Re: History of French

From: Ruud Harmsen (realemailseesite01_at_rudhar.com)
Date: 09/17/04 

Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 10:44:53 +0200

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 05:00:15 +0200: Mxsmanic <mxsmanic@hotmail.com>: in
sci.lang:

>I can teach adult learners to produce any sound in English in a few
>minutes, without an accent.

I don't believe you.

>The difficulty is not in producing the
>sounds, but in doing so automatically, so that the articulation needed
>to pronounce them correctly is not a conscious mental distraction.

Exactly. That makes it even harder.

>Most
>students are surprised to discover that they can actually pronounce
>these sounds without an accent. It's easy, though, once the manner of
>producing them is explictly explained to them (instead of "listen and
>repeat").

It's not easy. I know more about certain foreign sounds than probably
any teacher could teach me, and I also know how difficult it is to do
it right. Even after years. Even after lots of practice, knowing how
to do it, and with my excessive interest in phonetics.

Seeing you write that it's so relatively easy to teach foreign
students to speak a language accentless makes me suspect you are not
very good at hearing and detecting foreign accents. Not in all
meticulous detail. I think you often think you hear accentless
pronunciation when it really isn't.
That might explain why you claim to have met so many people with
perfect command of a second language learnt in adulthood. You simply
don't hear their mistakes. Am I right?

>Children learn by practicing a sound thousands and thousands of times,
>until others stop ridiculing the way they say it.

Nobody ridicules a child for speaking inperfectly, because everybody
knows it's what children do. 

-- 
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com

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