Pronunciation - I strive for ...

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I strive for ...

Pimsleur pronunciation
11
28%
Natural pronunciation
29
73%
 
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Le Baron
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby Le Baron » Sun Mar 05, 2023 3:52 pm

german2k01 wrote:That's what I think. Your thoughts, please. Why the results were different in the case of 2 native Chinese?That's what I think. Your thoughts, please. Why the results were different in the case of 2 native Chinese?

I think that correlation isn't necessarily causation. We have two people and might extrapolate from this correctly or incorrectly. As if I meet an excellent high-jumper who has long legs and flexible body who says: 'I did this particular training technique...' and we then conclude that this is what you need to do to be an excellent high-jumper. Or perhaps have long legs and a flexible physique?

If I cast the net a bit further, consider people here in NL. A large number watches a great deal of English-language TV and from an early age. However you still get oddities influenced from the first language. Things like being tripped up by 'th'. A lot of people say 'thin foil' instead of 'tin foil', also because of being accustomed to treating 'th' as a 't' sound in both written/spoken forms and then somehow thinking it's possibly the reverse for this case. Many seem to stumble over words like 'editing'. There are dozens of these which a lifetime of TV and speaking hasn't erased (some might be language memes).

Some have what Dutch people call a 'taalknobbel' or a feel for languages. Of course here on this forum this is more set aside in favour or planning and effort, however it plays a part in how well a person does (as does age indirectly for some things). So your Chinese fellow might well just be someone who needs to learn German whilst not being great at e.g. sound mimicry or less able to reproduce sounds heard. Since the unproven core of 'Dr Brown' is the assumption that one can reproduce what one hears by mere dint of mass exposure over time. And your Chinese girl of 6 months (whose background we don't know) may simply have a 'better ear'.

The reason I say it's too hard to untangle is that we could revise all this and say maybe there are many other variables we aren't accounting for. That both of those people don't have a great ear, but one worked harder than the other. Or one gets far more real-life speaking interaction than the other, which overrides just media listening.

I want to be careful about pinpointing alleged causal factors among that chaos of potential variables.
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby Gaoling97 » Mon Mar 06, 2023 4:39 am

jeff_lindqvist wrote:No idea, but someone once thought that my English reminded them of David Attenborough (yeah right...), and someone else thought that my Chinese (a single sentence!) sounded like a newscaster (or was it a politician?). :?


Was it a native Chinese speaker? I said a single word the other day in Chinese (那個) and somebody told me my pronunciation is "more standard than most Chinese people".

But yes, "learn the rules before you break them" is the best approach. Because a) there are situations where you need to speak super clearly, and b) natural everyday speech is something you need to slowly adjust to over time after spending thousands of hours listening, not something you can just pick up as a beginner.
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Mar 06, 2023 5:25 pm

Gaoling97 wrote:Was it a native Chinese speaker? I said a single word the other day in Chinese (那個) and somebody told me my pronunciation is "more standard than most Chinese people".


No - it was a friend who learned Chinese in Taiwan. So in that respect, I might actually have uttered something that sounded like "formal Chinese". (On the rare occasion that I speak Mandarin at all, my pronunciation is based on Assimil + whatever material we used in university classes. )

(All this being said, once over at Livemocha, a native complimented on my "Beijing accent"... :roll: Must have been the 儿化音. 8-) )
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby tractor » Sat Mar 11, 2023 10:09 pm

I haven't used Pimsleur (apart from listening once, many years ago, to the first lesson of their German course), but I guess they follow the same mould as most other language course publishers: the standard language as spoken by educated, middle/upper class people, i.e. more or less like a typical newsreader.

Native speakers use different registers, and a newsreader won't speak 'like a newsreader' when chatting with his colleagues, when he's at the pub or at home with his family. Maybe he speaks almost the same way in informal situations as when reading the news, just a bit more relaxed and with more informal vocabulary. Maybe he switches over completely and speaks the working class, regional dialect of his home town. Or maybe he speaks the middle class, regional dialect of his home town, yet very different from the pronunciation he employs when reading the news.

Who's the man in the street? He could be anybody. He could be a factory worker. He could be a farmer. He could be a fisherman from a remote village. He could be a university professor and the son of a count or a baron. They all speak differently.

The 'Pimsleur pronunciation' is the pronunciation I hear on my MP3 files, so that's the pronunciation that I emulate. As long as I don't live in the target language country, and as long as I don't feel a strong connection with a particular region or social class in that country, I see no reason why I should try to emulate any other accent. The better I get at the language, the better i get at picking up nuances and differences in register, and therefore the better I get at adapting my pronunciation to the formality required by the situation (e.g. speaking to the waiter in a fine restaurant, speaking at a business meeting, being drunk and speaking to other drunk customers in a tavern).
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby garyb » Sun Mar 12, 2023 1:25 pm

Le Baron wrote:
german2k01 wrote:If you can hear it well then you can register the sound correctly subconsciously. Hence, you can replicate it correctly.

