Tackling persistent mistakes / fossilisation

[aabram]

I am pronouncing the "u" in French wrong very often and it gives away my region of origin. Funnily enough, not even a tutor (native speaker) ever commented on that (I told you tutors were not a panacea...).

I don't know how severe you think your mispronunciation is but perhaps it didn't matter in their opinion?

Over the years I've grown to love little quirks in speech. As long as it is comprehensible and doesn't alter the meaning it adds a little flair and personality. In Estonian we have regional differences too, most notable people from one of the islands (Saaremaa) sometimes can't really hear the difference between ö and õ and therefore mix them up all the time, either disregarding õ altogether and just using ö or just randomly picking which one to use when talking to mainlanders. Of course, it is cute when there are one or two little quirks, butchering all the pronunciation is another story.

[Cavesa]

Obviously neither the tutor nor the DALF C2 examinators minded. But I do mind because this is too much of a basic mistake, in my opinion. There are harder things, such as stressing the right syllables, getting the rhytm right and so on. I don't mind having a slight foreign accent, really, just the fact my region of origin can be recognized bothers me. But I am as well lucky it doesn't happen that often, most people do not know we exist or that we could learn foreign languages (not sure how sarcastic I am being), so the wildest guesses of my origin have so far been two: an Arab, when speaking French. And Italian, when speaking broken Spanish, that one really amused me Thanks for encouragement. I will try to get rid of this by reading aloud and by repeating after natives I admire in tv series. Some are awesome speech models.

But, as was said, I now realized the gender mistakes are highly probable fossilization centers as well. I need to be careful with German nouns.

A question to people with more foreign languages learnt. Do you think you're more likely or less likely to fossilize mistakes in later languages? Are you being more careful or is it something not 100% preventable?

[Expugnator]

I don't believe that you can't get rid of fossilizations, I believe NOW is always the right time to improve, but this is more related to personal beliefs regardles of language learning. Apart from that, what I can say is that I seem to have a good memory for remembering things that 'need to be fixed'; once a mistake of mine is pointed out this really comes up to my conscious mind and so I keep an eye on it, I'm sort of mistake-aware. Maybe this has to do with being trained for prescriptivism when studying my own native language. It's not like people need to tell me a lot of times not to do this or that; if after a while the mistake reappeared it is maybe that I temporarily forgot and need some reinforcement, not that I don't care. Throughout my language-learning story I've seldom, really seldom had the opportunity of being corrected for my mistakes, and when this happened I tried to tackle with as many as possible at that time. I've come to realize that it's harder to deal with a correction at lang-8, for instance, when your knowledge of the language is still low; that can be overwhelming. When your level is better, though, you can associate the corrections the natives made with your input repertoire, and say to yourself "oh, right, that's how they say it indeed, I remember seeing it like this before". It's like text opacity and vocabulary learning indeed; the more you know, the more you can fine-tune for the details.

[neofight78]

I am pronouncing the "u" in French wrong very often and it gives away my region of origin. ... Any other ideas what to do about it?

People often tell me I have excellent Russian pronunciation. The only problem I ever had was with always saying И instead of Ы as we don't have this latter sound in English. What gave me the good pronunciation in the first place, and what allowed me to correct this one mistake, once it was pointed out to me, was flashcards with audio. They are vocabulary cards that I create myself in Anki with audio downloaded from forvo. When reviewing I give the answer out loud before reading and hearing the answer. For me to count my answer as correct I have to both remember the world and pronounce it correctly, including getting the stress right. When the problem with Ы was pointed out to me, I just paid special attention to my pronunciation of that letter. Through deliberate practice with the above method I soon ironed out the problem. You could maybe try this approach, and you would have the added benefit of learning vocabulary at the same time.

[emk]

In addition to drilling output I'd also make the argument that extensive reading (and sometimes listening) can help a lot as well for grammar points that are difficult to master.
...
Another major class of persistent errors learners are bound to make: gender. And this is the kind of mistake that really jumps out to native speakers (mistakes like effect/affect in English are common among natives as well so they won't out you as a second language learner).

I'm a big fan of learning from input. But there's a little thing I do when I'm reading and listening, and I've never really figured out how to explain it. Basically, when I know I'm weak in a specific area, I try to cultivate a heightened "awareness" of that area:

• If I'm struggling with the difference between two sounds, I try to really hear the difference between those two sounds in input. I know I'm doing this right when: Somebody at a meetup pronounces vu as */vu/ instead of /vy/, and I'm like, "Wait, what? That doesn't make sense."
• If I'm making lots of gender errors, I play a little game where I try to figure out the gender of the nouns that I hear using articles and adjectives. I know I'm doing this right when: A native speaker says un arbre, and I'm like, "Wait, I always thought that was *une arbre. Huh."
• If I'm struggling with the subjunctive, I train myself to recognize it in common context. I know I'm doing this right when: I hear a native speaker say, Il faut que j'y aille, and I'm like, "Ah, so that's the subjunctive of aller."

