Improving pronunciation and prosody

Discussion in 'Learning Techniques and Advice' started by garyb, Jul 11, 2014.

  1. garyb

    garyb Member

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    I was reading Big_Dog's thread about pronunciation in his Synergy method and I was going to post this as a reply, but I thought it would make more sense as a new topic. Big_Dog encourages working on pronunciation from the start, and I agree especially after having initially learnt French without paying attention to pronunciation then trying to fix all the bad habits afterwards. But that thread didn't have much constructive discussion on the how. And sadly, most courses and teachers pay little if any attention to pronunciation, and even in general discussion about language learning it's an area that doesn't get much focus.

    There's the whole debate of whether it's worth trying to obtain a good accent at the expense of working on other aspects of the language like grammar and vocabulary, which I'm not keen to repeat but personally I believe that a good accent is important for my goals especially as it's the first impression that people get of your competence in the language. Unfortunately though, I am absolutely not one of those lucky people who can reproduce an accent just from hearing it! Learning how to identify and produce the individual sounds is simple enough once you have some familiarity with phonetics and IPA (even if not particularly easy; it takes a lot of work!), but nailing the prosody is quite another thing and often I feel like I'll never get there...

    A few methods I'm aware of:

    * Shadowing: it's probably the most well-known one; basically you listen to audio and repeat it as you hear it. There are various permutations such as doing it with or without a transcription and while going for a walk in the park. Personally I've not found this useful for learning pronunciation as such, but I've found it helpful for "training in" what I've already learnt, for example going from being able to produce a sound in isolation to being able to produce it in the context of words and sentences. And for the same reason, I'm a bit wary of it as I think it can also train in bad habits...

    * Olle Kjellin's chorusing method: essentially you listen to a short phrase lots of times, then repeat it at the same time as the instructor/audio lots of times, trying to mimic. By hearing yourself repeat it so many times you essentially give yourself feedback and slowly get more accurate. Olle claims to have had great results from his students using it, and I've done some experimentation by looping phrases in Audacity. I've found it helpful, although it takes a lot of time and effort for the improvements to actually make their way to your spontaneous speech.

    * Luca Lampariello's "accent addition": the idea is to analyse the prosody of short texts to make yourself aware of the patterns in rhythm, intonation, etc. and then practising applying them to your own speech. Luca has a great accent in several languages so I'm inclined to think he knows his stuff. I've experimented with a combination of this and the chorusing above, by doing the analysis before the chorusing.

    * Idahosa Ness's Mimic Method. I've read his stuff on the site, but not tried the course; it costs money, but considering it includes personalised instruction the price doesn't seem unreasonable.

    * Recording yourself speaking. Definitely useful for finding bad habits, such as consistently pronouncing certain sounds wrongly or reducing vowels that shouldn't be reduced (unstressed /a/s in Italian, etc.), although especially for prosody it can be hard to go from "this doesn't sound right" to actually knowing what exactly is wrong and how to improve it.

    * Simply doing lots of listening. To be fair it works for some people, but the rest of us seem to need a more active approach.

    I suppose the best way would be to work with a teacher who's knowledgeable in the field and can listen to you and tell you exactly what you need to work on and how. But I've no idea where you'd find such a person (as I say, most teachers don't seem to know much about it) and I imagine it could be expensive.

    Has anyone else had success with any of the above methods or other ones? I'm curious to hear.
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  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I've always just used traditional methods of practicing the individual sounds in isolation, practicing syllabic stress and using minimal pair training for similar but difficult to distinguish sounds (which Cainntear disagreed with, i.e. minimal pairs). Kind of like the first part of an FSI course or a separate FSI phonology course. But overall I am a pretty good mimic once I learn by mounth/tongue position how to produce a sound. I have never tried shadowing, but have used the related method of echoing, where you listen and then repeat (using monolingual sources or bilingual like Pimsleur type ones). Prosody is the really tough thing to get down, and though I have not used it, chorusing seems a very good method for same though time consuming (I think he advocates spending the first month on chorusing alone). That time commitment may well be worth it to get a very good pronunciation from the get-go.

    A lot also depends on whether a language is highly phonetic or not, i.e. whether the spoken form corresponds closely to the written. For many languages, especially smaller ones, it seems that the Latin alphabet writing systems were invented by non-natives who were not trained linguists, and which is the source of of many phonetic difficulties. For Mandarin, the Wade-Giles system comes to mind, as opposed to the better pinyin system (I have never really studied the Bopomofo system used in Taiwan).

