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Help! Pronunciation "coaching" with non-teacher.
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gato -

Recording your wife and yourself and comparing the two seem the easiest option short of hiring a
professional language teacher.



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bomaci -

A trick which might help with tricky vowel sounds is to have your wife whisper them to you.
For instance have her wishper "shi zhi chi" (湿知吃). You will find that vowels when whispered
get different pitches so you will hear a sort of whispered melody which you should then try to
imitate. For the ü sound you could for instance let her whisper "qi1 qu1 ji1 ju1 (七区鸡居)
This should allow you to hear the changes in pitch between "qi" and "qu" and imitate them.
Once you can whisper the vowels at the same pitches as your wife just turn on the "voice box" and
see what happens. An even better idea is of course if your wife can record these things for you so
you can practice them on your own.










bomaci -



Quote:

I don't think you can expect to have perfect pronounciation from the start. Improvement comes
naturally with practise. As long as your wife can understand what you're saying, I wouldn't worry
too much.

Just because your wife understands you doesn't mean that everyone else will! If you speak to
someone everyday you get used to their accent and pronouciation quirks and thus your wife will
have a much easier time understanding you than a native speaker who is not used to your accent. My
view is that you should try as much as you possibly can to perfect your pronunciation on your own.
You have to train your ears to hear what sounds right and what sounds wrong. Apart from the tips I
gave above you can also let your wife record sentences for you which you can then chorus. Of
course you could try chorusing live with your wife as well (I.e let her say a sentence over and
over while you speak along with her, trying to match her speech rhythm excactly) but this can be
pretty tiring for her and your bound to stop before having reached optimal results. Have your wife
record 20-30 sentences for you (at natural speed!) and chorus these until you can say them
excactly like your wife. Having done that you will find that you will find that listening to
chinese will be much easier, and you will find it easier to imitate new words as well.










shibole -

Wow, I've gotten more and better advice than I could have originally hoped for. Thanks everyone!










shibole -

Following up on the suggestions to download Audacity and use it to check my pronunciation, I
figured that someone had to have a tool more specifically intended for this kind of thing. I did a
bit of searching around and found this:

http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog...ware.asp?id=57

Unfortunately: "The Speech Analyzer download is temporarily unavailable while we correct a serious
bug in the installer. Please check back later."

Doh!

Sucks that I just found this and it isn't there.

Anyone know if it's any good?










shibole -

Another program I have found to be quite helpful: http://www.speakgoodchinese.org/
Not sure how I missed this on the wiki until recently.










shibole -

That program will plot a little graph showing your tone. If you're already a master of tone it
probably won't be that helpful, but it's much better than using the tone analysis stuff in
Audacity, for example, because "Speak Good Chinese" actually isolates/recognizes the sylable and
can analyze the tone based on that. So it isn't "generic" audio tone analysis but a smart sort of
tone analysis that can actually plot a line based on tone (assuming you pronounce the specified
word correctly).

The fact that you need to pronounce the sylable somewhat correctly also means that if it isn't
working correctly you might want to check your pronunciation of that sound. Of course sometimes it
seems to work poorly and people tell me that I am pronouncing the sylable pretty well, so it isn't
perfect.

I have this tendency to make the 2nd tone sound almost like a 3rd tone, and it has helped me
correct that. I also have tone problems with certain sounds like "yue" that I just don't pronounce
well period.

On a related note the speech anaylzer link now says "During recent testing we have discovered an
incompatibility between a component of Speech Analyzer and a component of FieldWorks. We are
temporarily making the download of Speech Analyzer unavailable until we have a new version that
corrects this problem. Please check back later." so I guess they're working on it. I wish they'd
just let me download the thing since I don't use FieldWorks or know what it is....










imron -



Quote:

We are temporarily making the download of Speech Analyzer unavailable until we have a new version
that corrects this problem. Please check back later."

Don't know if it's any help, but a little bit further down the page, it mentions:

Quote:

An older, non-Unicode version of Speech Analyzer (version 2.7) is bundled with Speech Tools 2.2












marcusat -

i think the best way that works for me is to always get the frustrated teacher to not just bark
the correct answer, but first say

"the is what you sound like XXX, and this is how it should sound XXX"

that way you can compare the wrong with the right directly, because sometimes you think your doing
it exactly the same, but to the native ear it sounds wrong. good luck










shibole -

Thanks! We'll try that.












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