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Continue from
the 1st review from Wen Qu
The 2nd Review from Wen Qu
on May 1st, 2005
Hopefully my lessons will save you from going through my
mistakes yourself.
Let me start from one question that puzzled me years ago
We all know that babies are geniuses in terms of learning
languages, so everyone is born to master languages. Then, why is that the older
we are becoming, the more difficult for us to learn/correct pronunciation? Is
that paradoxical?
As youths or adults, we are influenced by the external
effect and the internal effect.
1) External effect: wrong or non-native pronunciation we
learned for the first time was imprinted.
2) Internal effect: for other rarely used words, we didn’t
know how to pronounce them; usually we just smartly make up the pronunciation of
those words because we don’t have the time or too lazy to look up the
dictionary. Unfortunately, most of time, we were too smart.
For babies, they just absorb whatever they are taught. As
long as they are taught correctly, they are not subject to either the external
or internal effects. If we take a closer look at the babies’ case, we will find
out that imitation is the most important skill for babies to learn pronunciation
from their parents. Now I find that Pronunciation Patterns could act as
“Pronunciation-Mentor” to us also.
From now on, I will try to review Pronunciation Patterns
objectively. It has some interesting features and I will go through them one by
one.
1)
Auto-play 4000 words.
I would choose any software should it own this feature.
Usually, 3000 words are enough for us to handle routine conversation very well
in the United States and 4000 is even better.
Here, I like to share with you how I took advantage of the
auto-play option:
- I have been investing 25 minutes to listen through 500
words every night.
- Next day, I would go through those words again and
chose the words I have trouble with.
- I just played these words over and over. Sometimes, I
just let my PC play the pronunciation while I was doing other house works.
- Within one month, I have noticed that my pronunciation
has improved greatly.
(By the way, I was also surprised to find out that I made
lots of mistakes before – the right pronunciation of many words is totally
different from how I pronounced)
Click
here to continue to
read Wen's next review on June 9th, 2005.
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