Pronunciation Professor Explains How To Sound Fluent

Yeah, right.

And I have to say now I'm a little bit worried because my sort of image of, you know, improving your pronunciation was I read, I think a few years ago, it was Paul Pimsleur's book.

I forgot what it's called, but it's a very short book.

It's pretty old.

It's from, you know, Paul Pimsleur.

And there are three sections.

And he said, OK, if you want to learn a language, there is pronunciation, there's grammar.

And then there is vocabulary.

That's a pretty simple picture.

And he starts with pronunciation and he says, okay, this is pretty manageable because, you know, when you take a language, it depends on the language, but every single language has about, I don't know what it was, 40 to 90 different sounds.

And so you just need to drill them separately, and then you can master all the sounds of the language.

But now you're saying that 50% of the picture is actually stuff that could be a little bit more complex.

So I'm wondering, okay, I can drill the individual sounds, but is there some sort of book or some sort of teaching service where I can learn about the other components of pronunciation?

That's a wonderful question, and I have a lot of answers for you.

So we can maybe talk about a few of them and revisit a few later on as well.

I think, first of all, I think 50% might be a lot, especially if we have practiced for a long time to make an individual sound.

I was an adult learner of French, and it took me three years to get the uvular sound, right? It was just a really, really strenuous effort to get there.

But it turns out if I use my American R in French, people may not like it, but they can totally understand me in many cases, right? And so we have to kind of pick apart what are our pedagogical priorities when it comes to even individual sounds, but also into intonation.

If our priorities are for casual travel or trying to make friends using a different language, I think we have a lot of resources available to us through television shows and film and all the media that we get that's authentic, right? And so we actually can kind of get the imprint of what that prosody sounds like pretty quickly.

The other advantage I think a lot of us have is if we're studying a language that has a lot of contact or maybe is culturally similar to our own, there's some evidence that I've seen kind of anecdotally that the prosodic preferences and patterns are quite similar from one language to another.

Now, I think if we're talking, I'm an American English speaker and I'm learning Japanese, that's going to be a very different story, right? So there's some distance factors as well about how different this feels.

But I studied German for a little while and, you know, I could maybe have a simple conversation in it.

And I could tell a lot, not because of the words, but because of the prosody.

Because the prosody just seems so familiar to me as an English speaker.

Right.

Yeah, right.

And I have to say now I'm a little bit worried because my sort of image of, you know, improving your pronunciation was I read, I think a few years ago, it was Paul Pimsleur's book.

I forgot what it's called, but it's a very short book.

It's pretty old.

It's from, you know, Paul Pimsleur.

And there are three sections.

And he said, OK, if you want to learn a language, there is pronunciation, there's grammar.

And then there is vocabulary.

That's a pretty simple picture.

And he starts with pronunciation and he says, okay, this is pretty manageable because, you know, when you take a language, it depends on the language, but every single language has about, I don't know what it was, 40 to 90 different sounds.

And so you just need to drill them separately, and then you can master all the sounds of the language.

But now you're saying that 50% of the picture is actually stuff that could be a little bit more complex.

So I'm wondering, okay, I can drill the individual sounds, but is there some sort of book or some sort of teaching service where I can learn about the other components of pronunciation?

That's a wonderful question, and I have a lot of answers for you.

So we can maybe talk about a few of them and revisit a few later on as well.

I think, first of all, I think 50% might be a lot, especially if we have practiced for a long time to make an individual sound.

I was an adult learner of French, and it took me three years to get the uvular sound, right? It was just a really, really strenuous effort to get there.

But it turns out if I use my American R in French, people may not like it, but they can totally understand me in many cases, right? And so we have to kind of pick apart what are our pedagogical priorities when it comes to even individual sounds, but also into intonation.

If our priorities are for casual travel or trying to make friends using a different language, I think we have a lot of resources available to us through television shows and film and all the media that we get that's authentic, right? And so we actually can kind of get the imprint of what that prosody sounds like pretty quickly.

The other advantage I think a lot of us have is if we're studying a language that has a lot of contact or maybe is culturally similar to our own, there's some evidence that I've seen kind of anecdotally that the prosodic preferences and patterns are quite similar from one language to another.

Now, I think if we're talking, I'm an American English speaker and I'm learning Japanese, that's going to be a very different story, right? So there's some distance factors as well about how different this feels.

But I studied German for a little while and, you know, I could maybe have a simple conversation in it.

And I could tell a lot, not because of the words, but because of the prosody.

Because the prosody just seems so familiar to me as an English speaker.

Right.