In my experience, people often mispronounce words because they pronounce them based on their spelling (which doesn´t work, unless you know all the rules and their exceptions) . It gets even worse when they apply the pronounciation rules of their native language.
When I learned English in school, I always pronounced “read” (past tense) like uhm…“read” instead of “red”. I could probably find more (and better) examples, but my brain refuses to cooperate.
Have you guys noticed that “phenomenon” as well?
Do you think it´d be a good idea to focus on listening instead of reading to solve that problem?
In German, I think reading is fine. Other than a few bad apples, I almost always know the pronounciation of the words I read. I can imagine it might be a problem with English. I am always coming across English words I have only ever read and have no idea what the pronounciation is.
Wow, that has thrown me! I’ve never thought about pronunciation that way round. I always thought the better the spelling, the better the pronunciation and, as an extension, the more we read the better we get.
I suppose what it really requires is to have a good understanding of ?the principals of pronunciation? of our TL before we start sub-vocalising in the beginners’ reading stage.
I do know it is difficult to iron out one’s early misconceptions in any language. My aunt, who learnt her English in the 1930s persisted in stressing police the Scottish way, despite everybody telling her to please stop saying POLis. Whenever she saw the word ‘police’ she saw POLis and that’s what she said.
In German I learnt to say VegeTArier as a child, but the other day I heard some Germans say VegetaRIER which to me doesn’t make any sense. The spelling of Vegetarier to my mind asks for VegeTArier…
“I suppose what it really requires is to have a good understanding of ?the principals of pronunciation? of our TL before we start sub-vocalising in the beginners’ reading stage.”
Hmm…beginners sub-vocalise with a strong accent. Using LingQ helps a lot , because you can listen to the text while you´re reading it.
I guess the only way to completely get rid of that problem would be reaching “illiterate flueny” before you start reading and writing (which is how we learned our native language). I don´t know how one could do that as an adult, though.
“In German I learnt to say VegeTArier as a child, but the other day I heard some Germans say VegetaRIER which to me doesn’t make any sense. The spelling of Vegetarier to my mind asks for VegeTArier…”
I think it really depends on the language. Like Colin said, I do better with German than English in this regard. I’m also much better at Swedish than Finnish, but I’m way better at getting the pronunciation from the spelling in Finnish.
For me, though, I find that I really have to see a word to understand / remember it. I don’t know if it’s that way for everyone or if I’m just weird.^^
I think early in my German learning, I found that I could basically never learn words without seeing them in print many times. Hearing them was of doubtful use. I don’t know why, but maybe it was because I didn’t really understand what I was hearing well enough, or the language just had not gesinkt in well enough for it to sound natural for me.
I am coming up to the second year anniversary of the day that I started learning German in a few weeks (back then, I was still naive enough to think that German might be a useful thing to know in Vienna). I have noticed that in the last few months, I have found it much easier to learn words just by hearing them. I understand what I hear much better and it is starting to be quite natural, such that I can listen to German and forget that it is a foreign language. Also, now I hear a lot of words that I have probably heard many times in the past, and I hear a lot of words that are similar to words that I already know, that I find it easier to understand a word for the first time.
I find it hard to believe how much football vocabulary I have learned since yesterday. Words like Treffer, Tor, Schiedsrichter, Kopfball, Handspiel, and abseits sound almost natural to me now, even though I have only ever watched three football matches in German, all of which were in the last 25 hours.
People pronounce when they read? They mispronounce with subvocalized accents? There’s such a thing as reading too much? I’ve mispronounced plenty of words in English. Maybe I should read less? Beginners should worry about pronouncing perfectly? So the classroom methodology has sense after all?
Paule do you still say reed when you should say red? Was the problem solved by cutting back on reading? Maybe you heard a few people say it correctly and made a mental note and then changed your pronunciation? Did you then have any trouble remembering your new pronOUnciation? (To be clear, I am being facetious to some extent. I’m not trying to be hostile and I know you can handle a little joshing.)
