8 ms·

Since many comments in this thread converge towards language pronunciation: When people are learning how to draw, they typically have to learn how to "unsee".

by GuiA 10y ago

Since many comments in this thread converge towards language pronunciation: When people are learning how to draw, they typically have to learn how to "unsee". To quote Betty Edwards: students beginning in art generally do not really see what is in front of their eyes — that is, they do not perceive in the way required for drawing. They take note of what's there, and quickly translate the perception into words and symbols mainly based on the symbol system developed throughout childhood and on what they know about the perceived object. Learning how to pronounce sounds in a new language is the same. A lot of people will pronounce foreign words with how their brain thinks it should sound, using their native language as a baseline. The trick is to try to get rid of any phonetic preconception you might have, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill. (Which is why romanization of Asian languages, for instance, is a trap for new learners: if you're learning Japanese, the latin alphabet should have no place whatsoever in your learning. It's a tempting, but false path) For drawing like for speaking, kids are naturally good at this. (except while language acquisition happens naturally for kids, deliberate drawing practice rarely does)

joggery 10y ago
Indeed. And just as most people can't see things accurately, not can they sense what's going on inside their mouths. AFAICT each accent has a signature pattern of muscle tension and positioning of jaw, pharynx, etc.
yoz-y 10y ago
I agree with the idea but disagree about the romanisation part. There are many reasons why people should start with romanised versions first. The main reason is that one should concentrate on the language first and on complex writing later, otherwise there is too much information to process. The other reason is that any useful actual writing in those languages will be done in the romanised alphabet (i.e.: on a computer). The barrier of unlearning the pronunciation of different characters is no larger when learning Chinese pinyin while being english, than learning Slovak pronunciations of Latin letters while being French.
- _samihasan_ 10y ago
  I agree with you completely and I even developed an open -source writing system called Eskéndereyya [1] to help learners of Arabic in reading and pronunciation and to prepare them to make the jump to the Arabic script very confidently because I noticed that some beginners are put off by the notion of learning a completely new script just to read and write few sentences and when taking into account how usually Arabic is communicated in writing without diacritics, it becomes very frustrating for them to get any immediate return for their efforts to learn the language. [1]: https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya
- kobeya 10y ago
  With Japanese learners at least, you can tell with a great deal of accuracy whether someone used a romanization crutch or native script from the get-go based on how bad their accent is (anecdotal, but observation over many students). I'm don't know if this holds true of Chinese, though.
  - ykler 10y ago
    Hiragana and katakana are pretty easy to learn, so if someone doesn't learn them quickly, it might be evidence they aren't working hard or efficiently to learn the language or aren't really ambitious. Chinese characters are a different story. I studied Chinese intensively for a year, and now I know almost know Chinese. I blame my failure partly on being forced to learn the characters from the beginning. The characters took 90% of my study time.
    - kobeya 10y ago
      A similar comparison would be learning Bopomofo and using that when knowledge of the characters fails.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    Is that because learning the kana helps? Or because being willing to learn to kana upfront is correlated with being willing to put effort into learning pronunciation?
curun1r 10y ago
> A lot of people will pronounce foreign words with how their brain thinks it should sound, using their native language as a baseline. The trick is to try to get rid of any phonetic preconception you might have, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill. There's actually a trick that, for me at least, makes this a lot easier. If I learn to speak English with a heavy accent of someone with a different native language, it will then be easier to transition into speaking that other language. It almost separates learning a new language from learning to pronounce that language. The key is that it's a lot easier for me to hear and practice the sounds of a new language when I can hear the differences between my pronunciation and correct pronunciation and it's most easy to hear those differences in my native language. With enough practice on the accent, the rhythms, tongue positioning and overall mouth habits that the speaker I'm aping hasn't yet learned to drop become second nature such that when I transition over to speaking that other language, I already have correct habits. As an English speaker, it's so easy to find YouTube clips of people who barely speak English to copy that I can learn to do a pretty convincing accent in an afternoon at this point, though it took take me a couple of days the first few times I tried it.
dharma1 10y ago
agree 100%. And can't recommend her (Betty Edwards') book enough. http://drawright.com/ http://drawright.com/ I think this likely also works for perfect pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI. Neuroplasticity is very different for kids, but there are probably techniques that can enable learning like this with adults - just takes longer.
- npgatech 10y ago
  Betty Edward's book is horrendously misleading to a serious artist. Her book rewards the user with false sense of skill - learn to draw what you see and not what you know. This is easy to do and she has garnered a tremendous support. Any serious artist who is seeking to truly learn how to draw must go through the fundamentals of construction and being able to draw the same thing from a different viewpoint/angle. Try that with Betty's book where one learns how to draw from a reference without understanding the structure. The reader gets to produce nice looking results, but they will miserably fail when asked to draw the same exact subject from a different angle. This indicates lack of fundamental understanding of how to transform 3D objects/scenes into 2D plane. One has to learn how to internalize the object and its structure before putting it down on paper. Betty's book also is riddled with pseudoscience and baseless claims of how the human brain works.
  - dharma1 10y ago
    I agree the books claims about the brain are mostly nonsense, but it does teach you to draw what you see, instead of what you think you see. I think that is a great first step in learning how to draw, feels very satisfying and gets results quickly
    - npgatech 10y ago
      I think that is the problem - learning what you see is flawed and shouldn't be the first step. If you look at Vilppu's drawing manual, or take the Fundamentals of Drawing class at Watts Atelier, and countless credible university courses, what you'll find is opposite of "learning what you see". I can understand that drawing a cube, cone, cylinder is very boring but so is learning chords or music theory in practicing Guitar. That said, if one doesn't want to take drawing seriously and just want to have fun (See conflicting Amazon reviews on Betty's book), Betty's book perhaps is entertaining. I just have a problem with its popularity and will probably lead people into delusion that somehow they have managed to conquer the drawing. Drawing is hard. I also lose respect for authors that despite of knowing nothing about the field or making any attempts to study/understand, they have the audacity to publish their own version of "how the brain works". It bothers me.
