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Immersion: Selecting the right voices? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5704 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 4 19 February 2014 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm studying Japanese and want to have lots of audio that I can have running in the background and sometimes use for active study, but I wanted to get your opinions about how selective I should be (or not). Japanese seems to have some clear differences in female vs male speech, and probably differences between different age groups that I'm not even aware of yet. And I should probably learn to speak in a way that's appropriate for my age and gender.
As a beginner, much of what I'm hearing is just one big mass of unfamiliar words at this point. But I don't want to end up learning things from an audio source, but then miss important things, such as that word only being used by guys - I don't want to end up talking like a man or saying nails-on-chalkboard awful-sounding things. Not if I can avoid it. So my question is, should I allow myself to listen to everything without being selective, or should I focus on finding audio material from women in roughly my own age group and focus on them? Does it matter? Of course I want to be able to understand everyone, but I don't want to sound off because I inadvertently learned the wrong thing because I was using the wrong source. I don't even know if this is something I should be caring about at all at this point, so thought I'd ask you what you think. Thanks :-) Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hasi Diglot Senior Member Austria Joined 5911 days ago 120 posts - 133 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 2 of 4 19 February 2014 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think if you listen to a lot of difference types of media (news programms, TV shows, variety shows, anime) you should be ok. I think hearing people speak in different contexts will help you figure out who uses which terms with whom and when. At least that's what it was like for me.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5327 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 4 19 February 2014 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
Listen to everybody, and have faith that your brain will sort things out. :-) Think about how things work in Norwegian: You've heard thousands of people in thousands of social situations, and you can generally figure out who to imitate and when. You can shift seamlessly between different speech styles as appropriate. To pick a silly example in English, take Moon Zappa's brilliant "Valley Girl" act. Sure, it's an exaggeration, but I actually know people who sound like that. And I can, like, totally imitate it, you know? But I'm not going to start speaking like that by accident. My brain associates that style of speech with young women from a certain Californian subculture, decades ago, and it would just be weird for me to speak like that. But I only know that because I've heard vast quantities of English, from all kinds of people, under all kinds of circumstances. Of course, when you're just starting out, you'll mix some stuff up. I recently heard a young kid recite the story of Jack and Beanstalk as "Fee fie foe fum! I smell the blood of an English muffin!" (instead of "Englishman"). This was adorable and hilarious. And then there was that time when I was explaining a rather stupid rural crime wave to one of my in-laws, and as a joke, I said that the perpetrators hadn't yet been chopés par les flics "busted by the cops". I think my poor in-law almost fell over from laughter. As a student of a foreign language, you will occasionally make people giggle uncontrollably. You might as well laugh along with the joke. :-) Your best protection against making people giggle, oddly, is to be familiar with the things you want to avoid. Don't want to sound like, say, a middle-aged man? Make sure you're familiar with the speech of different ages and genders. Don't want to accidentally use really rude words? Make sure you're familiar with them, and when native speakers use them. For me, at least, the solution has almost always been more context, not less. Edited by emk on 19 February 2014 at 9:11pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5704 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 4 22 February 2014 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your replies :-) The reason I'm even asking is because Japanese seems to have a lot more gender differences than languages I've studied before - the JP101 teachers have touched on this several times, saying that you would only say this if you're a girl, or this is something a guy would say, or if you say this you'll sound like so-and-so and if you're not then it would sound weird, etc. I never even thought about things like this when I was studying Italian, and Norwegian has almost no significant differences between how men and women speak. So this is basically my first time worrying about it...
Anyway I'll keep getting input from a variety of sources and just keep it in mind, and maybe try to look it up if I'm unsure. I know AJATT has talked about finding a small number of people to basically copy as a separate exercise, which I'm really considering because it sounds helpful, so if I end up doing that I'll make sure they're women in my age group, just to be on the safe side. Hopefully I won't end up sounding like a grandpa, but if that ever happens at least we'll get a good laugh out of it :-) Liz 1 person has voted this message useful |
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