Do people really say tons of words they’ve never heard spoken before? I thought that only happened in classrooms where you are forced to try to pronounce unfamiliar words and are sure to be chastised for mispronunciations.
I can’t claim to get any of it. Maybe I’m missing the point. To pronounce a word confidently, in whatever language, I have to have heard it said by others a few times. Reading greatly helps me recognize spoken words I would have glazed over before. The pronunciation sticks better if I already know the meaning of the word. The vast majority of the time the meaning of the word comes from reading. So my opinion is that reading is generally GOOD for pronunciation. In fact, reading makes learning everything else easier for me.
Nope, but I think that´s it´s possible to focus to much on reading and/or to rely too much on the spelling of words when you pronounce them.
" I’ve mispronounced plenty of words in English. Maybe I should read less?"
Which words do you mispronounce, the ones that are mostly used in writing?
" Beginners should worry about pronouncing perfectly? So the classroom methodology has sense after all?"
The fact that I mispronounced words like “read” after 8 years of English classes proves how awesome classroom methodology is. I don´t feel like answering the next paragraph of questions, it seems like you´re …uhm…making statements by asking questions?^^
" Did you then have any trouble remembering your new pronOUnciation? (To be clear, I am being facetious to some extent. I’m not trying to be hostile and I know you can handle a little joshing.)"
Why´d you write “pronOUnciation”?
I don´t feel “offended” or anything like that, don´t worry.^^
@the rest of your post
So, you´re basically saying that “reading is good as long as you also listen a lot”? I´d agree with that.
@paule I don’t believe everyone subvocalizes all the time and I know I generally didn’t during my beginning stages of learning Spanish. I was aware I said things with an accent when I did talk, but while reading I generally didn’t “hear” anything; I only saw.
Yes, my rhetorical questions were statements (That’s what rhetorical questions are really, I guess). You don’t have to respond to every statement if don’t you want. I won’t be offended.
“Which words do you mispronounce, the ones that are mostly used in writing? ;)”
I think you’re missing the point. If I hadn’t read them, I wouldn’t be using them. I mispronounce words only when I try to say words I haven’t heard (noticed) people say before. I mispronounce rarely because I say words I’ve never heard so rarely, which is my point. I’m saying that I think this “problem” is exaggerated and the blame misplaced. I just haven’t heard the words before. Once I do, the problem disappears because the word has meaning and it’s easy to notice and remember a novel (to you) pronunciation.
“Why´d you write “pronOUnciation”?” I’m kidding you about your spelling error, which, who knows, may reflect a word that you currently mispronounce.
I’m basically saying that reading is, nearly 100% of the time, wholly beneficial to language learning, whether you look at pronunciation or whatever. The effect isn’t necessarily direct, but in the long run, yeah, always positive.
For all words, I take the word, convert it to sound in my head, and then match the sound up to find it’s meaning and visual image. Isn’t it like that for everyone, even reading your native language? Or is that some part of my dyslexic coping mechanisms? Words that don’t have an image or have multiple meanings are potential problems in my comprehension.
When I started wondering about Korean, I looked at some romanized Korean words. I saw the same letters in the English alphabet and tried to pronounce the words as if they were English. I stored these made-up English sounds to Korean words and that is how I remembered the Korean. When later I decided to actually learn Korean, all those stored, mispronounced sounds in my head are a problem. If I could wave a magic wand and forget every word I learned from romanized Korean, I would.
Once I switched to using the Korean alphabet, pronunciation and storing the Korean words as Korean sounds was a lot easier. I now think it is a gift that Korean does not use the same alphabet as English.
Judy Thompson’s TED talk explains that English focuses on the stressing of a word and the way a word is spelled doesn’t link tightly to the way it is pronounced. I understand that now. Korean isn’t like that. Korean has a far more sensible pronunciation than English.
Sometimes I think English is quite a mad language. That so much of the world is working so hard to learn it seems insane. Wouldn’t life be better if we just had a simple, sane language with simple pronunciation that everyone in the world could learn in a short time (3 months?) Think of the productivity gains.
