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Moving from B2 to C2 | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4988 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 161 of 177 09 March 2015 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm glad that pronunciation has been brought up, as I've found it to be the hardest aspect to master. Most other areas can be improved with a combination of more input and specific work as needed, but pronunciation seems a tough one. I agree that, quoting s_allard, "one could possibly be quite proficient in various features of a language and have rather mediocre pronunciation".
There have already been various debates about how important good pronunciation and accent really is, and I really don't want to start these again. The general conclusion tends to be that, while flawless native-like pronunciation isn't realistic or at least isn't worth the effort for the vast majority of learners, decent pronunciation is possible and worthwhile. It seems to be one area where personal ability/talent is the biggest determiner. Some people have never studied French but can put on a convincing French accent. Some can pick up the pronunciation quite easily just from lots of listening. Then at the opposite end, there are people like me who've studied French for over a decade if you count classroom instruction and self study, gotten tons of input and done a reasonable amount of study and work specifically on pronunciation, yet still struggle. I agree that working with someone else is surely the best way to do it, but finding that person isn't easy. Most native speakers, even professional teachers, don't know how to teach pronunciation. I've worked with a few, even one who mentioned "accent reduction" in their profile, and their method begins and ends at making the student read aloud. Feedback, if any, is only on obvious mistakes and not more subtle points. Another issue is that bad habits in pronunciation seem to be particularly tenacious. I mentioned this in my last log post; it seems like I have to do very frequent work on pronunciation just to maintain the correct habits and stop the incorrect ones from creeping back in. Even if I temporarily improve my pronunciation, it quite quickly gets worse again if I don't continue to work on it. Avoiding the bad habits in the first place would be ideal, but hardly realistic between native language interference and imperfect learning/teaching. A lot of my own bad habits in French came from classroom learning and then self-studying without paying enough attention. But even with Italian, for which I made a conscious effort to focus on pronunciation right from the start, I certainly didn't avoid them. Edited by garyb on 09 March 2015 at 11:34am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 162 of 177 09 March 2015 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that garyb's observations are so true: after one has achieved a certain level of fluency and intelligibility, it is
often very difficult to improve pronunciation. The big problem is that self-diagnosis and self-correction is impossible despite all the listening in the world. In theory, one could compare a recording of oneself with that of a model voice and focus on the differences. But how do you go about making the corrections? And since speaking is so automatic, how do you implement these changes in everyday speech. It's not that easy. As garyb said, those bad habits are so tenacious. I don't have much experience in this area myself. So, I'm loathe to give any specific advice. The one thing that comes to mind is, in addition to working with a good resource person, a review of the basics. This would be a systematic study of the sounds of the language with special attention to connected speech and intonation. Maybe other people have better ideas. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 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 163 of 177 09 March 2015 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Gary, you mentioned that you speak French with non-native speakers a lot, and that you took classes too. These are definitely negative factors in terms of the pronunciation. I once overheard a Spanish class at my uni. I had only listened to native Spanish speakers and I could barely understand the Russian accent at first! Similarly, in Italian I've had so much input that I can tell when I sound off, including if I'm not putting my tongue into the right place etc. That was one of the few AJATT things I disagreed with until I really did enough listening combined with an absence of bad models.
Of course Spanish and Italian are not the hardest languages to pronounce for a Russian speaker. (and Finnish helped me where Russian failed) Edited by Serpent on 09 March 2015 at 4:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4988 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 164 of 177 09 March 2015 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree; I acknowledged that a lot of the bad habits came from my classes at school, and yeah, speaking with other non-natives won't help either. Hopefully my recent decision to cut down on meetups and try to speak more with natives will help my pronunciation as well as my usage. However, with Italian, which I speak almost exclusively with native speakers, I've still struggled with pronunciation and developed bad habits. And it's a phonetically simpler language than French. So I'd say bad models are a source of problems, but not the only one. A lot of listening gives me a great idea of when my own speaking sounds off, especially from hearing a recording, but figuring out what exactly about it is off and how to fix that is tougher and has required studying phonetics and prosody. Some people do have much better ears than I do and seem to be able to figure out tongue positions etc. naturally. The real hard part is implementing the changes in everyday speech as s_allard says. One thing I've found useful is to slow down a bit when I'm speaking, so I have a bit more time to focus on doing it correctly. If I try to go too fast, the automatic mechanisms (i.e. bad habits) take over. I always compare it to music: you play a piece slowly until you can do it accurately, then you can speed up. But when I'm trying to keep up with a group of native speakers, slowing down can be hard! Remembering to take it slowly is, yet again, a question of habit. I've recently had an idea of doing regular