Until a few years ago, I used to rely exclusively on my ears. I have always stressed the importance of creating a link between the sound and the corresponding word. I find it very useful to read and listen, especially at the beginning. Once this link is established, I only need to hear the sound, without having to read the text. Starting to produce those sounds myself “closes the circle”, thus providing the last piece of information I need in order to finally “hear” what I wasn’t able to hear before by simply listening.
Recently, however, I started to approach pronunciation and intonation more methodically. The language which I paid more attention to in terms of pronunciation is Chinese. It was the first time that I worked on pronunciation in a conscious, pragmatic way, and that’s where the idea of my “Phonetic Analysis”