wodenokoto 10y ago
The romanisation part is ridiculous, but pops up all the time. English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything. Anybody learning a foreign language will have to come to terms with the fact that the letters work slightly-to-moderately different for each language, whether those are European or Asian languages. Danish and Swedish are practically dialects of each other, but the spelling and pronunciation are miles apart. Trying to read one with the usage of the other will sound as stilted as any transliteration of any "non-alphabet" language. Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible. Vietnamese, like several other Asian languages is Alphabet with diatrics, so again, you have to use Alphabet. There is nothing magical about Asian languages that gets contaminated by the Alphabet. As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss, so it is in no way a poor substitute. You also have to learn romanisations in order to type on a keyboard. The bottom line is, you have to learn new sounds when learning a new language and you have to learn new spelling. shi in Japanese or Chinese are quite close to English, at least compared to how close ta is to the English pronunciation of "shi", so the alphabet acts as a nice mnemonic structure for learners.
- skrebbel 10y ago
  The way i understood the GP is that Japanese has the benefit of having its own writing system so you won't get so easily lured into mapping sounds to back your own (assumedly latin script based) language. Use that as an opportunity and avoid the Latin alphabet altogether. When learning French you don't have that opportunity so you're going to keep having to remind yourself that not a single character in a French word sounds like what it does on your native language. I've seen this in action when learning Finnish, a long time ago, in a class full of expats. Most Germans had serious trouble with the ä, which sounds entirely different in Finnish than in German. They would consistently pronounce it like in German, which made them sound ridiculous. The rest of the class, whose native language alphabet didn't contain the ä, got their pronunciation much closer to the real thing. I can only imagine how powerful this is if not a single character, but the entire script, is different from your native language.
  - 10y ago
jasode 10y ago
>, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill. This sounds plausible and I want it to be true but I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition. (The so-called "critical period."[1]). I think a fascinating example even within one language such as English is the "pin" vs "pen" pronunciation.[2] And plenty of other 2nd-language learning examples such as English speakers missing the delicate "zh" sound in French "bonjour" and always pronouncing it with the hard "j" -- or trying to pronounce the Vietnamese "Nguyen" as "when" or "win". There's a (tonal) phoneme in Vietnamese that's nonexistent in English so it's very possible English listeners can't even hear it as a new distinct sound they have to replicate. The "when" or "win" is the closest approximation they will ever hear and because of that, they will always sound non-native. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_language_acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_languag... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_most_southern_us_english_speakers_make_no/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_m...
- acqq 10y ago
  It's really funny: "In Alabama, both are pronounced "pee-uhn." People made fun of me when I first moved here for pronouncing pen as "pehn" and pin as, well "pin." hawklawson: "Can I borrow a pehn?" people: "Hahaha you need a 'pun'? Say it agin..." And, to this day, when I'm scheduling appointments for patients over the phone... hawklawson: "I have an opening for tehn o'clock." people: "Huh? Whee-uhn j'you say?" hawklawson: "I have an opening for tee-uhn a'clawk." people: "Alrighty then put 'er down." Source: I can turn my southern accent on and off." And living for more than a decade in the country that simply can't produce some sounds of my mother's tongue, I catch myself having more problems voicing them. I know the difference but it's somehow harder, without the environment and the context. Somehow the tongue becomes almost numb to move like before.
  - cjslep 10y ago
    Also from the South. When we hosted foreign exchange students growing up, the hardest thing for them to hear was "can" versus "can't". Since the "t" is silent, it really is just a subtle nuance in the way the "n" is pronounced, with drastically different results if misheard or misunderstood.
emodendroket 10y ago
> (Which is why romanization of Asian languages, for instance, is a trap for new learners: if you're learning Japanese, the latin alphabet should have no place whatsoever in your learning. It's a tempting, but false path) I don't really believe this. Spanish, French, English, and Swahili are all written in the same alphabet, but have wildly different pronunciations. There's nothing magical about using Roman letters (and I have a chip on my shoulder about this after studying Japanese because, while converting Japanese to a romanized system has actual sound arguments against it, "it would sound like English" is trotted out constantly even though it's nonsense).
- 55555 10y ago
  I'll use Thai as an example because I speak/read/write Thai, but the following is also true for most other languages... If you were raised speaking english, then the roman letters of the english alphabet have distinct pronounciations/sounds to you. They make these sounds in your head when you read them. Someone born in mexico will have a different alphabet, and heck even australians and British people have different sounds for their letters than Americans. Heck even Americans from different regions have different sounds. The point is that Thai people make different noises when they speak. They do not have an "z" sound. Frankly, none of their sounds match up exactly to any of our sounds. When you spell thai words using the english alphabet, you will then tend to read the word back as you have written it, in English, and thus incorrectly. Thai letters have Thai sounds, so you should learn this second alphabet and then you can read thai words by making the correct thai sounds. If a language has an official transliteration system, such as pinyin for Chinese, then it may possibly work, but you are still essentially learning a second alphabet, merely one with the same shaped letters. For languages like Thai though, there is no official transliteration, and making your own and using it consistently would be more difficult than simply learning the Thai alphabet, and infact would more or less require learning the Thai alphabet. For an extreme example, consider that African language that has the clicky sounds. How would you even begin to remember how a word sounds if you were storing it in your brain as text after transliterating it into the English alphabet? "Click clack click clack" is not the correct pronunciation. Edit: I re-read your comment and see that you speak Japanese. You are using roman-looking letters, but you are surely being very careful to read the letters using Japanese sounds. Given that an alphabet is a set of letters that represent phonemes, are you really using the English alphabet or have you created a second, phonetic Japanese alphabet that happens to have identical shapes?

