags: Speaking | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Hungringo Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 3776 days ago 168 posts - 329 votes  Speaks: Hungarian*, English, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 32 07 January 2014 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wonder if any of you have faced the problem of what I call "mute vocabulary".
I learnt English entirely on my own, basically by devouring books. This learning method was very effective in building a huge, but at the same time mute vocabulary. I mean that I have never uttered or heard at least half of the English words I know. When I say mute, I don't necessarily mean passive vocabulary, since I might use many of my mute words in writing. Having a mute vocabulary in languages with a more or less regular phonemic spelling is not an issue, but in the case of English I always worry that I might mispronounce my mute words. I know that listening to the radio, watching television and talking to people can help a lot, but what about those mute words that are unlikely to come up in a chat with your neighbours and are not used in an average movie either? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4491 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 2 of 32 07 January 2014 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Don't worry, I had this problem with English a lot growing up. I remember one time I was like 6 or 7 and decided to
announce that I was feeling "melancholy". However, I pronounced it "muh-LAN-choh-lee". My mom immediately burst out laughing, which I remember being very offended by. :-P Anyway, now I would go to Forvo if I needed to know how to pronounce something. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4495 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 3 of 32 07 January 2014 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
Russian does this to me every day. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4078 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 4 of 32 07 January 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I do this almost constantly for English, because I rarely communicate in English orally
with anyone anymore except the doctor, shopping, etc. So what I see in a book most likely I never speak. It would be for any language for someone who never speaks to anyone though, not just their target language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4321 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 32 07 January 2014 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am a native speaker in English and also remember experiencing this problem a few times even when I was in my twenties and thirties. I also read a lot and sometimes (esp. if the words were common in a US/UK context, but not Australian) then my guessing of the sounding of words would just be wrong. I remember having this problem a couple of times with words I new from the New York Times, that were sufficiently low frequency in British English that I didn't know how to correctly pronounce them.
Place names in English are their own special problem. I grew up in Melbourne, and Americans always pronounce it Mel-Born, when the local pronunciation is Mel-Bin (of course some lost souls might even try to pronounce the silent-E at the end). Of course, the opposite occurs: I was surprised when I lived in England to find out how Warwick was pronounced, for instance. I am learning German by devouring books at the moment. And I very grateful that German pronunciation is so regular compared to English, but I am also finding words whose pronunciation I haven't learnt correctly; often because I have mistakenly used an English not German pronunciation. Edited by patrickwilken on 08 January 2014 at 10:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5554 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 32 07 January 2014 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mall-bun! :D
Listening to varied audio sources helps, and so does reading aloud with a dictionary with IPE transcription at hand. (Or the internet.) What happens to me most often is that I mentally gloss over the pronunciation of words that are shared with another language I know; for example I used to see vehicle and think: Ah! Vehikel! and never realized it until I tried to read it out loud. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4232 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 7 of 32 07 January 2014 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are lots of words & phrases we may use for writing that we don't use in day to day speech. The other day I
sent a reply to somebody online about the Chinese word for a coconut tree which sounded like the word for Jesus. Besides cooking, I don't use coconut in everyday speaking. My English is more fluent but I do frequently write to people in Chinese online and having to look up all sorts of terms to make sure the translations are accurate. When you are writing to people in other countries you don't know what words or phrases they are likely going to use. The ones they use frequently may not be the ones you use regularly... Edited by shk00design on 07 January 2014 at 10:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Gunshy Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 3905 days ago 28 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French | Message 8 of 32 08 January 2014 at 2:16am | IP Logged | ||
Some people can just be so nitpicky though. I always get a reaction with the way I pronounce Birmingham (because I drop the g)! @Hungringo: How confident are you with the placement of stress? Due to dialectal differences in English, I'd say acquiring a standard phonemic inventory wouldn't be as important as speaking with consistent stress placement. As an example: 'important < im'portant. The first would sound very unusual to me, and I might not even understand in conversation (I'd think you're talking about impotence!). However, I'd never expect you to pronounce the word with the same phonemes as me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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