A Complete Journey Into a New Language - Part 4
Crappy to barely understandable pronunciation... or not?
If there’s one thing you should remember from this article, let it be this one:
Even polyglots make poor language learning decisions.
As I write these words, I’m entering my 5th month of learning Thai. There were times I studied intensively, like when I learned the script but I’ve also struggled to not skip a few days every week since January.
I could give excuse after excuse to justify myself but the truth is simple. I feel much less love for the Thai language than any other language I study and trying to show results is making me procrastinate on it.
Too often, I start my study sessions wondering if what I’m about to do is something that’ll help me show results in a short time so I could write about it.
This toxic mindset goes against everything language-learning stands for.
Learning a language takes time.
Focusing on short-term results is bound to feel overwhelming. I know it. I’ve said it before. And yet, I did it again.
I believe this was also a subconscious reason why I chose to improve my pronunciation in February. It’s “easy” to show an improvement when you’ve never studied it before.
I do enjoy learning Thai though so all I need is to stop putting so much pressure and enjoy the journey for what it is.
Alright, enough with the Johns. Let’s get to why you came here for.
Why I focused on pronunciation so early
It’s no secret that most people speaking a foreign language have a distinctive accent.
Anybody who can speak English can imagine a French accent with ease. When I was in Japan, I met many Americans with a thick accent that betrayed them on the spot.
Having a strong accent is often one of the key reasons why we don’t try speaking our new language. We become ashamed of our incapacity to pronounce well and the fear of speaking this exotic language only grows further.
We freeze and decide not to say a word.
We turn back to study without actually practicing our pronunciation.
Years later, we try to say words but it’s too late. We’ve heard too many sentences with a crappy pronunciation in our head. We’ve cemented an accent we’re ashamed of.
What happens then is one of two things:
You accept your crappy accent and live with it
You decide to work on it.
Most people choose the first option. Those who choose the second struggle for a long time to get rid of now-deeply-ingrained pronunciation habits.
The solution to all these worries is to focus on your pronunciation early on.
I still believe it’s a great option but it also highly depends on a few other factors:
Are you in for the long run, to reach a very high level?
Will you go to the country soon?
Are you learning to speak with native speakers or don’t care about speaking?
If you said yes to 1., then, go ahead, focus on the pronunciation early on. If you said yes to 2., don’t. People can understand you well-enough with a crappy accent.
Finally, if you aren’t learning to speak with native speakers, why would you spend time improving something that doesn’t matter? You don’t need an amazing accent to understand a movie—the actors do.
In my case, as someone who had just arrived in Thailand and isn’t planning to reach a “very high” level, choosing to focus on pronunciation was the best way to get overwhelmed.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’ll get to that soon enough.
How I practiced my pronunciation
As part of the monthly challenge of my 7 bullet points newsletter, I chose to practice my pronunciation on one sentence: ผมอยากเรียนภาษาไทยก่อนที่ผมจะกลับไปประเทศฝรั่งเศส. (“I want to learn Thai before I go back to France.”)
The goal was to record myself for a month so I could see the evolution and see how much I improved within this short timeframe.
I started with getting a recording of the correct pronunciation on HiNative so I had a reference that wasn’t read too fast nor too slow.
The best way to improve is to practice. That’s why I chose to practice it often.
…
Except that I didn’t.
I missed tons of days throughout the month. Sometimes I practiced but didn’t record myself and for at least half the month I just simply forgot to do it at all. I felt horrible whenever I noticed it.
And then I remembered I actually did study a bit so it was fine. I had just missed that one part of the journey.
I asked for feedback on my pronunciation on HiNative once but got only one truly useful bit of feedback: “อยาก you should say it longer.”
Loads of listening
Still, if I wanted to improve my pronunciation so I had to expose myself to enough of the language. Being in Thailand, you’d think that’d be an easy task. I could just walk outside and get that exposure.
Well, that wasn’t an option for the first 2 weeks since I was locked in quarantine. As for the second half of the month, I walked outside a bit but didn’t get to hear much of the language.
I overheard some people talking and some announcements in the metro but I couldn’t find the time to relax in a coffee shop listening to people around me. (I did go to coffee shops but with headphones to concentrate on my work.)
And so I relied on techniques I use when I’m not in my target country.
I listened to this Thai channel daily for at least an hour on radio.garden.
I watched Thai shows and movies on Netflix (such as Sleepless Society: Insomnia, Hope Frozen, Dark World, or App War)
I found some Thai podcasts like แปดบรรทัดครึ่ง and listened to them in the background, even though I couldn’t understand them.
I found some Thai-teaching podcasts, and especially listened to “You too can learn Thai.”
The more exposure you can get the better your accent will be when you start speaking.
Quick side story about exposure and accent
I became fluent in English through thousands of hours of watching TV shows bundled in one single year in high school. At the time, I didn’t speak English with anybody. I didn’t know any non-French person so I didn’t practice speaking at all.
I kept watching thousands of hours of English the following years and my accent became very Americanized.
When I met Americans in Korea a few years later, they regularly asked me which part of the States I was from. That was all thanks to exposure.
Side story within a side story—My accent later got altered through more exposure and active practice to sounds more British. I can’t say “can’t” without a rather British accent anymore.
As time passed and I stopped caring and listening as much to English, my French roots took over. It’s now easy to know I’m French from my accent, even though it’s not the “typical” French accent.
Alright, let’s get back on track.