by GuiA 10y ago

joggery 10y ago

Indeed. And just as most people can't see things accurately, not can they sense what's going on inside their mouths. AFAICT each accent has a signature pattern of muscle tension and positioning of jaw, pharynx, etc.

yoz-y 10y ago

I agree with the idea but disagree about the romanisation part. There are many reasons why people should start with romanised versions first. The main reason is that one should concentrate on the language first and on complex writing later, otherwise there is too much information to process. The other reason is that any useful actual writing in those languages will be done in the romanised alphabet (i.e.: on a computer). The barrier of unlearning the pronunciation of different characters is no larger when learning Chinese pinyin while being english, than learning Slovak pronunciations of Latin letters while being French.

_samihasan_ 10y ago
I agree with you completely and I even developed an open -source writing system called Eskéndereyya [1] to help learners of Arabic in reading and pronunciation and to prepare them to make the jump to the Arabic script very confidently because I noticed that some beginners are put off by the notion of learning a completely new script just to read and write few sentences and when taking into account how usually Arabic is communicated in writing without diacritics, it becomes very frustrating for them to get any immediate return for their efforts to learn the language. [1]: https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya
kobeya 10y ago
With Japanese learners at least, you can tell with a great deal of accuracy whether someone used a romanization crutch or native script from the get-go based on how bad their accent is (anecdotal, but observation over many students). I'm don't know if this holds true of Chinese, though.
- ykler 10y ago
  Hiragana and katakana are pretty easy to learn, so if someone doesn't learn them quickly, it might be evidence they aren't working hard or efficiently to learn the language or aren't really ambitious. Chinese characters are a different story. I studied Chinese intensively for a year, and now I know almost know Chinese. I blame my failure partly on being forced to learn the characters from the beginning. The characters took 90% of my study time.
  - kobeya 10y ago
    A similar comparison would be learning Bopomofo and using that when knowledge of the characters fails.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  Is that because learning the kana helps? Or because being willing to learn to kana upfront is correlated with being willing to put effort into learning pronunciation?

