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Eventually people can be educated, but what you have to do is find a way give them the experience, to put them in the situation. Sometimes this can only happen
by PakG1 8y ago
Eventually people can be educated, but what you have to do is find a way give them the experience, to put them in the situation. Sometimes this can only happen by making real the thing you are describing, but sometimes by dint of clever artifice you can simulate it.
With luck, eventually there will be an “Aha!”. If you’re really good, the “Aha!” will followed by “Oh, so that’s what you meant”. But don’t be too surprised or upset if the “Aha!” is instead followed by “Why didn’t you tell me that?”.
This jives with how children learn. Perhaps adults are actually the same in many respects. Kids don't learn how to pronounce words by listening to someone explain how to form the lips and place the tongue and vibrate the velum to form a z sound. They just learn by observing it and then trying to attempt it. Ironically, foreign language pronunciation may be one of the examples where you do need to teach adults how to do it before they try to do it because their brains have already defined what's normal and find it difficult to make foreign sounds.
But various other topics? Learn by doing. Light bulb moments by doing.
- thedancollins 8y agoSo, children are so good at learning because they don't "know" anything and therefore do not put cognitive barriers in place?
- jmcgough 8y agoNo, they just have crazy neuroplasticity
- notduncansmith 8y agoPretty much, although they’re also good at making false associations for the same reason.
- mettamage 8y agoI don't know how to make this point clear and concise, my apologies. As a Dutchie when I tried to learn Italian I just did it mostly. I did it exxagerated and in stereotypical fashion because I found it fun. Doing it in exxagerated manner also gave me the feeling I could have fun with the language, was allowed to fail and had an understanding where the exxageration came from and soon got to understand how to do it in a more normal fashion. This approach worked so well that my teacher at one point said to a couple of Russians in class "just pronounce it like Mettamage." They were dumbfounded, "really? Do we have to? It is so over the top." They did it anyway, their Italian accents improved immediately. Before they were really monotone and had a heavy voice, and now their tone was all over the place and their voice was less heavy. Dutch and Italian are closer in pronounciation than I initially thought. So you have a point. But not quite: The point of this whole post is this: when I got back home to The Netherlands, I wanted to continue my studies. I suddenly lost interest in Italian. I realized that learning Italian words on paper is not the same thing as learning Italian words in Rome. The biggest reason: when I learned Italian words in Rome I saw people speak. Not only did I learn a word, I apparently remember how their lips moved to such an extent that the movement was encoded in my lips. This didn't happen straight away but if you forget a particular word a couple of times and you see the word being said all the time, you start to remember how people say the word with their lips. I could clearly remember a distinct feeling of not feeling any muscle memory in my newly learned Italian words that I learned in The Netherlands.
- undershirt 8y agore: learning how to pronounce foreign words via exaggeration—a friend told me that pronouncing Japanese words in the most racist way possible actually earned him nods from his teacher.
- reificator 8y agoThat exaggerated accent came from somewhere. It wasn't just invented by racist people for fun, though I'm sure it's changed over time.
- lotyrin 8y agoTeaching my wife her Katakana has been fun, all the words on the flash cards are loan-words, mostly from English, and the correct readings of the words certainly give her pause.
- farnsworth 8y agoWhen I was taking Chinese classes, our teacher would always demand that talk loud, exaggerate the pronunciation, and be as over-the-top as possible. Apparently there's a popular english learning method in China called Crazy English that takes this approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_English
- Bromskloss 8y agoMockery such as making fun of someone's accent surely does not constitute racism. If racism can be anything, then it loses its meaning.
- cardiffspaceman 8y agoI realize that I'm replying to an old message, but I really find this interesting. I was talking with my father about proper pronunciation of Spanish, because he was very fluent in Spanish. I told of how "over the top" it felt to me, to pronounce certain things certain ways, like I was making fun of Mexicans or something. And he said, "You have to pronounce it that way, it is what they are used to hearing." What is interesting about your post to me is that I thought my attitude was common among Americans, but you add two other groups, Russians and "Dutchies". Americans like to degrade unstressed vowels to undifferentiated "schwa" sounds, while Spanish speakers retain the character of vowels when they are unstressed. To an American this difference on unstressed vowels is one of the things that good pronunciation has that makes it sound over the top to a naive American. Your observation about lip-reading as reinforcement of the pronunciation one hears, is intriguing.