What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

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David1917
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby David1917 » Fri Jan 04, 2019 7:53 pm

2 things are being discussed and wrongly conflated in this argument:

Contention #1) If you get enough hours of CI, there is no way for you not to be able to distinguish word separation, intonation, different sounds (e.g. aspirated consonants, long vowels, regional dialects) - therefore the "bad ear" phenomenon is more likely an "underfed ear"

Contention #2) However many hours of CI you get, that does not automatically give you the ability to produce these different sounds or proper intonation - but without a "well-fed ear," the battle is only going to be that much more difficult. Nonetheless, you must consciously try to gain that accent.

So, while rdearman has lived in the UK for that many years, has he ever tried to pass off as British? And have the French and Italian friends made attempts to do that either? All three of these people though can probably more readily understand a wide variety of British dialects and colloquialisms than I can, because I have no familiarity with them.

My own experience in these regards is that some people's (myself or someone's siblings noted above) ears have a lower set-point for discerning all these different sounds re: Contention #1. I believe this is a function of innate talent, possibly corollary to the same innate traits that might make one gravitate towards music. I also believe that this same talent would lead to an even greater ease in accomplishing the task of producing a better accent.
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby David1917 » Fri Jan 04, 2019 9:19 pm

CompImp wrote:So, does she have an advantage over the likes of me ? Without doubt. She is innately 'talented' for sounds and accents, and naturally predisposed to tune her ears into what's going on around her. She listens even when she doesn't mean to listen (is this a woman thing ?! :mrgreen: ) but.....i have better actual interpretative listening skill than her. I understand more spoken French. I've put in 6k hours of mostly listening and reading, and she hasn't. My work has beaten her talent.


But hypothetically speaking, if she did 6K hours in the same concentrated fashion as you, then she would probably be further along, right?
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby David1917 » Fri Jan 04, 2019 9:38 pm

As for the main purpose of the thread:

For a language like Italian, where the OP has mentioned that the main stumbling block for an English speaker is the rhythm/melody, then indeed extended listening+shadowing ought to be of great help. Probably an intermediate coursebook would be the best for this focused exercise, so that no extra energy is being expended onto new vocab/complex grammar etc. My recommendations would be Assimil Perfectionnement or the Practice & Improve (+) Series.

The former can be done in maybe 5-lesson daily waves [I usually do 7-10 with the With Ease series, but these dialogues are considerably longer] e.g. Lessons 5-4-3-2-1, next day 6-5-4-3-2, next 7-6-5-4-3, etc. Reviews can be built in as well in 5's: 25-24-23-22-21-16-11-6-1; 33-32-31-30-29-24-19-14-9-4). For the P&I books, I'm not sure how long each chapter is, but both editions of the book present a running narrative throughout, so it might be the kind of thing you just cycle through a few times. You could also do the "waves" but chronologically in order e.g. 1-2-3, 2-3-4, 3-4-5, etc. Either way the material should be simple and enjoyable so the focus is just on getting the rhythm down.

For a language like Polish with the issue being one of unfamiliar phonemes, then in addition to extended listening and shadowing, I'd suggest working directly with the phonemes and minimal pairs. To this end, you could look at the Linguaphone course (I have not used the Polish one, but many of them have a section with recordings on the phonemes and sample words grouped by such) or the Rosetta Stone program. If you have university/work access to RS for free, then that would be the easiest bet, if not I think you can buy 3 months of online access for a nominal fee, and it goes on sale every couple of weeks. The first 2 Units of Level 1 have exercises on minimal pairs and sounds specifically troubling for English speakers named Pronunciation, Reading, Writing, again in context with words/phrases. Either way, I'd jot down the problem sections of either and revisit them frequently. Also when shadowing/listening, repeat complicated words. For example, there's some German issues I have with soft ch/sch/st- appearing too close together, so I will stop at a phrase in Assimil that includes these and listen to it a couple times over. The day I can say "Ich spreche Chinesisch" will indeed be a personal triumph.
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Cainntear » Fri Jan 04, 2019 10:02 pm

CompImp wrote:
garyb wrote:The short version for me is that "just listening" absolutely doesn't work and perhaps even reinforces bad pronunciation as everything I hear is filtered through my faulty model of the language's phonetics, but more focused methods (and I've tried most of them) have only given me marginal improvements.

How many hours ? Ideally we need a few thousand hours of just listening before we even look at a written word, but that's obviously not what most adults are going to do. And this is outside of comprehensible speech, we need lots of time just for the language to sound natural, recognisable, for our ear to even begin to understand word boundaries etc. Comprehensibility comes after that.

Unfortunately that's not how perception appears to work.

Very early in life, we learn to filter input to map a near-infinite variety of spoken sounds into a narrow set of meaningful sound units -- phonemes. It doesn't matter how many hours you spend listening -- if your brain is filtering out the information that it would need to build a new phoneme map, you cannot build a new phoneme map. If TH and T sound the same to you, no amount of just listening is going to show your brain that they're not the same.
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby David1917 » Fri Jan 04, 2019 11:17 pm

Cainntear wrote:
CompImp wrote:
garyb wrote:The short version for me is that "just listening" absolutely doesn't work and perhaps even reinforces bad pronunciation as everything I hear is filtered through my faulty model of the language's phonetics, but more focused methods (and I've tried most of them) have only given me marginal improvements.

How many hours ? Ideally we need a few thousand hours of just listening before we even look at a written word, but that's obviously not what most adults are going to do. And this is outside of comprehensible speech, we need lots of time just for the language to sound natural, recognisable, for our ear to even begin to understand word boundaries etc. Comprehensibility comes after that.