curun1r 10y ago

> A lot of people will pronounce foreign words with how their brain thinks it should sound, using their native language as a baseline. The trick is to try to get rid of any phonetic preconception you might have, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill. There's actually a trick that, for me at least, makes this a lot easier. If I learn to speak English with a heavy accent of someone with a different native language, it will then be easier to transition into speaking that other language. It almost separates learning a new language from learning to pronounce that language. The key is that it's a lot easier for me to hear and practice the sounds of a new language when I can hear the differences between my pronunciation and correct pronunciation and it's most easy to hear those differences in my native language. With enough practice on the accent, the rhythms, tongue positioning and overall mouth habits that the speaker I'm aping hasn't yet learned to drop become second nature such that when I transition over to speaking that other language, I already have correct habits. As an English speaker, it's so easy to find YouTube clips of people who barely speak English to copy that I can learn to do a pretty convincing accent in an afternoon at this point, though it took take me a couple of days the first few times I tried it.

dharma1 10y ago

agree 100%. And can't recommend her (Betty Edwards') book enough. http://drawright.com/ http://drawright.com/ I think this likely also works for perfect pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI. Neuroplasticity is very different for kids, but there are probably techniques that can enable learning like this with adults - just takes longer.

npgatech 10y ago
Betty Edward's book is horrendously misleading to a serious artist. Her book rewards the user with false sense of skill - learn to draw what you see and not what you know. This is easy to do and she has garnered a tremendous support. Any serious artist who is seeking to truly learn how to draw must go through the fundamentals of construction and being able to draw the same thing from a different viewpoint/angle. Try that with Betty's book where one learns how to draw from a reference without understanding the structure. The reader gets to produce nice looking results, but they will miserably fail when asked to draw the same exact subject from a different angle. This indicates lack of fundamental understanding of how to transform 3D objects/scenes into 2D plane. One has to learn how to internalize the object and its structure before putting it down on paper. Betty's book also is riddled with pseudoscience and baseless claims of how the human brain works.
- dharma1 10y ago
  I agree the books claims about the brain are mostly nonsense, but it does teach you to draw what you see, instead of what you think you see. I think that is a great first step in learning how to draw, feels very satisfying and gets results quickly
  - npgatech 10y ago
    I think that is the problem - learning what you see is flawed and shouldn't be the first step. If you look at Vilppu's drawing manual, or take the Fundamentals of Drawing class at Watts Atelier, and countless credible university courses, what you'll find is opposite of "learning what you see". I can understand that drawing a cube, cone, cylinder is very boring but so is learning chords or music theory in practicing Guitar. That said, if one doesn't want to take drawing seriously and just want to have fun (See conflicting Amazon reviews on Betty's book), Betty's book perhaps is entertaining. I just have a problem with its popularity and will probably lead people into delusion that somehow they have managed to conquer the drawing. Drawing is hard. I also lose respect for authors that despite of knowing nothing about the field or making any attempts to study/understand, they have the audacity to publish their own version of "how the brain works". It bothers me.

wodenokoto 10y ago

The romanisation part is ridiculous, but pops up all the time. English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything. Anybody learning a foreign language will have to come to terms with the fact that the letters work slightly-to-moderately different for each language, whether those are European or Asian languages. Danish and Swedish are practically dialects of each other, but the spelling and pronunciation are miles apart. Trying to read one with the usage of the other will sound as stilted as any transliteration of any "non-alphabet" language. Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible. Vietnamese, like several other Asian languages is Alphabet with diatrics, so again, you have to use Alphabet. There is nothing magical about Asian languages that gets contaminated by the Alphabet. As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss, so it is in no way a poor substitute. You also have to learn romanisations in order to type on a keyboard. The bottom line is, you have to learn new sounds when learning a new language and you have to learn new spelling. shi in Japanese or Chinese are quite close to English, at least compared to how close ta is to the English pronunciation of "shi", so the alphabet acts as a nice mnemonic structure for learners.

