An Olle Kjellin [Chorusing] thread

[Montmorency]

Olle Kjellin's name comes up from time to time, but I thought perhaps he warranted a dedicated thread.

http://olle-kjellin.com/SpeechDoctor

Swedish version


One paper that caught my eye:

http://olle-kjellin.com/SpeechDoctor/Ch ... actice.pdf

Feel free to highlight and|or discuss any other papers or pages from that site, or anything else Kjellin-related.

[Montmorency]

http://olle-kjellin.com/SpeechDoctor/pd ... stones.pdf

Strategy #3: Practice Plenty of Times
The simple motto here would be, "Most Heard, Best Remembered". If one reads an ordinary novel of, say,
70,000 words, the 50 most common words will be seen in 40 percent of those, i.e., 28,000 times, or 560 times
each on an average, with the proper inflectional and syntactical context and all. It will be difficult to forget them!
Thus, extensive reading of books and listening to the radio and ambient speech, without any ambition to
understand everything but with the ambition to recognize as much as possible, will serve as the non-child L2
learner's substitute for the naturally superstatistical environment of the L1 learner

+1 for audiobooks? (and maybe for the L-R method?)

[Iversen]

Olle Kjellin himself participated under the name Okhjum in the discussion at HTLAL in the thread Devise A Pronunciation Experiment

[Montmorency]

Olle Kjellin himself participated under the name Okhjum in the discussion at HTLAL in the thread Devise A Pronunciation Experiment

I certainly remember reading about him over at HTLAL, but if I ever realised that the man himself participated in those discussions, I must have completely forgotten. Either way, thanks for the link, and I shall be heading over there shortly.

[Henkkles]

I think dr. Kjellin's methods and Glossika are a match made in language learning heaven.

[reineke]

Too many words to describe something involving 20-30 sentences.

- listen to minimal pairs
- listen to the sentences
- practice the sentences

Is this the gist of it?

What's the secret sauce of choosing the 30 sentences? They can be the learner's favorite sentences. I won't go into prosody...

Quality Practise Pronunciation With Audacity – The Best Method!
A tutorial by Olle Kjellin, MD, PhD

The short version: In the way to be described below I will train my ears with the correct speech rhythm and melody according to the model and saturate my brain's primary hearing centres as well as its hearing perception centres with it. I should not torture my ears to hear me speak with a faulty accent (as I would do in the beginning, if I didn't saturate my ears first). Subconsciously and gradually, by shadowing, mirroring and imitation, I will train and automatize my mirror neurons (imitation neurons), which are then to guide my speech muscles to my own pronunciation, when, eventually, I start saying the phrases myself without help. In this process my brain will actually be physically changed due to its plasticity. This is learning on the neuroanatomical scale. My brain will very effectively connect and match the sounds that I hear with the sounds that I make and the sounds that I should make. Therefore, I should not trouble my speech muscles to learn first to speak with a funny pronunciation (as, again, I would do in the beginning, if I didn't saturate my ears first). Instead, I will first make the (correct) model utterances resound as a template din in my head, and that will direct my speech muscles accordingly. It will then even be difficult for me to pronounce much differently from the model. (Incidentally, this is also how our native, first-language speech is mirrored, acquired, controlled and monitored, the speech muscles then being guided by internally “hearing” and predicting how the result would and should sound for a given articulation. More than 50,000 years of human language evolution cannot be wrong.)
In conclusion: I will practice pronunciation with my ears and let automated nerve reflexes do the rest. I will then have created an “audio-motor procedural memory” for the target language, with a result as native-like as I have the time and motivation to aspire for.


Are you learning a new language? Do you, like me, have the ambition to learn it well, to sound as "native" as possible, or at least to have a listener-friendly pronunciation that will not embarrass me or annoy the native speakers? This paper will show you how to achieve that, and explain why it is possible, even if you are not a child. In these 21 pages with its 34 illustrations you will learn how to:
• Produce perfect pronunciation exercises with your favourite sentences for free.
• Practice the way that will give you the best result, for example perfect pronunciation, if you wish.

"In experimental conditions it has been found that automating a new (simple) motor skill takes about 15 minutes. Can you practice the same sentence for 15 minutes? It seems like a good idea to do so. However, depending on the difficulty of the task and your previous experience with similar skills, of course, it may take longer or shorter time than that to learn a new motor pattern. For example, the 15 click consonants in Zulu are quite a challenge for English speakers, but presumably easy-peasy for Xhosa speakers (who have 21 click consonants). When, however, you can say 20-30 sentences in a native or near-native way in your new language, after hours of deliberate, persistent practice on only them, you will also be able to say 20-30 million other sentences in the same way. Because they all follow exactly the same rules of prosody and pronunciation. So part of the trick for the adult language learner is to have a very limited curriculum for the initial pronunciation training period."
D) Mirror neurons...

