Re: Speaking without a foreign accent

From: LEE Sau Dan (danlee_at_informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: 11/12/04 

Date: 12 Nov 2004 18:03:44 +0800

>>>>> "Mxsmanic" == Mxsmanic <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> writes:

    Mxsmanic> Here in France, students in state schools learn grammar
    Mxsmanic> almost exclusively, with little or no practice in
    Mxsmanic> listening, speaking, or pronunciation. Needless to say,
    Mxsmanic> after years of student they still cannot speak or
    Mxsmanic> understand spoken English. Which is why teachers like
    Mxsmanic> myself have jobs.

That is exactly the situation of my self-taught French. I can read
the whole "le petit France" without much difficulties. But I can't
understand a general spoken sentence.

    Mxsmanic> Yes. A lot of students don't seem to be interested in
    Mxsmanic> correcting their accents, though, so very often not much
    Mxsmanic> can be done.

If someone doesn't want to learn something, it is meaningless to
force-teach them. There are always "eternal speakers" of every
subject, who enjoy the status of being a "beginner" forever. (In the
Esperanto community, they are called "cxiamaj komencantoj" and are
very common.)

The bigger problem is: when someone really cares and wants to improve
their pronunciations, they don't know where and how to seek help. 

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     +Z05biGVm-                          ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Are women allow to blow Shofar in Rosh Hashana?
    ... another pronunciation would be looked upon as pedantry, ... Perhaps some other student went to Italy and form there Rabbenu Gershom ... Talmud is quite different and always at variance with it. ... That is not a tradition. ...
    (soc.culture.jewish.moderated)
  • Re: O.T. Robert Kennedy
    ... Bill Clinton speak and commented to several people how great a speaker ... Amazing that other speakers mis-speak, yet no one thinks anything of it, ... who realizes that 'nuclear' and 'nucular' are accepted ... Pronunciation, a sequence of sounds that directly reflects the spelled ...
    (rec.arts.tv.soaps.abc)
  • Re: BBC does it again
    ... pronounce it differently.- ... pronunciation as you can get without code-switching. ... Besides that, you have invented some alchemical set of rules governing how speakers from Place X where English is spoken should pronounce this one name, yet when it's pointed out to you that you don't follow those rules yourself, you are mystified as to why anyone would think it was relevant. ... Because they speak English the way English is spoken in England. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: BBC does it again
    ... pronounce it differently.- ... hold your American English to the same standard. ... pronunciation as you can get without code-switching. ... Because they speak English the way English is spoken in England. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: American Accent Quiz
    ... Since we speak of little that does not involve frequent ... Whether you're MIMIM or MINMINM or somewhere in between, ... but in conversation no casual listener who ... of the words, not their precise pronunciation. ...
    (alt.usage.english)