Unfortunately that's not how perception appears to work.

Very early in life, we learn to filter input to map a near-infinite variety of spoken sounds into a narrow set of meaningful sound units -- phonemes. It doesn't matter how many hours you spend listening -- if your brain is filtering out the information that it would need to build a new phoneme map, you cannot build a new phoneme map. If TH and T sound the same to you, no amount of just listening is going to show your brain that they're not the same.


You mean, hypothetically if someone speaks one language that does not have the TH sound, no amount of listening "before we even look at a written word" will allow that person to uncover that sound? But if they are clued in via some sort of phonological overview or by trying to read along and noticing "hey, what's with that th (or z in Castilian, theta in Greek, etc.)" then surely they will notice that there is something *special* to search for in the sounds they're hearing and then learn to distinguish it?
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby reineke » Sat Jan 05, 2019 12:47 am

Our results suggest that second language acquisition of phonology is not limited by the phonological features used by the native language grammar, nor is the presence/use of a particular phonological feature in the native language grammar sufficient to trigger redeployment. I take these findings to imply that feature availability is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient condition to predict learning outcomes.
SIMILARITY IN L2 PHONOLOGY Shannon L. Barrios, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Jan 05, 2019 9:45 am

David1917 wrote:You mean, hypothetically if someone speaks one language that does not have the TH sound, no amount of listening "before we even look at a written word" will allow that person to uncover that sound?

Exactly. There's enough redundancy in language that you will be able to understand the message without perceiving every single phoneme. With no need to ever notice, why would the brain ever spontaneously do so?
But if they are clued in via some sort of phonological overview or by trying to read along and noticing "hey, what's with that th (or z in Castilian, theta in Greek, etc.)" then surely they will notice that there is something *special* to search for in the sounds they're hearing and then learn to distinguish it?

I personally always start with the phonological description. I do as good an approximation of the target sound myself, because then I'm doing it. If I do it, my brain has to recognise that "it" is something. And once my brain recognises that it's something, it can start to notice when other people do it too.

I'd be dubious about simply trusting people to "notice" it from writing, because I've seen plenty of evidence that doesn't work, (eg French speakers who can't pronounce either TH).
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Kraut » Sat Jan 05, 2019 2:24 pm

Lithuanian has an extremely difficult morphology due to its conservation of 7(8) cases, but sounds too are very difficult to analyse when you begin to learn the language. I had thought that I could skip phonetics and learn by just listening. It turns out that they have sounds I had never heard before.
I had been used to two "l" sounds, like in "light" or "Bill", and then I heard the simple name "Gabriele". To me the "l" almost sounded like"r" and it took me a while to learn how to reproduce it.
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby David1917 » Sat Jan 05, 2019 3:51 pm

Cainntear wrote:
David1917 wrote:You mean, hypothetically if someone speaks one language that does not have the TH sound, no amount of listening "before we even look at a written word" will allow that person to uncover that sound?

Exactly. There's enough redundancy in language that you will be able to understand the message without perceiving every single phoneme. With no need to ever notice, why would the brain ever spontaneously do so?


OK, that makes sense. Especially if one were not especially "talented" as noted above.

But if they are clued in via some sort of phonological overview or by trying to read along and noticing "hey, what's with that th (or z in Castilian, theta in Greek, etc.)" then surely they will notice that there is something *special* to search for in the sounds they're hearing and then learn to distinguish it?

I personally always start with the phonological description. I do as good an approximation of the target sound myself, because then I'm doing it. If I do it, my brain has to recognise that "it" is something. And once my brain recognises that it's something, it can start to notice when other people do it too.

I'd be dubious about simply trusting people to "notice" it from writing, because I've seen plenty of evidence that doesn't work, (eg French speakers who can't pronounce either TH).


I'd say again that just because a French person cannot necessarily pronounce TH doesn't mean they don't notice the difference between the usage of words like ten/then, tin/thin, etc. I follow a Swedish youtuber who substitutes either a T/D or an F for "th" sounds, depending on if they're hard or soft (dere are free settings on dis plug-in) so, he knows those two words have different sound values, and even responded to a comment in a recent video about it and practiced saying "three" on camera, explaining that it's just slightly difficult. Also in his case, he had a lisp as a child and had speech therapy to remove it so, there's that issue as well. Heck, there are even dialects in England that replace TH with F/V.

Broadly speaking, I'd say that most language-learners, especially those who learn a language for utility (e.g. the majority of English learners, Americans who learn Spanish, Russian-speakers in the CIS, etc.) do not do so in the obsessive way that many of us do on the forum, and are concerned only with being understood well enough to get by in their surroundings. I think that is probably why using people's pronunciation as a rubric for whether or not they understand all the different phonemes of a language is flawed.
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Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby sjintje » Sat Jan 05, 2019 9:13 pm

Kraut wrote:Thomas Kielinger is a regular guest on BBC news shows. I have always thought that his English is really excellent. How close is he to perfection? Can natives still detect that he is foreign? German?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea3bjp18c28


I used to watch that program quite a lot and always thought of him as sounding slightly German, but having listened to the clip, there aren't any specific german traits I can put my finger on. I'd say he has a slightly indeterminate European / educated upperclass English accent. A sort of Europeanised Adam Raphael

Just to exercise my hobby horse, I think the BBC often prides itself on finding foreign interviewees who barely speak comprehensible English, as if it's some proof of their foreign authenticity or something.
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