The ear in your brain (English tips for French learners)
If you have ever been to an international conference, you probably couldn't have helped noticing how much the grip on English of a speaker depends on the country where s/he comes from. Folks from the Netherlands and Sweden would usually give a very decent performance. You would recognize French speakers among all by their accent, obviously; while the worst of them all are arguably the Japanese.
One explanation I have heard is that, after a while, you somehow become 'deaf' to the sounds that your mother language misses. The example I have most frequently come across is the Japanese that supposedly cannot differenciate between the 'r' and 'l' sounds.
According to my personnal experience, this does not make sense at all. Ok, I cannot pretend to clearly distinguish between the three (1, 2, 3) different ways of saying the word 'donkey'. But most of the time, when I am presenting two words, I can spot the difference, even how subtle it might be.
It seems to me the problem is not really that I cannot hear features that my own language does not have, but that I don't pay attention.
It's best illustrated with Chinese. Chinese has tones, which means that syllables are only part of the story; if you voice stays steady or falls sharply while you pronounce the syllable ma, you are either saying 媽 (mother) or 罵 (to insult), which obviously you don't want to mix if you still care about some potentially valuable inheritance. Now, everybody would agree that the difference between a steady and a falling tone can be heard by anybody; and yet, paying attention to this damn tones is one of the most difficult things to the students in Chinese.
I guess what I am trying to say is that, no matter how difficult it is to pay attention and to mimic new features of a foreign language, it is never, ever, impossible to. Your ear is not deaf to these sounds -- your brain is just too lazy to process them. Good news: the brain can be taught better.
One of the main difficulty when learning English is how to pronounce things. It has always striken me how English is so far away from all other European languages in that respect. German? You have to know how to pronounce those 'ch', and to make your p's and your t's stronger, and that's pretty much it. Spanish? The rolling r's are actually quite easy to master, as well as those funny z's and gutural j's. Italian? You get the weird gl's right and you're all set.
English? Well, forget about the alphabet. Actually, I've always thought that knowing how to read and write has been the main reason why learning how to pronounce English right took me so long. The relationship of English to writting is pathetic, if not pathological, and you just have to have a glance at the famous poem entitled 'This phonetic labyrinth' to have a pretty good understanding of how dramatic the situation is. (Note that this poem was written by a foreigner living in the UK. Quite a few of the spelling and pronouciation curiosities listed in this poem relates to British English. American English, thankfully, is considerably simpler and more consistent).
As for me, the first sparkle was made by one of my English teachers, who decided to lecture us about the phonetic writting of words. Of very, very basic words we thought we knew -- but we didn't, because again we didn't pay attention, every time we heard them, to the difference between what we thought those words are pronounced, and how they actually are. And this excellent teacher had shocking news indeed. He asked us to open our dictionaries and look at the pronounciation of this tiny, innocent, familiar word: of.
I coudn't believe my eyes.
The official pronounciation of of, in my dictionary and in all of my classmates was not 'OF', but 'UH-V'.
From this very moment, I suddenly realized the extent of all I have missed by sticking to the word spelling and my mental interpretation thereof. It's not that I couldn't make the distinction between 'of' and 'uh-v' -- it's just that I wasn't aware that I should in the first place. I just had to unlock the ear in my brain, to let loose any logic between writting and pronounciation, and let me relearn English. I also realized that this i that you find, say, in bit, is actually very easy to mimic if you think of it as a sound midway to the French i and é. (Give a bét of a try, you'll be surprised!).
From this very moment, I was also angry at all those useless English teachers I have had so far.
Thank you, dear English teacher -- you are one of the very few good English teachers France can be proud uh-v. Too bad I met you when I was already 20.
One explanation I have heard is that, after a while, you somehow become 'deaf' to the sounds that your mother language misses. The example I have most frequently come across is the Japanese that supposedly cannot differenciate between the 'r' and 'l' sounds.
According to my personnal experience, this does not make sense at all. Ok, I cannot pretend to clearly distinguish between the three (1, 2, 3) different ways of saying the word 'donkey'. But most of the time, when I am presenting two words, I can spot the difference, even how subtle it might be.
It seems to me the problem is not really that I cannot hear features that my own language does not have, but that I don't pay attention.
It's best illustrated with Chinese. Chinese has tones, which means that syllables are only part of the story; if you voice stays steady or falls sharply while you pronounce the syllable ma, you are either saying 媽 (mother) or 罵 (to insult), which obviously you don't want to mix if you still care about some potentially valuable inheritance. Now, everybody would agree that the difference between a steady and a falling tone can be heard by anybody; and yet, paying attention to this damn tones is one of the most difficult things to the students in Chinese.
