Steve wrote:Also, perhaps because I'm a musician, I find I sense dissonance as I speak along incorrectly. It feels similar to singing along and knowing I am out of tune.
Hi Steve,
I have the same experience. And although I used to be obsessed with listening to music, I'm not musical.
I have found that if I use enough audio in the beginning and work my pronunciation aloud always with whatever content I'm using (Pimsleur is particularly good for this in the beginning stages), be that course materials, books, articles etc, that I then have the 'song' (in this case sounds of the language) embedded in my head. Then while reading aloud, like yourself, I can feel if I'm out of tune.
Sometimes, however, I think my embedded tune of the language might shift ever so slightly with certain sounds and this is where listening helps. If I watch a TV series for example I start to feel that I may have been pronouncing a phoneme insufficiently deep enough or even visually notice that my lips haven't been forming exactly the same shape as speakers in the series when producing a particular sound. For 'fine tuning', I guess we could might use the analogy of tuning an instrument that's been put aside for a bit and needs a bit of readjusting. Not being musical, forgive me if my analogy is a little off, but I think it's clear what I mean. Thus, I always try to remain open and not set in stone with forming ideas of how to pronounce all the phonemes in a language as well as the tone and prosody.
Reading aloud with the kids almost daily helps me a lot. It reinforces what I do know as well as helps me discover new words, but it also is time to practice my pronunciation. i think my daughter has picked up on my finicky nature with pronunciation, as occasionally when i'm tired I accidently mispronounce a word (perhaps it's late, and I've read several books already, or perhaps it's just a slip of the tongue), and she'll correct me with my pronunciation. That's great, I now have feedback from my children to keep me on guard! But as you can see, reading aloud also helps them with their listening skills all the while hearing interesting stories.
Of course, reading to myself I often will read aloud whenever possible (sometimes I can't due to my surroundings perhaps at work, other people around etc). This is something I did right from the beginning with courses through to reading of lengthy books. And if I don't know how to pronounce something - well, don't be lazy and skip over it, I look it up in a dictionary with IPA.
Steve wrote:I find that mentally this works well for me since written words are reminding me of the oral pronunciation rather than me trying to piece together a best guess pronunciation of words and having my brain remember my guesses. I am trying to mentally treat the audio I am hearing as the "real" language and what I am seeing on a page as a visual "recording" of the audio.
While this isn't exactly how I've viewed things myself in terms of visualisation, in practice it is very similar to what I do. Anything I read, I must know how to pronounce it correctly (not an approximation as this will lead to a more noticeable accent) and when I read it, even if I do it silently in my head, I'm pronouncing everthing either out loud or sounding it out in my head. Even now as I write, I cannot write without reading the words silently yet ironically aloud in my head. I generally never read English aloud unless it's requested, it's not a foreign language that I need to constantly focus on, it's my native tongue.
So, yes, reading aloud helps immensely!