This week (actually during these last weeks) I´ve been much worried about pronunciation.
Grammar has never been a problem to me. Although I certainly can´t say that I master its concepts, it never brought any real difficulty to me. Reading and listening have always been intersting. Sometimes they´re tricky but with some patience and with the aid of a dictionary or even simply reading (or listening) the context I´ve been able to handle it.
Doing my workbook exercises made me realize that I shouldn´t have quitted Phonetix discipline (although I had no other choice). I´ve always been confident while apeaking but nowadays I wonder whether is clear or not to a native English-speaker that his language is not my mother language. I know that many different accents exist in English but I want mine not only to be comunicative but to be clear and authentic as well. Sometimes I wish I were in someone´s else head just to hear me speaking in English. I tried to tape me and listen after, but it didn´t feel as authentic as I expected, I´ll keep trying to see if it comes off right.
So, that´s my next goal: to improve my pronunciation and to help my colleagues to improve theirs either.
2 comments:
It is also something I worry about. But I realized that it’s not studying Phonetics and Phonology that I’ll have a perfect pronunciation. I think that the most important for us, foreign learners, is to practice our all skills, trying to use it almost all the time, as we do with Portuguese. And come on, Sergio, you a have an excellent pronunciation and accent. And with time, we can improve it.
You mentioned the workbook, how it is showing us that we’ve forgotten many things. In relation to pronunciation, I think we could organize an “extensive exercise”; each one of us could prepare a little exercise and join them in class. It’s just an idea. What do you think?
Sergio, I myself am much worried about pronunciation because I change phonemes! (Remember allophones don't interfere in the meaming but phonemes do?) But I don't think we'll be able to sound like natives, though we can have a really good accent and our mother language can not be recognized because of it. And I think what we should be worried about is that allophone problem, cause we aren't Rodrigo Santoro and won't be restricted to bad roles just because of non-native accent, cause we don't have to play americans or British, we can be latins.
But don't worry, anyway, about missing Phonetics classes. If you want to know the rules, you can read them on its bibliography. We aren't going to finish that subject speaking perfectly, we'll have to practice its content for a long time so we can absorbe it as we have done done eith the ehole language structures we've learned until now.
Hope you notice I'm not putting your expectations down, but just telling you not to over hurry, cause you're already good and if you want and try to improve your pronunciation, you will, so don't 'suffer'! Although, as Carla said, I guess you have a quite nice accent ;)
P.S.: I f you want to read something about it, there are two texts in Carla's folder: "What a native speaker knows" and "What a language student should learn".
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