Hangul was a revolutionary idea, creating a simple set of letters that people could learn in half a day that matched the sounds made when speaking. Now we need a language that is like that too. One that follows rules logically like a computer would.
@jreidy
"Hangul was a revolutionary idea, creating a simple set of letters that people could learn in half a day that matched the sounds made when speaking. Now we need a language that is like that too. One that follows rules logically like a computer would. "
You are confusing alphabets with languages.
I wonder if the new language is suitable for writing novels, supposing that there has been no great literature written in that new, simple or logical language.
If for no other reason than that George Orwell wrote his essays in English, one ought to learn English.
P.S.
Newspeak?
"Limiting language limits more than just words—it limits thought. Without the means to express thoughts beyond ‘I feel good or ungood’, people lack the means to commit a thought crime. "
“Isn’t it like that for everyone, even reading your native language?”
I think if there’s one thing we can take away from this thread, it’s that it seems to be different for everyone (and also that the English spelling system sucks). I don’t really have ‘images’ for words (that aren’t concrete nouns, at least), but I have synesthesia and for me, all words have colours based on their letters. It’s based solely on the letters; the sound those letters make in the word is irrelevant to the colour. It’s completely subconscious, of course, I didn’t even realize I associated words with colours until I was about 12. It seems to be how I process words, though, because I guess I have to see a word (if not only in my head) to accept it as a word. It’s like instead of taking letters and decoding them into sound, I’m taking sound and decoding it into letters. I can learn new words without reading them if I can assign them letters and a colour (even if the letters are wrong), but if I can’t do that, it’s just a sound to me and not a word.
I don’t understand my brain at all because I obviously learned how to speak English before I learned to read it. Learning to read seems to have rewired my brain’s language processing…
Anyway, I guess that’s pretty weird and most people don’t process words like that, but everyone seems to do it differently. Focusing on listening as opposed to reading might work for Paul because it lowers the chances of him subvocalizing it wrong, but it wouldn’t really work well for me because… well, of that giant paragraph I just wrote, so I should find some other way to cope with messing up the subvocalization. I guess it’s not black and white and we all have to figure out what works for us.
p.s. It took me like an hour to write this because I’ve never really contemplated this before and I just realized some of this stuff right now…^^
@lynkusu - thank you for your discussion of synesthesia. I once watched a documentary on how people who are brilliant at math process numbers with color and other sensations. I thought it was something only geniuses were capable of doing, and wished I could learn how to process numbers rapidly by using color, texture, smell. Today, you taught me about synesthesia as related to language. Interesting!
@Yutaka - I had not thought about Newspeak in ages! Thanks for that.
I propose a simple language that serves a basic purpose that everyone could use worldwide. This does not need to be a language that does EVERYTHING. It’s beauty would be in SIMPLICITY. You can still have another language for writing your novels, but the common simple language would allow simple transactions.
In computer terms, it is like a common language HTML. HTML doesn’t have to do everything, but HTML should allow documents to be shared on the internet all over the world.
I do not seek to limit human expression or repress ideas. I seek a subset of language that could be shared by all so we could have the basis for sharing and interaction.
@jreidy
"In computer terms, it is like a common language HTML. HTML doesn’t have to do everything, but HTML should allow documents to be shared on the internet all over the world. "
As you know, HTML simply controls how your documents are displayed on the screen. If you have no content written in English or in whatever other language, it’s just nothing. You cannot compare HTML with human languages.
“Is reading (too much) bad for one´s pronunciation ?”
Too much means the amount is excessive. If you read too much, you have less time to think by yourself. You can, however, kill time. You can also absorb a lot of information. On the other hand, if you do not read anything, you have more time to spend on watching TV programs, listening to audio files, and other listening-based types of input. This might be good for your pronunciation. If you are a bookworm, however, you don’t have to worry about your pronunciation. Just concentrate on eating books.
