How to study BETTER as an advanced learner?

[tarvos]

I explicitly study it. I've done extensive prosody training in Spanish for example.

Whether it's worth it is up to any individual to determine. I'm just pointing out that even good grammar can be undone by one weird piece of intonation - and you sleep on the couch.

[Jiwon]

And saying (Jiwon) that if you haven't mastered your TL prosody/intonation means you don't speak the language is something I left without comment till now and I don't think it requires it anyway.

You're traveler so since you didn't answer my question on how you master prosody/intonation I may only assume you do it mainly in social context. But, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

Which is why I said "speak".

Just a gentle reminder: I am not obliged to answer your questions. We are talking about very non-verbal aspects of languages and it's very difficult to express this in words. It takes a lot of thinking and time to talk about that. So I was even contemplating on recording a video to illustrate my points, but I don't think I need to bother sacrificing my study time anymore.

In case you are wondering, I barely do any language "learning" with native speakers or on my travels. As I have already posted on this thread, I learnt German without ever visiting Germany, and I learned Hindi in Korea from Korean teachers. My method utilzes learning the prosody of the videos and audios, almost as a musical exercise.

[tungemål]

I find the intonation* of a language interesting. It doesn't seem common to teach this, but it must certainly be a field of study in linguistics? I think there are some systems developed for notating it.

Anyway, some people seem to have a gift for imitating this. I don't, but I have music education and a good ear, so I analytically and deliberately studied intonation in British English and in German, and developed some kind of model for intonation in those languages. It takes time to get used to a new intonation and like someone mentioned, it requires practice just like practicing an instrument.

*
Intonation: how the pitch varies up and down in a sentence
Prosody: intonation, tone, stress, and rhythm
wikipedia

[slowmoon]

Anyway, some people seem to have a gift for imitating this. I don't, but I have music education and a good ear, so I analytically and deliberately studied intonation in British English and in German, and developed some kind of model for intonation in those languages.

Can you describe or show me your German intonation model? I've noticed that the pitch generally drops on the final verb in a declarative statement and rises at the end of yes/no questions. I haven't noticed much else, sadly.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Does this help?

Towards a Model for German Prosody
https://journals.lub.lu.se/LWPL/article ... 6917/15296

[devilyoudont]

Some languages have courses on this, and I think it's a worthy area for an advanced learner if they didn't study it at the beginner or intermediate level. As it goes, I agree that there are a lot of ways that small improvements in this area go quite a long way, and are not necessarily too difficult to attain. But, absolute mastery of this area is incredibly uncommon and for whatever reason this seems to cause 1 of 2 reactions in most learners: 1) completely abandoning this as an area of study or 2) denial about the practicality of attaining this for the vast majority of learners.

Where I see a problem here is when people, who are generally trying to sell something to beginners or even pre-beginners, attack learning resources which are high quality because they can demonstrate that the person who made the course does not have perfect intonation. A further annoyance to me with this is that beginners have no understanding that "native-like" is a description with practically no meaning, because a person may mean anything from "I 'get confused for a native speaker', but then the other party generally figures out that I am not within 5 sentences." to "I have no detectable accent at all."

There are plenty of people in the world who are not native-like in any sense, but their intonation is still good enough to avoid the outlined problems of poor intonation in this thread. (at least among people who are not bigots). Why not accept this as a worthy goal, rather than abandon it as an area of study, or insisting that problems with attaining good intonation (and accent and pronunciation) do not exist?

For anyone looking for a course on these subjects in Japanese: check out Dogen on youtube. He has a paid course thru his patreon.

[slowmoon]

Does this help?

Towards a Model for German Prosody
https://journals.lub.lu.se/LWPL/article ... 6917/15296

Thank you! I just skimmed through it. It confirms what I've noticed, but most of it is a bit too academic for me.

If the visual models on pages 28 and 32 (or even the High-Low notation used on page 18) were used to model 100 or 1000 different sentences (with accompanying audio), it would be a fantastic resource for learners.

I found this video pretty useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95vfpXaZbC0

[tungemål]

Can you describe or show me your German intonation model? I've noticed that the pitch generally drops on the final verb in a declarative statement and rises at the end of yes/no questions. I haven't noticed much else, sadly.

Yes, could we split off this part of the thread that dicusses intonation? It has branched off from the opening post, and it would be interesting to discuss this further.

Edit: I just started a new thread.

[Voytek]

I explicitly study it. I've done extensive prosody training in Spanish for example.

Do you think it might be done successfully when one is an advanced learner and has been speaking the language without the correct intonation/prosody for years?

Whether it's worth it is up to any individual to determine. I'm just pointing out that even good grammar can be undone by one weird piece of intonation - and you sleep on the couch.

It happens in my relationship since my Thai gf has a poor intonation which makes an impression of being brusque from time to time. But I guess I'm slowly getting accustomed.

[Voytek]

And saying (Jiwon) that if you haven't mastered your TL prosody/intonation means you don't speak the language is something I left without comment till now and I don't think it requires it anyway.

You're traveler so since you didn't answer my question on how you master prosody/intonation I may only assume you do it mainly in social context. But, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

Which is why I said "speak".

Just a gentle reminder: I am not obliged to answer your questions. We are talking about very non-verbal aspects of languages and it's very difficult to express this in words. It takes a lot of thinking and time to talk about that. So I was even contemplating on recording a video to illustrate my points, but I don't think I need to bother sacrificing my study time anymore.

In case you are wondering, I barely do any language "learning" with native speakers or on my travels. As I have already posted on this thread, I learnt German without ever visiting Germany, and I learned Hindi in Korea from Korean teachers. My method utilzes learning the prosody of the videos and audios, almost as a musical exercise.

Thank you for your answer. Is your method a secret you cannot reveal or you could post some details, please?