    One thing I think is very helpful, is simply to allot some time to reading aloud in an L2, even without feedback. Your mouth muscles need practice to produce unfamiliar sounds, just like a singer needs practice. For me such reading is best done after a short session of echoing.
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  3. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    You've got a point. What I've written is meant to be a guide, and I don't normally go into a lot of detail. That being said, you really need to read all my posts in that forum if you want to get a full picture of what I recommend. Everything is interrelated. For example, some of what you mention can be found in Synergy part 1. Also, I wrote what I consider to be a pretty thorough explanation of how to learn Mandarin pronunciation recently. You still need to tailor what I wrote to the individual language you are learning, of course.

    I'm curious why Pimsleur wasn't even on your list. I'm going to write a post on how to use Pimsleur soon, fyi.
  4. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    While Pimsleur is well-regarded for being able to impart good pronunciation, aside from what else it teaches, it only explicitly teaches pronunciation via the method of reverse build-up, not just of phrases, but also of individual words. Since one of instructions to use Assimil is to pause after each sentence and repeat (echo), I think it too allows one to mimic. And of course any course could be used the same way, especially via Audacity or similar software where one can slice and dice and speed up or slow down a dialogue.

    Although Pimsleur is widely available for major languages in libraries throughout the US, it is not as available in libraries outside the big 3 of Spanish, French and German (and perhaps Mandarin). And its hideous cost rules it out for many self-learners who need something not available via a library. While Pimsleur may be slow as well, that criticism has never been the predominant one for me, simply because it can be very effective and most learners are not in a race for time (well, other than all those who post on HTLAL with those "I need to learn language X to C1 in 3 months - help me!" type of threads).

    Pimsleur might be a best recommendation when actually available via a library or cheaply found, but alternatives need to be recommended as well for when that is not possible.

    The best feature Pimsleur could offer would be to add a copy of each lesson in a monolingual L2 format only, the way Living Language did in their older offerings with both "at Home" and "On the Go" recordings (which were not completely identical though).
  5. biTsar

    biTsar Active Member VIP member

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    Pimsleur Farsi, Pimsleur Persian, Pimsleur Ojibwe, Pimsleur Japanese -- all were available from interlibrary loan. My guess is every Pimsleur course can be had this way. On something called Compact disc. (A technology from before your time, pardner :cool:)
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  6. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Good point about inter-library loan, although there might be restrictions on extended loans (assuming one doesn't just rip it). And re antiquated technology, I've still got plenty of cassettes I need to dub to my computer!
  7. biTsar

    biTsar Active Member VIP member

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    It's a pain, but ripping is the way.

    The first CDs of a set often have scratches, the later CDs are pristine. People are the same everywhere -- they have the notion to explore, but they do not like to hold their noses to the grindstone. Bet you could make a fortune selling impressive looking yellow boxes based on this.
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  8. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    One of the biggest mistakes many learners make is to confuse phonology with accent.

    "An accent" is rarely a serious barrier to communication, but saying a sound in a completely wrong manner normally is. The classic example would be an English speaker trying to speak Spanish with their iwn accent. Diphthongised vowels and glide-R mangle "no puedo hacerlo" into "neu puedeu assehleu", which is just as much gobbledigook to the ear as it is to the eye.

    Most courses that attempt to teach pronunciation tend to think in terms of "accent", instead of focusing on the structure of phonemes. This often leaves the learner approximating two different allophones of a single phoneme in ways that are completely different.

    Spanish again provides a classic example, with the TH-like pronunciation of D. If you pronojunce a normal D in the English way, the change to TH makes no sense at all, but if you pronounce the D as a Spanish D, that is by touching your teeth with your tongue, the TH sound makes a lot of sense, because it's now just a reduced, "lazy" D.

    Welsh is even worse for this, as most vowels have three allophones depending on their position in the word relative to the stressed syllable. Most learners tie themselves in knots trying to learn umpteen different sounds and cope with "changes" when a suffix moves the stress. I decided to start by learning one characteristic version of each phoneme and slowly make the distinction of the three variants on top. (Not that I ever got that far with Welsh, mind.)
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  9. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Your biggest ally in learning prosody is possibly your hand.

    I read the suggestion once that emphasising stressed syllables by moving your hand would assist you in learning to stress them properly in speech. I found this to work quite well and I tend to do it when learning a new language.

    I also use it for timing. One of my students here was preparing to deliver a speech in English and her timing was all Italian - all syllables getting equal time, machine-gun like. I got her to move her hand on the important syllables and very quickly, she fell into rhythm with her hand moving steadily and regularly, with other syllables fitted between the beats as in natural speech.