pronunciation "check-ups", perhaps weekly, instead of doing bursts of work and then neglecting it. I'm hoping that that will help me keep up the good habits and catch any bad ones that are trying to return. This is just an idea, and an idea for my particular situation, so I don't know how well it'll work. Immersion does seems to work well for a lot of people. I've met quite a few who have spent a year or two in France, and while their usage of French isn't always great, most have very good pronunciation if they've avoided the expat bubble. Maybe the several hours per day of native input is enough to put a solid feedback loop in place and "brute-force" good pronunciation and overpower bad habits: you hear good pronunciation and compare it to your own so much that you eventually figure out all the tongue positions and the intonation and all the rest. By that logic, AJATT-style extreme levels of listening could have the same effect. Now I just need to find a spare few hours per day to test this theory out :). After spending two weeks in the countries, I noticed my pronunciation improved significantly, but sadly the effect wore off again quite soon. Perhaps a longer period would make the improvements more permanent. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gomorritis Tetraglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 4059 days ago 91 posts - 157 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, Catalan, French Studies: Greek, German, Dutch | Message 165 of 177 09 March 2015 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | ||
They don't know how to teach pronunciation or they just don't care? Because I have been taught pronunciation by non-teachers by simply saying a sentence in their language and asking them if I sounded native. It didn't seem hard for them to understand and explain which details were giving me away, so maybe after repeating the sentence 50 times they finally agreed that I sounded native (or maybe they were just bored and they just said that to shut me up). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4840 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 166 of 177 09 March 2015 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | ||
I've tried to do this with a student, and he simply could not understand what the problem was or how to make the correct sound. It was a Hindi speaker who wanted to learn American English pronunciation. I was able to identify to him that the "th" sound was giving him away, but he wasn't familiar with the terms from phonetics to accurately describe what he had to do. If I spoke at full speed, he couldn't track what i was doing. If I slowed down to exaggerate it, he would overcompensate, and then still do it wrong. I think there is a subset of talented learners who can take feedback about the problem areas of their pronunciation and actually fix it. Some people can even achieve near-native pronunciation just by listening and imitating. This seems to be relatively uncommon, though. Many people seem to get stuck with an accent that essentially uses their native-language phonemes, and it's really hard to shake them out of this pattern. I think competent teachers are able to help the talented group--who need it less, and benefit only slightly--but most don't know what to do with those who are locked into their accent, and don't try. I'm not aware of any professional method that teachers could even learn, but there may be something in the field of speech therapy. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4071 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 167 of 177 09 March 2015 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I know that there seems to be some belief that teachers are the only ones who can
teach pronunciation, but regarding my Spanish, after I actually started studying it seriously after I stopped classes in secondary school (i.e. after 2007), the reply that I got from Hispanophones was from what part of Spain I was, or based on my accent, how old was I when I moved from Spain to Argentina or vice versa, because I tend to be able to mimic whatever I hear, even without wanting to. My accent is messed up now because I mix Rioplatense and Peninsular, but at least I do it such that I sound like someone from Buenos Aires who moved to Madrid or vice versa, rather than an Anglophone who is trying desperately to sound like a native. I am not sure if this is usual i most people, but that is why when I have big problems when I converse with people with widely differing accents--in English when I had a friend who had a Texan accent, just hearing it I picked up part of his accent. Just living in Newcastle I picked up a partly Geordie accent. Living in San Francisco, I picked up a part Bay Area/skater accent. Mix that up with Lancashire drawl from living in MAnchester, and I sound similar to David Lloyd. No one taught me, it just happened like diffusion, which means that my accent in English is very messed up. So I do not believe that anyone is needed to teach pronunciation. It does not help that the teacher that I had for Spanish for one year was a native Anglophone, so with all due respect, if his pronunciation was Anglicised, why would he be able to teach me pronunciation better, Anglophone to Anglophone? One of my Mandarin teachers was also a native Anglophone. And one of the German teachers was a native Korean speaker... Another one who can do accents is, you must know if you watch Aquí no hay quien viva, the actress Malena Alterio, who is actually was born in Buenos Aires and moved to Madrid as an adult for her career. I am not sure if she had training or not, but I have not seen anywhere listing it. Her accent, nonetheless, sounds to me pure Peninsular, both grammatically and in prosody instead of Rioplatense. She plays Belén Vázquez López. Edited by 1e4e6 on 09 March 2015 at 10:04pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5211 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 168 of 177 09 March 2015 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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If one is fortunate enough to have an innate ability to imitate accents, then acquiring good pronunciation is not a
problem. No teacher is needed. Great. What about the rest of us? What's the advice for the many people who find speaking with a good accent so challenging? 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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