skrebbel 10y ago
The way i understood the GP is that Japanese has the benefit of having its own writing system so you won't get so easily lured into mapping sounds to back your own (assumedly latin script based) language. Use that as an opportunity and avoid the Latin alphabet altogether. When learning French you don't have that opportunity so you're going to keep having to remind yourself that not a single character in a French word sounds like what it does on your native language. I've seen this in action when learning Finnish, a long time ago, in a class full of expats. Most Germans had serious trouble with the ä, which sounds entirely different in Finnish than in German. They would consistently pronounce it like in German, which made them sound ridiculous. The rest of the class, whose native language alphabet didn't contain the ä, got their pronunciation much closer to the real thing. I can only imagine how powerful this is if not a single character, but the entire script, is different from your native language.
- 10y ago

jasode 10y ago

>, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill. This sounds plausible and I want it to be true but I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition. (The so-called "critical period."[1]). I think a fascinating example even within one language such as English is the "pin" vs "pen" pronunciation.[2] And plenty of other 2nd-language learning examples such as English speakers missing the delicate "zh" sound in French "bonjour" and always pronouncing it with the hard "j" -- or trying to pronounce the Vietnamese "Nguyen" as "when" or "win". There's a (tonal) phoneme in Vietnamese that's nonexistent in English so it's very possible English listeners can't even hear it as a new distinct sound they have to replicate. The "when" or "win" is the closest approximation they will ever hear and because of that, they will always sound non-native. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_language_acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_languag... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_most_southern_us_english_speakers_make_no/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_m...

acqq 10y ago
It's really funny: "In Alabama, both are pronounced "pee-uhn." People made fun of me when I first moved here for pronouncing pen as "pehn" and pin as, well "pin." hawklawson: "Can I borrow a pehn?" people: "Hahaha you need a 'pun'? Say it agin..." And, to this day, when I'm scheduling appointments for patients over the phone... hawklawson: "I have an opening for tehn o'clock." people: "Huh? Whee-uhn j'you say?" hawklawson: "I have an opening for tee-uhn a'clawk." people: "Alrighty then put 'er down." Source: I can turn my southern accent on and off." And living for more than a decade in the country that simply can't produce some sounds of my mother's tongue, I catch myself having more problems voicing them. I know the difference but it's somehow harder, without the environment and the context. Somehow the tongue becomes almost numb to move like before.
- cjslep 10y ago
  Also from the South. When we hosted foreign exchange students growing up, the hardest thing for them to hear was "can" versus "can't". Since the "t" is silent, it really is just a subtle nuance in the way the "n" is pronounced, with drastically different results if misheard or misunderstood.

emodendroket 10y ago

> (Which is why romanization of Asian languages, for instance, is a trap for new learners: if you're learning Japanese, the latin alphabet should have no place whatsoever in your learning. It's a tempting, but false path) I don't really believe this. Spanish, French, English, and Swahili are all written in the same alphabet, but have wildly different pronunciations. There's nothing magical about using Roman letters (and I have a chip on my shoulder about this after studying Japanese because, while converting Japanese to a romanized system has actual sound arguments against it, "it would sound like English" is trotted out constantly even though it's nonsense).

55555 10y ago
I'll use Thai as an example because I speak/read/write Thai, but the following is also true for most other languages... If you were raised speaking english, then the roman letters of the english alphabet have distinct pronounciations/sounds to you. They make these sounds in your head when you read them. Someone born in mexico will have a different alphabet, and heck even australians and British people have different sounds for their letters than Americans. Heck even Americans from different regions have different sounds. The point is that Thai people make different noises when they speak. They do not have an "z" sound. Frankly, none of their sounds match up exactly to any of our sounds. When you spell thai words using the english alphabet, you will then tend to read the word back as you have written it, in English, and thus incorrectly. Thai letters have Thai sounds, so you should learn this second alphabet and then you can read thai words by making the correct thai sounds. If a language has an official transliteration system, such as pinyin for Chinese, then it may possibly work, but you are still essentially learning a second alphabet, merely one with the same shaped letters. For languages like Thai though, there is no official transliteration, and making your own and using it consistently would be more difficult than simply learning the Thai alphabet, and infact would more or less require learning the Thai alphabet. For an extreme example, consider that African language that has the clicky sounds. How would you even begin to remember how a word sounds if you were storing it in your brain as text after transliterating it into the English alphabet? "Click clack click clack" is not the correct pronunciation. Edit: I re-read your comment and see that you speak Japanese. You are using roman-looking letters, but you are surely being very careful to read the letters using Japanese sounds. Given that an alphabet is a set of letters that represent phonemes, are you really using the English alphabet or have you created a second, phonetic Japanese alphabet that happens to have identical shapes?