    I've started using this more with other students, and last night I was explaining it to a bunch of Italian Couchsurfers. The immediate improvement was notable, even though it wasn't a complete instant fix.
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  10. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    I didn't see much of a connection between your post and what I said, but I'll comment because you quoted me.
    Isn't repeating phrases "explicitly teaching pronunciation" too? And they tend to cover all the separate sounds at some point, so maybe I don't understand what you mean here. I'm not saying separate sounds are a strength of Pimsleur, but at least they cover them. If you read my first synergy post, I mention how I think pronunciation should be handled in general, and you will see that everything is covered in a very thorough way.

    You lost me. Are you suggesting creating a Pimsleur-like program from Assimil? I don't do this kind of thing any more. There's nothing wrong with it, but just paying for a pre-made program that does exactly what I want is so much more convenient for me. I'm getting to the age where I value my time more than when I was young.

    biTsar made a good point about the interlibrary loan. Also, I've heard it's cheaper in some audio book sites. I bought it really cheap on Ebay once. I've never paid full price for it, but it's never been cheap for me either (usually $200-$300 for 90 lessons). Well worth it to me. Some people just won't be able to use it. And it's a good idea to suggest alternatives in threads like this one. But I'm not about to exclude it from my method or my posting, which it sort of sounded like you were suggesting. Pimsleur is the best program I've used for pronunciation at the sentence level, easily, so it's still my golden boy.

    The best thing for you, maybe, but worthless to me. The best thing for me - a transcript, although I can usually find one or make one without too much effort.
  11. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    I feel obliged to challenge this idea that Pimsleur is good for pronunciation.

    Yes, they do the reverse build-up thing, but that's not so much "pronunciation work"... it's just vocabulary teaching. They're teaching you the word, bit-by-bit, so that you remember it.

    There is no explicit direction on the way to reproduce the actual sound you're hearing. In the Hindi course, AFAIR you don't get told about retroflex vs dental, aspirated vs unaspirated and voiced vs unvoiced, so you're left to notice for yourself that where we have T and D, they have 8 different phonemes. Most learners aren't capable of noticing that, so they will learn it wrong. It also leaves open the possibility (and indeed a high probability) of learning two allophones as though they were distinct phonemes.

    I stopped doing the Hindi course because even though I was aware of all the distinctions, I couldn't hear which consonant was which, soI couldn't copy. I found Vietnamese even worse, because I knew nothing about Vietnamese phonology, and I knew I had no idea whatsoever of the sound I was listening to.
  12. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Firstly, I apologize since this topic is off-topic to this thread, and your comment was more an aside, though I took it initially as relating to pronunciation. Perhaps you could move our posts on Pimsleur to a new thread.

    Please note the criticisms I have for Pimsleur mostly relate to what you get for the price, which in my opinion is excessive, and due to the affiliate channel of distribution. Also many of my criticisms are as to omissions in my view, but which does not take away the value of the course. Barring price and assuming availability, I would heartily recommend Pimsleur to any learner.


    Yes it is teaching pronunciation explicitly, but just not at a deeper levels as well. If one has a talent for mimicry, and can distinguish all the sounds, then that may well be enough for many languages. Again, I am only saying that it may not be enough by itself for pronunciation for some languages and some learners.

    I was only pointing out that other programs that do not have an explicit pause for repetition can also be used, or made to be used, in the same was as Pimsleur for echoing (listen & repeat), and that the Assimil instructions do include one for pausing and repeating, but which makes one do that manually instead of including the pause as Pimsleur does.

    On HTLAL I criticized whiners who complained about the price of Assimil which is mostly under US$100. Just because someone does not have $100 does not make it expensive, and I view it as a comparative judgment via the cost of other programs. But while bargain seekers such as ourselves may be willing to keep an eye out for same, many others have paid full freight which is in the over $500 range. Again comparatively, there are other options for much less, even if they don't work as well as Pimsleur

    Again I apologize if you thought I was insinuating that Pimsleur should not be recommended by yourself or anyone. I do however believe price is an issue with it and that thus alternatives should be suggested as well.

    Then perhaps they could add both :), and a transcript is indeed highly worthwhile. The biggest criticism Pimsleur gets from more experienced learners is the amount of English it contains and how long it is with the pauses (plus how little vocab it contains though that is not as big criticism to me since it obviously cannot take one as far as Assimil or FSI). So after one learns the material fairly well, a second recording for each lesson in just the L2 would be to most learners I think, more efficient for repeated listening, again after one knows the meaning of the L2 in the lesson well.


    Sorry if I came across overly critical, and bashing Pimsleur is not a hobby horse of mine. As I said I would always recommend it, though with caveats and alternatives. I will say what has surprised me the most is that other publishers have not just made their own methods using the Pimsleur Method (not using the name of course), at a much lower price point. The only one that occurs to me is Learning Spanish Like Crazy, which is lower officially though still in the cheap end of the Pimsleur scale for used materials ($100 per level).

