On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 01:55:45PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > "James Miller" <ja...@aatch.net> wrote in message > news:mailman.235.1331210469.4860.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... [...] > >Being British means that I do notice the differences in > >pronunciation, I've pretty much done the opposite to Reagan, gone > >from England to NZ. I tend to get frustrated when I can't even > >correct pronunciation because nobody can hear the difference! > > I have a little extra insight into this as my mom is a speech/language > pathologist: > > As you've noticed, trying to get a person to hear the difference often > doesn't work (And even if they can hear it, that doesn't necessarily > give them enough info to actually pronounce it). I think the right > thing to do, at least in cases where it actually matters, is to > instruct them on the actual mouth movements involved. Then they can > "feel" the difference, and start to hear themselves making the > different sound. "Hearing" it can naturally follow from that.
I couldn't agree more! When I first started learning Russian, I simply could not hear the difference between И and Ы. At all. They sounded identical to me. Or rather, I notice there's a difference when a native speaker says both sounds, but I couldn't pinpoint what that difference was, nor could I reproduce the sounds, or distinguish between them when heard in isolation. It took a lot of research to find out exactly how to pronounce Ы (И is relatively easy), and a lot of effort to learn how to tell them apart in different contexts, before I started "hearing" the difference. Now I was somewhat lucky that my mother tongue distinguishes between an aspirated T (the T at the beginning of an English word) and a non-aspirated T (the Russian Т, or, for that matter, the Spanish T). So I had no trouble pronouncing the Russian T correctly, but another guy who was also learning Russian couldn't tell the difference, and as a result always spoke with a heavy "foreigner accent". I can't say I've mastered it all, though... one thing that still throws me off is Л and ЛЬ right before a consonant. I can do it right if a vowel immediately follows, but I have a lot of trouble if ЛЬ is followed by a consonant. I couldn't hear the difference at all. Now I can somewhat tell, but I still slip up all the time when I try to pronounce it myself. Another thing is, I can't roll my R's. My tongue as stiff as a stick and just refuses to roll anything, no matter how hard I try. I've tried to follow online tutorials, but it just doesn't work for me. :-( T -- Doubtless it is a good thing to have an open mind, but a truly open mind should be open at both ends, like the food-pipe, with the capacity for excretion as well as absorption. -- Northrop Frye