This is a typical South-East Asian thing though. Not that she can't hear the word. It's surely interference from her own internalised sound-system. Another similar one is the confusion of V and W among people in India (I don't know if it is localised or what). So that despite recognising the word 'love' perfectly well the same person will say: 'I lowe you'. And also e.g. 'It's vinter' (winter).

Listening doesn't really seem to solve this.
Indeed, I think it's quite well-understood now that no amount of listening can fix a gap in one's knowledge of the sound system; you need to actually understand the difference between V and W or L and R or French "u" and "ou" etc. in order to hear the difference. If not, then as far as you're concerned they're the same sound and that's how you hear it and produce it. That understanding can be conscious (from learning the mouth movements to produce the different sounds, as I had to for the French example) or unconscious as it might be picked up as a child typically does, or an adult who happens to have the fairly rare ability to accurately mimic sounds from hearing them, but it has to be there.

I do think that early speaking can reinforce bad habits, but that's often misused by the Krashenite lot as a reason to delay speaking when the real solution seems to be to just learn the sounds properly early on and continue to be conscious of them and mindful of your pronunciation as you keep learning. More listening can reinforce the lack of understanding just as much as more speaking can.
Last edited by garyb on Sun Mar 12, 2023 1:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby garyb » Sun Mar 12, 2023 1:30 pm

Anyway, on the topic, I'm not one of these rare people and don't have a spare few hundred hours to work specifically on pronunciation, so "Pimsleur" and "natural" are both completely unrealistic goals. But I aim for somewhere in the middle: natural, but a clear and standard-ish sort of natural.
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby Cainntear » Sun Mar 12, 2023 4:07 pm

german2k01 wrote:
Le Baron wrote:
german2k01 wrote:If you can hear it well then you can register the sound correctly subconsciously. Hence, you can replicate it correctly.

This is a typical South-East Asian thing though. Not that she can't hear the word. It's surely interference from her own internalised sound-system. Another similar one is the confusion of V and W among people in India (I don't know if it is localised or what). So that despite recognising the word 'love' perfectly well the same person will say: 'I lowe you'. And also e.g. 'It's vinter' (winter).

Listening doesn't really seem to solve this.


This is what we call fossilization. When people speak more than listen more; these sorts of issues happen.

That's an unproven assertion. Besides, fossilisation doesn't say anything about a mechanism, but about the result.
The subconscious mind does not know how to pronounce it as it has not listened to its correct pronunciation hundred times.

There really is no proof for this. Krashen has never given proof, and his proponents all use it to justify that their failing students are at fault, because they didn't do what was asked of them.

As I see it, it is more likely that their successful students didn't do what was asked fo them, and that they didn't ask tell their failing students what the right things to do actually were. For example (re the Chinese "good" student vs the "bad" one):

She said that she watched A LOT of German TV show with SUBTITLES on Netflix and Amazon prime. Natural Listening when listening for hours and paying attention to the sounds of the words in the end will fix it. Matching sounds with their corresponding words has its merits for developing good pronunciation at least being aware of it.

What she was doing was building a phoneme map of the target language. It is a form of intellectual reasoning and it is much to her credit that she did it, but it should not be held against the Chinese guy that he didn't do the same thing. The woman's actions are not a direct result of listening -- that is an oversimplification, and it fails to give her full credit for her own success.

To state it plainly: you have no proof that the act of listening in the absence of conscious analysis would result in better speaking, and you have no proof that teaching conscious awareness of the sound system would not have resulted in better speaking in the absence of listening.

I think this is what Dr. Brown is alluding to it as early speaking hampers acquiring correct sounds of the language. Hence, a long silent period of intensive listening is advisable. This way you are giving an opportunity for your subconscious mind to notice the real and correct pronunciation of words.

I'm not familiar with the name, but Google says he did much of his writing in the US when Krashen was king, and would have retired before the majority of us finished high school. (Google also suggests you might have picked up the name from A.J. Hoge... did you?)

Everything since then that has demonstrated the problems in the philosophy... well it's hardly going to be addressed in his writing.

Neither he nor Krashen have proposed a cognitive method through which a new phoneme map can spontaneously form itself.

We now understand that the brain has processes that extract meaningful stimulus as the first step of sensing it. I could describe a visual example if you want, but skipping straight to language, we don't take raw sound and feed it into a black box that processes language -- we take raw sound and pre-process in by identifying phonemes (or perhaps likely phonemes), and then the stream of phonemes goes into our language centre.

The problem with the input hypothesis is that it was written before this was established as scientific fact, so while there's reason to given Krashen, Brown etc for some leeway at the time, the resurgence of these theories requires some significant additional evidence.

Basically, you cannot understand a language without using a phoneme map, and if you do not have the target phoneme map, you're let to either build one yourself or use the one you already have. In several Asian languages, R and L are allophones of one phoneme (i.e. phones that don't differ in meaning, only in context) and so there is literally no impetus for a Chinese speaker to spontaneously develop the two phonemes for themself.