    It is too bad that Pimsleur does not ditch the affiliate program for distribution, and just sell directly, with a direct price that is not protective of inflated affiliate pricing.
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  13. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Pimsleur without the English would be an entirely different beast. The whole point of Pimsleur is to reinforce recalling language from memory, and hearing it and copying it does very little to build memory. Also, Assimil's dialogues are designed primarily to be listened to, and attempt to be involving an entertaining as an outside observer. Pimsleur is intended to be controlled role-play, and is only involving when you put yourself into the situation.
  14. Stelle

    Stelle Active Member VIP member

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    This is anecdotal and very brief, but every time that I've taught French to students who've worked their way through Pimsleur, their pronunciation has been excellent. Their overall language skills are not necessarily superior to students using other courses, but their pronunciation certainly is.
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  15. biTsar

    biTsar Active Member VIP member

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    That first Pimsleur lesson will convince people who think they can't learn that maybe they can. It blows their socks clean off.
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  16. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Further to actual topic of this thread, which focuses on methods for pronunciation and prosody, as opposed to resources for same, I was wondering if anyone has used chorusing for a month and what their results were. Also whether dialogues are as good as just one longer non-dialogue type of text. I seem to remember Kjellin or someone who summarized his method on HTLAL saying that one A4 sheet of paper of text with accompanying audio would be sufficient, as that should contain almost all the sounds of a language.
  17. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Not at all, sorry for my misunderstanding.
    Ouch! That one always hurts. Maybe I'll have enough experience some day :(
    For sentence level pronunciation, it's the best I've used. I can't argue with what you said about isolated sounds - that's why I use other techniques for that.
    I have, but not the exact way Olle recommended. I looped audio, and didn't even try to use a "minimal subset of sentences" that contain all the pronunciation present in a language. I just used a bunch of sentences. But doing what I did was enough to realize the method is critically flawed.

    When I started, I felt I was getting a sort of a biofeedback that allowed me to correct my pronunciation. I clearly heard when I wasn't matching the recording, and could adjust so that I didn't hear the discrepancies. So I thought it was great. That is, until I figured out as long as I was in the ballpark, I wouldn't hear discrepancies. But the ballpark is too big for me. The method isn't very accurate.

    I prefer to wait until there is no noise to repeat a phrase. That way I can hear myself, which allows me to pronounce accurately.
    Last edited: Jul 13, 2014
  18. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    A wise old man (or was it a wise guy?) once told me "it's a tool, dummy!"
  19. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    Sorry again :(. I should have qualified that statement with "many".



    That is usually my preference as well, i.e. to echo after the audio. I think I remember though some advice to re-record the audio at differing volumes, and slowly as one progresses, to keep reducing the audio volume until it is gone. Even with just echoing small bits of the material at a time though, I think the practice could be extended until one has done it so many times that one can get the pronunciation down, and exercise that might in fact still take a month.
    Last edited: Jul 13, 2014
  20. garyb

    garyb Member

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    I didn't mention Pimsleur because I also disagree with the "Pimsleur is good for pronunciation" meme. It's just listening and repeating, and as Cainntear explains, it's up to the learner to notice the distinctions and the differences between similar sounds as it doesn't "teach" as such. Like I said in my original post, some people seem to be able to learn well that way but I certainly can't. I worked through all three units of Pimsleur French and my pronunciation and accent were still terrible afterwards ;).

    I recognise the importance of the distinction between individual sounds and prosody/accent even if both come under the "pronunciation" banner. Prosody is my main concern and the main thing I'm hoping to hear ideas about. And I suppose I'm using "prosody" and "accent" interchangeably; correct me if that's

    Interesting idea, I'll give it a try!

    I also did it fairly consistently for a few weeks. As I said, I noticed some improvement but it was limited. I wasn't sure if it was just because I hadn't done enough of it, but it makes a lot of sense considering your "ballpark" point: maybe after that improvement I just got to the point of diminishing returns because the "ballpark" was too big to continue improving. At the end of the day, I suppose it's flawed in that it's still relying on your own perception of prosody, like any other variation of listen-then-repeat. For that reason I think Luca's phonetic analysis might be onto something, since it's focused on actually improving your awareness of prosodic features, developing a "better ear" for prosody if you will. Maybe that combined with listening, repeating and recording could work well, as you'd then be better at telling exactly what is making your prosody different from that of the recordings and what you need to do to fix it? Luca doesn't really go into a lot of detail about what to do after the phonetic analysis and how to apply it to your own speaking.

    Also, it's been a while since I read Olle's paper, but I'm sure he said that when he uses his method in classes, he also listens for students repeatedly making the same mistakes and prompts them to make them aware of it. So that's another bit of feedback that you can't really replicate alone.
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2014

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