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Practice Pronunciation Like A Virtuoso
by Nathalie Fairbanks
If you dabble in music and play an instrument, you're probably familiar with the following scenario:
You're learning a new piece. You know the piece, so you know what it's supposed to sound like. You start playing the first few bars and it goes smoothly. You feel quite proud of how well you're handling it, when suddenly *CRASH* you encounter a "technical problem." Your fingers don't quite produce what your ear expects to hear.
The natural thing to do is to go back to the beginning and start over. Until you reach that same spot again and...mess it up again. After starting over five, 25, or 105 times, you get frustrated. Every time you hit that bar, it throws you off!
Realize what you're doing:
1. You create a habit of screwing up at that particular bar
2. You know the beginning of the piece quite well, but what's behind "the" bar remains a mystery.
Starting from the beginning will only reinforce that habit and pretty soon, you'll start dreading that bar.
The solution?
1. Isolation
2. Reconstruction
1. Isolate the troublesome bar and practice it until you fully master it. Play it as slowly as you need to get all the notes right. Write some fingerings on the page, circle the tricky note so it stands out. Do whatever it takes to help your fingers organize themselves to play correctly.
2. Once you "get" that bar, you need to embed it into its "surroundings" and practice to get into it and out of it smoothly. Start with the bar before and play it with the bar in question, then add a bar behind it and slowly add one bar at a time until you can play from beginning to end without fearing the bar and without messing it up. Practice until the dreaded bar becomes "just another bar."
Let's transfer this to language learning.
For a language student, just as for the music student, there is a difference between making music (= speaking and conveying meaning) and practicing (= learning the technique).
Your "notes" are your phonemes (individual sounds), your "bars" are words, and your "phrase" is a sentence. Your "instrument" consists of your vocal cords, tongue, mouth and your breathing apparatus.
Similar to a shaky piano student, language students often balk at one word or one sound that's unfamiliar. They'll be reading along and suddenly stop in front of a word. They remind me of Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all Mexico, when he's going full speed and abruptly comes to a halt, leaving skid marks in the sand.
Apply the music student's strategy to learn how to wrap your tongue around those unfamiliar sounds:
1. Isolate
Repeat the foreign sound often enough by itself until you feel confident that you can reproduce it. For the German and French "r," for example, I suggest you practice gargling for a few days... and then make the same sound without water. It's pretty much the same mechanism!
2. Reconstruct
Now that you tackled the sound in question in isolation, practice getting it right when it's in context. Let's take an example in German: bringen (= to bring) and let's assume the "r" is the "obstacle sound."
Start by adding one letter to the "r" at a time:
1. RI
2. BR
3. BRI
4. BRING (the NG sound counts as one)
5. BRINGE
6. BRINGEN
Practice each of these sound combinations slowly at first and for as long as you need to until they roll off your tongue naturally. Make sure you don't slip back into the English "r" when you start saying them faster!
Once you can pronounce the word correctly, apply the same principle on a macro level: instead of combining several sounds, now combine several words and integrate them into a sentence, e.g.: "Die Kinder bringen einen Ball mit." (The children take a ball with them.)
Here's how you put the sentence together:
1. bringen
2. Kinder bringen
3. bringen einen
4. Kinder bringen einen
5. Kinder bringen einen Ball
6. Die Kinder bringen einen Ball
7. Die Kinder bringen einen Ball mit.
You now have mastered the "r" in "bringen." Next, pick a word that has another letter than "b" before the "r." Every sound combination will be a little different and needs to be practiced separately until you can run right through every "r" you encounter. No more skid marks, Speedy-- "¡Arriba, arriba!"
© 2007 Nathalie V. Fairbanks
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