...and so on. This is vaguely related to the Noticing hypothesis, which nobody has ever really figured out how to lay out rigorously enough to study. But essentially, if pure input doesn't work, I try to focus in on one problem area, and listen and read in a much more "active" fashion for a bit. You could probably achieve the same heightened awareness by doing grammar worksheets, or writing things out by hand.

My half-baked theory is that adult brains can learn from input, but that sometimes they're so set in their ways that they sometimes don't even notice the details of the input. By paying attention to tricky details, I hope to encourage my brain's natural learning processes to wake up and start do its job. Because grammar is just too big to do this without some help from my brain!

[Expugnator]

I was trying to say the same as you did, emk. Thanks for clarifying and even defining it

[pir]

The worst problem, however, are fossilized pronunciation mistakes. I was told about one by Tarvos a few days ago (we met in Prague and he is an awesome guy, by the way). I am pronouncing the "u" in French wrong very often and it gives away my region of origin. Funnily enough, not even a tutor (native speaker) ever commented on that (I told you tutors were not a panacea...). I suppose the only way is to repeat after audio a lot, drill that thing into the ears, brain and tongue. Any other ideas what to do about it?

Yes, this is my problem as well (fossilized pronunciation problems), though I am actually trying to ameliorate my accent.

I think in your place I would go for a tutor again, but explicitly look for somebody who knows what your issue is and how to fix it. I think that just shadowing audio is no longer good enough at that advanced stage; the habits are engrained and I find it hard to self-correct without some initial help. It might also be good to find out what your mouth and tongue positions should be versus what they are, and then consciously do speech exercises retraining them.

[Cavesa]

I don't think a tutor would help me. I know what the mistake is (this identification is mostly what you hire a tutor for) and I will try to get rid of it on my own. If I fail, it is still not such a tragedy but I'd like not to fail. I do not mean shadowing, I actually don't believe in shadowing. Or rather, it hasn't worked for me, it was too much stress and too much of a memorise-the-dialogue feeling. I think I can hear easily the difference between me and a model speaker. And I don't have that much money to waste on tutors. You never know whether they are good enough in advance and vast majority of them is not strict enough.

I don't think position of mouth or tongue is a problem, I am not incapable of producing the sound. I just grew lazy, obviously. It wasn't necessary to try harder, so I automatically didn't. That's a root of many bad habits. Just like my mistakes in English. It hasn't been necessary to review grammar and to strive for perfection since my CAE. So I have grown lazy. And sometimes, I am really unpleasantly surprised, when reading my own posts.

[pir]

Ah, we use pronunciation tutors differently -- I hire one not just to identify my problems but also to listen and correct, tell me what to change to say it correctly, listen and correct some more until I've drilled it into my mouth. You're absolutely right, it's neither cheap nor easy to find a good one, though it's vastly easier now than it was 10 years ago. I tried by myself before and just didn't get anywhere, but I am learning from watching what my coach does.

It's rarely about not being able to produce the sound, it's more about having formed the wrong motor pathways in my mouth, if that makes sense. And then at some point I stopped hearing it. That's why I need somebody else to harp on it for me because as soon as I stop monitoring myself carefully, it goes back to the wrong habit.

If it's really just laziness for you, then hopefully it will be easier to change. Good luck!

[Cavesa]

I don't need to watch a live tutor, I have plenty of awesome tutors available in tv series. I've found those to be absolutely awesome. It has already worked a few times. I can hear them, I can see them, I can rewind the video and rewatch them, I can make pauses and repeate as much as I want.

And I don't think a tutor would tell me that much about "how to make the sound" anyways at this point. There is a point after which you need to get it right with the anatomy you've grown into. I used to play the flute for years and there is a point after which a teacher cannot tell you how to properly use your mouth, all the good advice has a limit, you need to try and try and listen, watch yourself in a mirror and experiment with your mouth, lips, tongue, and position of the instrument because your muscles are slightly different from those of your teacher. I'd say this is similar. I had been taught as much as I could have been taught, now I need to practice and practice so that I don't forget to use that "skill" when concentrating on other things.

Trully, I don't even think repeated corrections work that much in general. I was repeating the same mistakes for ages at some points of learning, I was being corrected over and over. What worked was sitting on the issue and putting some order into it at my pace, systematically, in calm. And there were even fossilized mistakes of various kind that were created by teachers. It is not such an easy issue.