8 ms·

I'm a non-native English speaker, and I've been working with an accent coach to improve my pronunciation. The IPA chart has been instrumental teaching tool, and

I'm a non-native English speaker, and I've been working with an accent coach to improve my pronunciation. The IPA chart has been instrumental teaching tool, and after about two years it's finally starting to sink in. It's really helpful to understand the theory behind the pronunciation, instead of just repeating words and attempt to make the same sounds as my coach. As in "this is what your tongue should be doing, but you're doing this other thing instead." You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong. For example, there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English. It's just something that never crossed my mind before starting to work with a professional.

rootbear 5y ago
This chart is awesome. I agree about understanding the theory. My best friend is Hungarian and I could not get the 'gy' sound in his name (Gyuri) right until I read up on just how it's articulated. I read up on Finnish before I visited there a few years ago and it seemed a lot easier, although I'm not sure I understand the 'o' vowel correctly.
- euroderf 5y ago
  Finnish 'o' is familiar enough, perhaps you mean 'ö' ?
gizmo686 5y ago
I had this realization during one of my later linguistics classes. It was a syntax class, so didn't really have anything to do with pronunciation; but it was an upper level class, so it was a safe assumption that everyone knew IPA. In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times). Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty. (For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)
- StavrosK 5y ago
  Can you post his name? I don't understand how it would be so hard to hear, hopefully he wouldn't mind.
  - gizmo686 5y ago
    Gesoel /ʒɛʒuɛl/ (Going off of memory here, I probably butchered the pronunciation anyway). /ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English, and for whatever reason it was incredibly hard for me to perceive it there. There was probably other more subtle differences between the two that did not make it into the transcription (e.g., his native name was pronounced with his native accent instead of his English accent)
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      Oh aha, that's very interesting thanks! It's amazing how hard it is to parse things that you aren't primed for. I sometimes don't even recognize my native language for a while if I'm in an English-speaking country and hear it out of the blue without context.
      - gizmo686 5y ago
        I'm giving up my search for it, but I once read a research paper on categorical perception. If you compare [ta] and [da], you find that the only difference is the time between when you make the consonant, and when your vocal chords start vibrating (voice onset time). In theory, VOT is a contimum, with any value being possible. However, in English it forms a tri-modal distribution /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/. The experiment artificially edited a sound to vary between /t/ and /d/, including with VOTs between the two that do not occur in English. What they found is that people put all of the sounds in 2 boxes, and were unable to distinguish between sounds in the same box, even if their VOT varied considerably. However, when test subjects were played the same sounds, but told they were listening to rain drops, this effect disapeared, and they were able to distinguish between sounds in the same box.
dvirsky 5y ago
I'm a native Hebrew speaker. We basically have one way to say each vowel. It took practice for me (not with a coach but with some training videos etc) to even hear the different ways English speakers pronounce them, my brain just wasn't tuned to hear them, let alone pronounce them. Week, weak and wick will be pronounced and will sound exactly the same to a non trained Hebrew speaker, and to much much more hilarity - sheet/shit, peace/piece/piss.
- shazar 5y ago
  Aren't week/weak and piece/peace pronounced exactly the same?
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    They're really quite close, both pairs of them. But the emphasis isn't quite the same as most people speak it.
    - ff7c11 5y ago
      I think they're identical.
      - danielheath 5y ago
        I’m sure, in many accents, that they are. Definitely not the same in Australian Strine.
        hunter2_ 5y ago
        As an American, I knew about Straya but this is the first I've heard of Strine. Or should I say Murican :)
        no_carrier 5y ago
        They're identical in Australian English.
bjackman 5y ago
I was once in a classroom in India attempting to teach English to Hindi speaking kids (I don't speak Hindi, but at that time I more or less knew the devanagari script). Someone told me a Hindi word and I wanted to write it on the blackboard in an example. There are (at least) 3 different consonants in Hindi that just sound like "T" to me. So it took me 3 attempts to spell this Hindi word correctly. The kids all absolutely lost their minds with laughter at this - they were all yelling (what I heard as) "no not tuh, TUH" and just couldn't understand why I couldn't tell the difference.
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  The same happens with foreigners learning Mandarin Chinese. The consonants are easy, but each vowel can be pronounced with one of 4 different tones (or 5 if you count the 'neutral' tone). If you get a tone wrong, sometimes people will understand the erroneous word due to surrounding context. But pretty often you'll just elicit a blank stare. This is especially the case for short phrases, e.g. when you're asking for directions.
  - chalcolithic 5y ago
    >The consonants are easy I wish. My teachers have no problem telling apart my j and q, but I rarely hear the difference despite all the cosonants in my native language coming in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs.
    - rahimnathwani 5y ago
      I forgot that English speakers often have difficulty with these pairs of consonant sounds in Mandarin: j / zh q / ch (the former is further forward in the mouth than 'ch' in English, and the latter further back, with a fully clenched mouth)
jdmichal 5y ago
Wikipedia has a large number of "Help:IPA/<lang>" articles that I refer to a lot. Here's the English one, with its abundance of vowels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English
davidw 5y ago
May I ask which coach you are working with? My wife is interested in one of those services. Thanks!
- JaakkoP 5y ago
  Let me ask my coach if she's taking new clients at the moment and I'll get back to you. You can reach me at {HN Username}iipponen@gmail.com
DavidSJ 5y ago
I found Fluent Forever's minimal pair Anki training decks to be extremely helpful for my German listening and pronunciation. I'm native to American English, and I've been told by multiple native German speakers that my accent is a 2 in strength on a scale of 1 to 10. https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciation-trainer/ https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...
esolyt 5y ago
> there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English What are those four ways?
- schoen 5y ago
  I think this is an orthography issue rather than a phonology issue. I did a search in cmudict and found examples! sample → /s/ treasure → /ʒ/ visible → /z/ unsure → /ʃ/ I could probably have thought of these eventually, but cmudict made it a whole lot quicker.
  - schoen 5y ago
    OK, and it can also, rarely, be silent ("island", "debris").
blowski 5y ago
> You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong There's a book called "Learner English" by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith for identifying common problems faced by English learners coming from different language backgrounds. They don't have a section on Finnish, at least in my second edition.