Why did I share that story? Because exposure works really well to get a good accent. At least at the start.
The problem? You need a lot more than a month of exposure. No matter how intense it is.
Hell, even babies need a year!
Shadowing practice
If you’ve never heard of the term “shadowing,” here’s a simple explanation of what it is.
It’s a term made popular by Professor Alexander Arguelles in the language-learning community and refers to a practice of repeating along with an audio text.
Here’s the clearest example of what it is. Pardon the low-quality video as it’s also one of the earliest videos on the topic.
The goal of shadowing is not to repeat after hearing the sentence, but along with it, mimicking its intonation variations, the places stresses put on syllables, and well, the flow of the sentence overall.
This exercise can be useful at any level:
If you’re a beginner, you get to practice making sounds in the language. Your tongue gets accustomed to the strange movements this new language requires.
If you’re an intermediate learner, you improve the flow of your sentences and make the language more natural to you.
If you’re an advanced learner, you can focus on certain types of speakers to improve your speech in specific situations. You can also learn to speak like a specific person if you practice for it.
And so I began shadowing a bit.
Let me be clear. I’m no shadowing expert. I rarely relied on this (useful) technique because I tend to be too lazy to do it.
This time I chose to do it because starting early means reaping the most results from this method in the long run.
And so I shadowed in two situations:
The “You too can learn Thai” podcast has a few listening comprehension episodes so I began practicing along, listening to them while reading along. I barely understood but it got my tongue moving for more sentences than just the one I was practicing since February 1st.
I began adding flashcards to an Anki deck (for Spaced-Repetition practice) with audio recordings and practicing pronouncing each sentence along at least 5 times for each new sentence added. Since then, I shadow each sentence 2-3 times when they pop up for revision.
Getting rid of a problem
There’s one problem with practicing your pronunciation for a new language alone. You can’t be certain you got the pronunciation right.
Our ears distinguish sounds they’re used to. And you’re not used to a new language. I mean, you know, that’s why it’s “new” after all.
For some languages, you can refer to your native language but in most cases, there will be new sounds in your target language.
The “French R” and the “Spanish R” have nothing in common. The Korean “eo” (ㅓ) is not an “e” followed by an “o”, nor just a standard “o” as in “phone”, it’s what can be called an “open o” (/ʌ/).
That’s where the IPA enters.
No, not the beer. 🍻
The International Phonetic Alphabet.
This alphabet was created to solve the exact problem I mentioned above. Instead of having to struggle with figuring out in which way each letter should be pronounced, the IPA has one single way to write it.
There’s no consideration to take. No wondering which country’s accent you should apply.
If you want to say “father” with an Australian accent, it’s /ˈfaːðə/. With a standard British accent, it’s /ˈfɑːðə(ɹ)/. And with a standard American accent? It’s /ˈfɑðɚ/.
Learning the IPA allows you to simplify learning the pronunciation of any new language you’d like to learn in the future.
Any.
Language.
This might be one of the most useful things to learn for any aspiring polyglot could take upon.
And so, I opened Wiktionary, the most complete dictionary when it comes to IPA, for most new words I encountered. I added a line in my flashcards so I could always have that reference, even when I couldn’t listen to the audio when I’d review the flashcards.
Everything I did wrong
Or at least everything I noticed doing wrong. There’s probably more if I’m being honest.
You’ll notice I haven’t talked much about that one sentence I practiced pronouncing. There’s a reason for that. It was just was too short to have any meaningful impact.
Pronouncing well one sentence ≠ Having a good pronunciation in the language
Want to improve your pronunciation quickly, practice it with many, many, sentences. Not one. You need variety for your tongue to get used to as many variations of movement as possible.
Speaking a language is creating a habit of making those associations of sounds.
As for when to try to improve your pronunciation? It should have been obvious:
Do it early on if you’re not in a hurry and are in it for the long haul.
Do it late if you ended up sticking to it until a high level even though you didn’t expect yourself to do so at the beginning.
Don’t do it if your goal isn’t to speak in the language or is to reach an intermediate level at most.
You can have a crappy pronunciation and still enjoy a foreign language.
Hell, my Korean accent sucks nowadays, and yet I’m enjoying it more than ever.
Finally, getting feedback on your own works well for many things. Pronunciation doesn’t seem to be one of them.
You can compare yourself to audio files like I did but you’ll always be relying on the hope you didn’t miss any detail. It was fine-ish for me since I’ve learned a few languages and am used to hearing sounds of languages, but it’d be a lot more taxing for someone with less experience.
Instead, get help.
Get a tutor on Italki or Preply. Find a language exchange partner nice enough to give you feedback on HelloTalk, Tandem, or Slowly. Or rely a lot more than I did on HiNative by asking for feedback on dozens of sentences daily or weekly.
In the next chapter…
By the time this is published, we’ll be mid-march. I’m two weeks late on this piece because I wasn’t sure how to structure it. Now that I’m done writing it, I realize I’ve rambled quite a bit. If you’ve read everything up to this point without skipping, congrats!
I plan on writing more pieces like this long, rambly, and hopefully useful for you to do better than me.
But I also want to let you know more often my thoughts on the journey, overlooking different topics rather than focusing on one.
Thursday 23rd will indicate the middle of my 3 months in Thailand so I’ll try to look back on my time, the errors I’ve made, and what my plans are with the language.
Expect a new piece then!
Disclaimer: None of the tools mentioned in this article sponsors me. I genuinely enjoy using them.