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> Mispronunciation is no big deal! I'd argue on the contrary that it is the most important part when starting learning a new language. People easily skip the p

> Mispronunciation is no big deal! I'd argue on the contrary that it is the most important part when starting learning a new language. People easily skip the pronunciation and phonology part of their target language and then hit a barrier while still being at the beginner level because they cannot go further: nobody understand them. Working seriously on that part at the beginning is fundamental not to lost time and waste effort later on. Heck, I've heard people with 3 years of Chinese that still could not make most consonants correctly...

zzzcpan 8y ago
It's not a barrier if no one understands you, still many years of learning to do. To make a sound you first need to hear it many times and be able to recognize and distinguish it.
- titanix2 8y ago
  You don't need years to produce a phoneme that can be recognized by a native speaker. The important point is two-fold: being close enough to the actual sound, and working on minimal pairs where confusion can occur. It means you don't need to sweat over how you pronounce /r/ in French because however you make it it won't be confused with something else, but one sure should work on making their Chinese /t/ and /tʰ/ correctly. Also for listening given the sheer amount of audio and video that there is on the web it is easy to cram the required hours of listening in a few months.
  - zzzcpan 8y ago
    My point is speaking early on doesn't help with learning the language and isn't a barrier. On the contrary, it slows down progress. You shouldn't try to speak or even attempt to write sentences until you have large enough vocabulary in your brain with all the proper pronunciation and spelling associations and patterns, like to understand 80% of the words in a random article large vocabulary (or more, it takes many years to get to 99% and higher). Otherwise you will learn wrong things and form associations with wrong pronunciations because you had to make assumptions due to broken methodology and those take a long time to get rid of and relearn.
yesenadam 8y ago
I don't think they were at all saying it's not important, but rather trying to encourage, to reassure that 'breaking into a cold sweat' isn't necessary. Also, from what I've heard, Chinese is rather an extreme outlier among languages in terms of difficulty in westerners being understood, isn't it? Everything about it's different. (It works the other way too: by far the worst, opaque, near-indecipherable English-speaking I've experienced online text-chatting with people was by a couple of Chinese people..who told me they were English teachers! I could hardly believe it..)
jnurmine 8y ago
My point was that if someone has a severe social anxiety, one can learn to read the language first. This way they can build a model of phrases and how words tie together and so on. Of course, to actually communicate with people, writing or speaking is required. Then only with speaking comes the pronunciation. That can be very cognitively demanding in addition to other cognitive loads, so having a vocabulary and phrases ready can help. I know two foreign languages. The first foreign one I started to learn by accident by listening (English, through kids' movies/cartoons with subtitles) until English formally started in school. At that point it helped a lot to know some phrases and structure "beforehand". The second foreign one started in school at 14 years old (Swedish), but I did not have a lot of motivation for it back then. Reading felt easier and that is what helped me pick up the language in more detail over ten years later. I also studied German for two years but never used it afterwards so I can't really speak it. I can mostly figure out stuff I read if it has words I know or can figure out the meaning from the context. Now, is my lack of German pronunciation skills stopping me from deepening my skills in German? Nope, I can still study vocabulary and reading in general. Of course I cannot talk with anyone in a proper way. But, at least to me, knowing a language does not imply being able to speak it. Speaking is just one dimension (of reading, writing, listening, speaking).

zzzcpan 8y ago

It's not a barrier if no one understands you, still many years of learning to do. To make a sound you first need to hear it many times and be able to recognize and distinguish it.

titanix2 8y ago
You don't need years to produce a phoneme that can be recognized by a native speaker. The important point is two-fold: being close enough to the actual sound, and working on minimal pairs where confusion can occur. It means you don't need to sweat over how you pronounce /r/ in French because however you make it it won't be confused with something else, but one sure should work on making their Chinese /t/ and /tʰ/ correctly. Also for listening given the sheer amount of audio and video that there is on the web it is easy to cram the required hours of listening in a few months.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  My point is speaking early on doesn't help with learning the language and isn't a barrier. On the contrary, it slows down progress. You shouldn't try to speak or even attempt to write sentences until you have large enough vocabulary in your brain with all the proper pronunciation and spelling associations and patterns, like to understand 80% of the words in a random article large vocabulary (or more, it takes many years to get to 99% and higher). Otherwise you will learn wrong things and form associations with wrong pronunciations because you had to make assumptions due to broken methodology and those take a long time to get rid of and relearn.

yesenadam 8y ago

I don't think they were at all saying it's not important, but rather trying to encourage, to reassure that 'breaking into a cold sweat' isn't necessary. Also, from what I've heard, Chinese is rather an extreme outlier among languages in terms of difficulty in westerners being understood, isn't it? Everything about it's different. (It works the other way too: by far the worst, opaque, near-indecipherable English-speaking I've experienced online text-chatting with people was by a couple of Chinese people..who told me they were English teachers! I could hardly believe it..)

jnurmine 8y ago

My point was that if someone has a severe social anxiety, one can learn to read the language first. This way they can build a model of phrases and how words tie together and so on. Of course, to actually communicate with people, writing or speaking is required. Then only with speaking comes the pronunciation. That can be very cognitively demanding in addition to other cognitive loads, so having a vocabulary and phrases ready can help. I know two foreign languages. The first foreign one I started to learn by accident by listening (English, through kids' movies/cartoons with subtitles) until English formally started in school. At that point it helped a lot to know some phrases and structure "beforehand". The second foreign one started in school at 14 years old (Swedish), but I did not have a lot of motivation for it back then. Reading felt easier and that is what helped me pick up the language in more detail over ten years later. I also studied German for two years but never used it afterwards so I can't really speak it. I can mostly figure out stuff I read if it has words I know or can figure out the meaning from the context. Now, is my lack of German pronunciation skills stopping me from deepening my skills in German? Nope, I can still study vocabulary and reading in general. Of course I cannot talk with anyone in a proper way. But, at least to me, knowing a language does not imply being able to speak it. Speaking is just one dimension (of reading, writing, listening, speaking).