rootbear 5y ago

This chart is awesome. I agree about understanding the theory. My best friend is Hungarian and I could not get the 'gy' sound in his name (Gyuri) right until I read up on just how it's articulated. I read up on Finnish before I visited there a few years ago and it seemed a lot easier, although I'm not sure I understand the 'o' vowel correctly.

euroderf 5y ago
Finnish 'o' is familiar enough, perhaps you mean 'ö' ?

gizmo686 5y ago

I had this realization during one of my later linguistics classes. It was a syntax class, so didn't really have anything to do with pronunciation; but it was an upper level class, so it was a safe assumption that everyone knew IPA. In the beginning of the class, the professor introduced himself with "my name is X, but you can call me Y if that is too difficult". The two names were mostly the same, except that the first sound in X was a complete mumble, where I could not make out what he had said (and he repeated it several times). Later in the first class he handed out a syllubus which included his name in IPA. I immidietly knew not only how to pronounce it, but was able to do so without any difficulty. (For those curious, his real name started with /ʒ/, while his nickname started with /dʒ/)

StavrosK 5y ago
Can you post his name? I don't understand how it would be so hard to hear, hopefully he wouldn't mind.
- gizmo686 5y ago
  Gesoel /ʒɛʒuɛl/ (Going off of memory here, I probably butchered the pronunciation anyway). /ʒ/ does not occur in word-initial position in English, and for whatever reason it was incredibly hard for me to perceive it there. There was probably other more subtle differences between the two that did not make it into the transcription (e.g., his native name was pronounced with his native accent instead of his English accent)
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    Oh aha, that's very interesting thanks! It's amazing how hard it is to parse things that you aren't primed for. I sometimes don't even recognize my native language for a while if I'm in an English-speaking country and hear it out of the blue without context.
    - gizmo686 5y ago
      I'm giving up my search for it, but I once read a research paper on categorical perception. If you compare [ta] and [da], you find that the only difference is the time between when you make the consonant, and when your vocal chords start vibrating (voice onset time). In theory, VOT is a contimum, with any value being possible. However, in English it forms a tri-modal distribution /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/. The experiment artificially edited a sound to vary between /t/ and /d/, including with VOTs between the two that do not occur in English. What they found is that people put all of the sounds in 2 boxes, and were unable to distinguish between sounds in the same box, even if their VOT varied considerably. However, when test subjects were played the same sounds, but told they were listening to rain drops, this effect disapeared, and they were able to distinguish between sounds in the same box.