In fact, the only impetus to recognise the phoneme difference comes from speaking. You can understand a sentence while misidentifying a phoneme, but problems in your phoneme map are only revealed when you attempt to produce the phoneme, as success and failure both result in useful feedback.

As such, given the current state of neuropsychology in general and neurolinguistics specifically, the onus is on proponents of teaching based on a "listening hypothesis" to say how this could possibly work.
A major part of that would be in depth interviewing of successful learners and attempting to prove that they aren't doing anything that they weren't told to do.
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby Cainntear » Sun Mar 12, 2023 5:03 pm

Anyway, I'd like to say that I can't choose either of the options given.

One of my major differences in philosophy is that a lot of people say they want a good accent, but I don't care about "accent"; I only want good pronunciation.

Pimsleur I reckon is an early entrant into the "accent's important" market. There is nothing in Pimsleur that tells you how to pronounce; it's all just "listen and repeat" with no attempt to deal with a potential failure to correctly pick up the phonemes.

When I was not long into learning Spanish, for example, I picked up the idea of dento-alveolar consonants -- i.e. TNDL being pronounced with the tongue touching the teeth on the gumline, as opposed to true dental consonants touching the tip of the teeth themselves, in Scottish Gaelic, for example.
(*Not 100% certain if the term "dento-alveolar" is right, forgive me if my memory deceives me!)

In English, the /d/ sound is a true alveolar consonant, but /ð/ ("this","that") is a true dental consonant. A focus on "good accent" saw well meaning teachers accepting the English /d/ and /ð/ as acceptable sounds for the allophones of the Spanish D consonant, because in Iberian accents there's a difference between the Ds in "dorado".

I made a deliberate decision to make the two Ds sound more like each other in order to build the phoneme map, and my teacher would correct my pronunciation by highlighting the difference between the two allophones while making no comment on the fact that classmates were making the sounds in wildly different places of articulation.

The result was that I quickly determined that many people in my class were treating the two sounds as two different phonemes (and asking "is that D a /d/ or a /ð/?")

I reckon the source of the problem was that my teacher was so used to English speaker errors that my "stuff the accent -- correct pronunciation matters" attitude made my accent stand out as weird even though it was heading in the right direction.

(It used to bug me that my former Russian flatmate would correct my mispronunciation of unstressed O in Russian, but she was a language teacher too, so the fact that she disagreed with my point on the idea of learning the correct phoneme first and then respecting the phoneme map by reducing it to the right allophone *later* meant that it wasn't worth my time arguing.)

The extreme example of "phonemes first, allophones later" must be Welsh. I took a beginner's course with the Open University and when all my classmates were stressing over which vowel sound to use (Welsh vowels can have up to three allophones depending on the syllable location: pre-tonic, tonic, post-tonic) I decided I was just going to identify the central sound and say it in all three locations. Phonemes first, allophones later. My teacher complimented me on my accent and I have no idea whether she'd even noticed the lack of distinction in allophones. Certainly, she wouldn't have met enough learners to have acquired a sense of "that's a normal learner pronunciation", and her job as a university lecturer in Celtic Studies probably made her more aware of the importance of point-of-articulation anyway.

It's something I've done time and again. I know that I'm very lucky that I got a good French accent basically for free (my mum had me singing along to chansons d'enfance she had on vinyl) and also that the English language course I took on the OU was deliberately written to act as both a language course for natives and, in parallel, as an introduction to linguistics across languages, so did not restrict itself to features of English and instead talked about features that were present exclusively in other languages.
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby galaxyrocker » Sun Mar 12, 2023 5:27 pm

I agree with what Cainntear said myself, though I voted 'natural pronunciation'. Really, I just want to be able to make the right phonemes at the right places of articulation. I struggle with this, especially with Irish, but generally in any language. It's something I really need to work on and train, but, well, I've inquired just about everywhere and there were no teachers willing to focus on Irish pronunciation. It's a shame, as most learners don't have it correct at all and its dying out even in the native speaking areas. Lots of bad linguistics involved in the entire situation too.

Really trying to do better with my French, but I've been struggling to get around to booking a lesson (I'm cheap!) to work on it. Thankfully, I'm sure there's teachers out there who can, and I really hope I can find one. The perks of learning a majority language!

It's even more annoying because I know, theoretically, how to make them, but I just...can't.
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Re: Pronunciation - I strive for ...

Postby sirgregory » Sun Mar 12, 2023 7:04 pm

Early on, I definitely do not attempt to effect a "real" or a "street" accent. I stick with standard, well-enunciated pronunciation while I'm still on the learner materials simply because it corresponds the best to the written language which makes it a sensible point of departure for further studies in the language. Moving from "textbook" pronunciation to common speech is fairly trivial imo once you start interacting regularly with the everyday language. To clarify, I do not mean to say that the jump from textbooks to everyday speech is easy. It's not. But the difficulty I think is mostly because of lack of vocabulary and lack of fluency/processing. The style of speech and accent etc does matter, but this varies so much from region to region and person to person (at least for many major languages) I think it makes sense to cross those bridges when you get to them rather than try to anticipate everything as a beginner.
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