Initially I don't necessarily have to understand anything at all, but of course it would be more fun if I could. With time I will be able to discern more and more. I will be like a little child conquering his first language, but I will do it faster than a child. With my recordings, I have no teacher who gets fatigued, no difficult letters, no boring text, no complicated grammar, no confusing explanations. Only pronunciation, pronunciation, pronunciation, pronunciation, ... Particularly the rhythm and intonation. When my new pronunciation is ready (!) after some time with thousands of exercises with the same small amount of practice sentences, then it is time for me to move on with a good textbook and/or teacher. I will be on the approximate level of a native 2-4 year old. That is, I will have a native or near-native prosody, as explained above. But in addition, I will also have quite good command of most if not all the vowels and consonants, because my speech apparatus is mature. And I will have a basic, working vocabulary and a set of useful sentences. The front door to the new language will be wide open. I can begin functioning in a simple conversation. Fortunately, my interlocutors can't know what I do NOT know. Thanks to my pronunciation they will think I know very much more than I actually do, even when I hesitate and don't find the right words. They will find it natural that I'm still having some empty slots in my command of their vocabulary, and they will not know that nearly all slots still are empty... As a result it will be easy for me to make contact with native speakers; they will not shun me because of my pronunciation. On the contrary, they will respect me because I respect their language.

This situation, in my opinion, is far better than hurrying through a language course and superficially learn many lessons, but with unbrushed prosody and pronunciation, hoping that I will deal with that little detail later on. Because the sad truth, as you may have inferred by now, would most likely rather be that I learn and automatize such unbrushed pronunciation that neither I nor my teacher nor any other native speaker will like or much less respect.
An advantageous spin-off effect of the Quality Repetition method is the fact that, in all languages, there are close connections between the pronunciation and the grammar, particularly between their prosody and syntax. Hence, focusing so hard on the pronunciation initially, will also help me approach and master the grammar better later on.

How to practise pronunciation the best – in real life!
NB. This is important: When I play my practice sentences, I set my player to Repeat 1, so I can listen lots of times without having to press the play button every time. Hundreds of times. Thousands of times, over and over again. This is very efficient, and necessary for training my ears first. Particularly if it is a completely new language of which I have no prior knowledge. Further, since I will make perhaps 6 copies of every item in each track (see below), I will get 6 exemplars (repetitions) of each even when I have not set it to Repeat 1, as when I review my material at a later stage. This will efficiently remind me of all that I had forgotten. There is no commercially available material that is as good as this.

In the beginning I set the volume of the player to quite loud and "push" the sounds into my head. Little by little my ears will be "saturated", and I will be able to discern words and feel an urge to mirror and to speak in unison with the....

I will also claim that the method I advocate here is very time-efficient. Because it will not take a long time to master 20- 30 sentences to the level I aspire for. Of course the required time is very individual, depending on many factors such as previous experience with learning languages, time available for practice, and the difficulty of the particular language. But I would dare say that on an average it should take not much more than 100 hours or so of active exercises.The other alternative, that of learning a broken pronunciation, will take most people more than a lifetime to repair!

The scientific and empirical underpinnings for this method are sketched in my 1998 article "Accent Addition : Prosody and Perception Facilitate Second Language Learning" (see link in the bibliography), and detailed in my 2002 book "[Pronunciation, Language and the Brain. Theory and Methods for Language Education]" with more than 200 annotated references (sorry, only in Swedish so far). But when they were written, we didn't know as much about mirror neurons as we do now. So the present paper is an important update.

5 Minimal pairs
Don't ever practice much with minimal pairs! Minimal pairs are good for phonological research and for making learners aware of crucial, phonological distinctions, such as of the vowel in ship and sheep, or the initial consonant in tin, thin and sin. So, of course some listening..."

[reineke]

Group chorusing mega sessions. Eh.... I "tink" not. I like the part about intense, deliberate practice, and overwhelming the ears but I would not do it in this manner. Some of the theory is questionable. See, for instance, "Festina Lente: Evidences for Fast and Slow Learning Processes and a Role for Sleep in Human Motor Skill Learning".

Ollie K

"I sometimes give 1-week long full-day very-intensive courses in "Swedish pronunciation renovation" for immigrant doctors who are dissatisfied with their pronunciation and feel they are stigmatized and hampered in their contacts with patients and colleagues. And in the way I do it, a 10-12 member group and choral practice is far, far more effective than one-to-one sessions.

The participants are then consistently surprised how much they have achieved already after the first lesson (and get sooo angry with their previous teachers who failed them on this surprisingly easy task). During the whole week, we almost only practice "deliberately" on the participants' own addresses. After all, any short-short text is very representative of the whole language, a too-long text would entail less practice per part, and their addresses contain a very high, inherent motivation factor."

Question:
"I'm curious as to why you chose to organize 35-hour sessions: do you feel that this is more effective than 35 separate one-hour sessions?"

Olle K.:
"-- Yes, definitely! Much less forgetting between sessions. But just as with any learning of a skill, practice has to go on. Speech and language are not unique or different from, say, stitching, or airplane flying, or playing the violin, or java programming, or keyboard typing, etc. In all areas of skilled performance, *everybody* knows that abundant, continuous practice is the only way to attain that skill. *Except* in language teaching, where it has been out of fashion for decades. "

HTLAL

Olle K on ResearchGate:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Olle_Kjellin