dvirsky 5y ago

I'm a native Hebrew speaker. We basically have one way to say each vowel. It took practice for me (not with a coach but with some training videos etc) to even hear the different ways English speakers pronounce them, my brain just wasn't tuned to hear them, let alone pronounce them. Week, weak and wick will be pronounced and will sound exactly the same to a non trained Hebrew speaker, and to much much more hilarity - sheet/shit, peace/piece/piss.

shazar 5y ago
Aren't week/weak and piece/peace pronounced exactly the same?
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  They're really quite close, both pairs of them. But the emphasis isn't quite the same as most people speak it.
  - ff7c11 5y ago
    I think they're identical.
    - danielheath 5y ago
      I’m sure, in many accents, that they are. Definitely not the same in Australian Strine.
      - hunter2_ 5y ago
        As an American, I knew about Straya but this is the first I've heard of Strine. Or should I say Murican :)
      - no_carrier 5y ago
        They're identical in Australian English.

bjackman 5y ago

I was once in a classroom in India attempting to teach English to Hindi speaking kids (I don't speak Hindi, but at that time I more or less knew the devanagari script). Someone told me a Hindi word and I wanted to write it on the blackboard in an example. There are (at least) 3 different consonants in Hindi that just sound like "T" to me. So it took me 3 attempts to spell this Hindi word correctly. The kids all absolutely lost their minds with laughter at this - they were all yelling (what I heard as) "no not tuh, TUH" and just couldn't understand why I couldn't tell the difference.

rahimnathwani 5y ago
The same happens with foreigners learning Mandarin Chinese. The consonants are easy, but each vowel can be pronounced with one of 4 different tones (or 5 if you count the 'neutral' tone). If you get a tone wrong, sometimes people will understand the erroneous word due to surrounding context. But pretty often you'll just elicit a blank stare. This is especially the case for short phrases, e.g. when you're asking for directions.
- chalcolithic 5y ago
  >The consonants are easy I wish. My teachers have no problem telling apart my j and q, but I rarely hear the difference despite all the cosonants in my native language coming in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs.
  - rahimnathwani 5y ago
    I forgot that English speakers often have difficulty with these pairs of consonant sounds in Mandarin: j / zh q / ch (the former is further forward in the mouth than 'ch' in English, and the latter further back, with a fully clenched mouth)

jdmichal 5y ago

Wikipedia has a large number of "Help:IPA/<lang>" articles that I refer to a lot. Here's the English one, with its abundance of vowels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English

davidw 5y ago

May I ask which coach you are working with? My wife is interested in one of those services. Thanks!

JaakkoP 5y ago
Let me ask my coach if she's taking new clients at the moment and I'll get back to you. You can reach me at {HN Username}iipponen@gmail.com

DavidSJ 5y ago

I found Fluent Forever's minimal pair Anki training decks to be extremely helpful for my German listening and pronunciation. I'm native to American English, and I've been told by multiple native German speakers that my accent is a 2 in strength on a scale of 1 to 10. https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciation-trainer/ https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...

esolyt 5y ago

> there's just one way to pronounce "S" in Finnish, whereas there are four ways to do that in English What are those four ways?

schoen 5y ago
I think this is an orthography issue rather than a phonology issue. I did a search in cmudict and found examples! sample → /s/ treasure → /ʒ/ visible → /z/ unsure → /ʃ/ I could probably have thought of these eventually, but cmudict made it a whole lot quicker.
- schoen 5y ago
  OK, and it can also, rarely, be silent ("island", "debris").

blowski 5y ago

> You can even use the chart (and maybe Wikipedia) to identify specific reasons as to why you're doing something wrong There's a book called "Learner English" by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith for identifying common problems faced by English learners coming from different language backgrounds. They don't have a section on Finnish, at least in my second edition.