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Polyglot after 20? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6662 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 49 of 57 29 August 2010 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Olle, I'm unclear on what your methods to learn the accents and pronunciation are. Could you please elaborate on them, or show me where on your site it's explained?
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| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5780 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 50 of 57 29 August 2010 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you search here on the forums under "Chorusing", you find various related topics. From Olle's site, I suggest the following: Accent Addition
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| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 4998 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 51 of 57 30 August 2010 at 1:02am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, that's how I do it myself, in the absence of a teacher & chorus or other live interaction. Commuting by car about 45 minutes each way, I spend most of that time listening over and over again on a small number of utterances that I've recorded from any source, even old language courses on cassettes, and burnt on a CD with very short tracks, each the length of one breath group. I set the player on "repeat 1" and have my ears and brain "saturated" with an utterance. Then I'll start saying it in chorus with the CD. Initially with a very large sound that "pushes" my speech apparatus the right way (mirror neurons, I presume). Then with gradually softer and softer CD sound, until I'm saying it by myself. While the quantitative progress is rather slow, the qualitative success is inevitable, unavoidable. What little I can say, I really CAN say. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 4998 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 52 of 57 30 August 2010 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Ideally, and obviously, you would like to have a competent tutor that helps you hear the salient details so that you can get everything right. But IMHO that's not the most important rationale for having a live teacher and chorus. Speech pronunciation does not consist of bull's-eye sized "phonemes" (google it) that the speaker has to hit clean. On the contrary, for each speech sound, syllable, or pitch pattern, there is a practically infinite number of variations, permitted variations between *limits* just like any quality control scheme in a bolt factory, as it were. But unlike in the factory simile, speech sounds are like rather big targets with moving limits, moving according to other varying ambient factors such as who is speaking how, where and when, saying what and why. (I might return to that later.) I see them as soap bubbles with soft and malleable walls that are bumped and squeezed depending on the surrounding bubbles in contact. Often enough they even are interweaved with their neighbours, depending on the circumstances. It does not matter a jot where on those targets you hit. As long as you hit within the boundaries, the bubbles will break, i.e., the native listener will perceive the correct target as an abstract construct (phonemes etc.). It's called *categorical perception*. The variations of each "phoneme" are called allophones. Phonemes never exist physically; nobody can pronounce a phoneme; it will always come out as one or other allophone. Infants are born with continuous perception and thus can detect even the smallest variations, from whence they can develop the categories of any existing language(s) that they happen to be exposed to. That will be their first language(s) - and no theoretical restrictions to the number of such first languages, as long as the exposure time is "enough" for each one. During our first year of life, the categorical perception will mature, after which we are like deaf for phoneme-internal variations. But we become super-experts on even the minutest deviation from the limits, which we will ruthlessly label as a "foreign accent". IMHO, my pronunciation exercises will aim at making me know and accurately master the sizes, shapes, and variations of those *boundaries* in perception and thence in production. That can only happen with a live teacher; only a live teacher has those variations. A recording gives me only one specific, bull's-eye sized pronunciation of each phrase I'm learning; so I will learn a deficient variety of the language, though be it good enough for a starter. Long live the teacher! :-) 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6344 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 53 of 57 30 August 2010 at 4:48am | IP Logged | |||||
This statement right here, imo, is why you're the man. Welcome to the forum! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6233 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 54 of 57 30 August 2010 at 7:18am | IP Logged | |||||
I fully agree that a teacher is ideal for this exercise; humans can give interactive feedback in a way that computers simply cannot (at present). However, not everyone can easily have access to a sufficiently patient and trained teacher for every language s/he's interested in. How much do you think the method would suffer if it were done on computer, by individual students, but with dozens or even hundreds of recordings, to try to convey the phoneme ranges accurately? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5354 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 55 of 57 30 August 2010 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
"Quantum Phonetics". Is it a particle, or is it a wave? Edited by schoenewaelder on 30 August 2010 at 2:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 4998 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 56 of 57 30 August 2010 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I suppose it must be a pitch wave - in particular... :-D 1 person has voted this message useful |
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