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I'll be honest. I think that's terrible advice for improving your accent, though it might be okay advice for improving your comprehension at an early level and
by xiaoma 10y ago
I'll be honest. I think that's terrible advice for improving your accent, though it might be okay advice for improving your comprehension at an early level and maybe picking up some vocab and grammar along the way.
For improving pronunciation, it's much more useful to pick a short passage that includes pretty much the full phonetic set of the language and drill it repeatedly. In years past, famous hyper-polyglots in Europe tended to use The Lord's Prayer for this. Now, there are a lot more options and you can also record yourself reading the passage and listen and compare your own sound with a native recording. Spend half an hour a day doing this for a month and it will have a dramatic effect on your pronunciation and accent in the target language. At least it has with every single person I've seen who has had the discipline to do it.
- zhte415 10y agoYeah, I agree short passages are great. Because they focus on the flow of sound, not on the individual word. Lords prayer as something to read does not fit well for Chinese. Chinese cannot sanely be read using pinyin. Chinese must be read by characters. I guess you know this, as your username is xiaoma. Speaking and listening doesn't need remembering a lot of what are to early learners, symbols, and to later learners a collection of particles that sometimes make cute sense but are more often a sense of time waste and pain. Learning characters one-by-one however makes no sense. Unless on wants to sound like a CCTV1 7pm news announcer reading a script, words need to be put in to context, and for that is the need to relax, and just say things as they're said.