I guess what I am trying to say is that, no matter how difficult it is to pay attention and to mimic new features of a foreign language, it is never, ever, impossible to. Your ear is not deaf to these sounds -- your brain is just too lazy to process them. Good news: the brain can be taught better.
One of the main difficulty when learning English is how to pronounce things. It has always striken me how English is so far away from all other European languages in that respect. German? You have to know how to pronounce those 'ch', and to make your p's and your t's stronger, and that's pretty much it. Spanish? The rolling r's are actually quite easy to master, as well as those funny z's and gutural j's. Italian? You get the weird gl's right and you're all set.
English? Well, forget about the alphabet. Actually, I've always thought that knowing how to read and write has been the main reason why learning how to pronounce English right took me so long. The relationship of English to writting is pathetic, if not pathological, and you just have to have a glance at the famous poem entitled 'This phonetic labyrinth' to have a pretty good understanding of how dramatic the situation is. (Note that this poem was written by a foreigner living in the UK. Quite a few of the spelling and pronouciation curiosities listed in this poem relates to British English. American English, thankfully, is considerably simpler and more consistent).
As for me, the first sparkle was made by one of my English teachers, who decided to lecture us about the phonetic writting of words. Of very, very basic words we thought we knew -- but we didn't, because again we didn't pay attention, every time we heard them, to the difference between what we thought those words are pronounced, and how they actually are. And this excellent teacher had shocking news indeed. He asked us to open our dictionaries and look at the pronounciation of this tiny, innocent, familiar word: of.
I coudn't believe my eyes.
The official pronounciation of of, in my dictionary and in all of my classmates was not 'OF', but 'UH-V'.
From this very moment, I suddenly realized the extent of all I have missed by sticking to the word spelling and my mental interpretation thereof. It's not that I couldn't make the distinction between 'of' and 'uh-v' -- it's just that I wasn't aware that I should in the first place. I just had to unlock the ear in my brain, to let loose any logic between writting and pronounciation, and let me relearn English. I also realized that this i that you find, say, in bit, is actually very easy to mimic if you think of it as a sound midway to the French i and é. (Give a bét of a try, you'll be surprised!).
From this very moment, I was also angry at all those useless English teachers I have had so far.
Thank you, dear English teacher -- you are one of the very few good English teachers France can be proud uh-v. Too bad I met you when I was already 20.
posted by frenchdude at 1:10 AM
8 Comments:
Salut French Dude,
Why do they say "qu'est-ce que c'est que ca?" It sounds like, "what is that what it is that this?" Huh?What is the difference between this and "qu'est-ce que c'est?" Isn't qu'est-ce que c'est enough? Yet somehow I have got in the habit of saying "que ca" at the end because I hear it a lot. Cool blog, btw. I hope you keep on so I can ask other questions as they arise!
Interesting blog. You may want to check out my blog "Framptonia" at nathanframpton.blogspot.com . I have a few contributors and there are some great discussions.
You may also want to try blog explosion to get more readers on your blog. I have a blog explosion link on my blog if you are interested.
in fact, "qu'est ce que c'est" means : what is this, that it is ? and "qu'est ce que c'est que ça ?" means what is this, that it is THAT thing ? It's used, for example, when you're discovering something quite surprising (or disgusting : "berk, qu'est ce que c'est que ça ?" can be translated by "ick, what's that ?")
dont give up bonjour tristesse !!! ;)
You have to forgive the Japanese because their language is so different from English. where Dutch is at least in the same language group. French is rather difficult for English speakers but Spanish is a lot easier. For further fun with English may I recommend Melvyn Bragg's The Adventure of Englsih: The Biography of a Language.
I 'taught' first year phonetics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and I learnt a lot about English sounds that I had never really thought about before when I had to transcribe words phonetically. Like the upside down 'e' symbol which is pronounced something like 'uh' and is used in the, a, and countless other words in British RP English as soon as these words are used in a sentence and not just read out in isolation.
My students' pronunciation did improve dramatically after that course. Even though I was making most of it up as I went along...
This is such a great blog - I don't imagine you'll receive this post as it's so old now but if you do then drop me a mail at hg_wilson at domain watsonbox.net: I just moved to Paris from the UK and will start to learn French... think I should try to convince you to start posting again!
Happy Fête Nationale, France!
It is the accent that is the problem. I learned French young but the accent was always there and I have been making progress but it takes a number of years.
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