Pronunciation reminder

Had a reminder this week about my pronunciation problems. I wrote about this ages ago, and how inportant it was, and then promptly completely forgot about it for a year or so.

It seems that when it comes to Japanese I can kid myself that the pronunciation is so simple (at least compared to Chinese) that I don't need to think about it. Not so!

I've also mentioned before that when you really try to speak as if you are a native speaker, almost mimicking the native speakers I guess, success seems to become easier to come by.  Tonight I was concentrating on doing this in my Chinese language exchange, and I could see my Chinese partner's positive reactions to what I was saying.

10 minutes later however my concentration had slipped, and I was back pronuncing words with a British drawl. My language partner's face had dropped, I could see the pain in her eyes.

Goddamnit! It's bloody hard work learning these foreign tongues. There's so much more to it than learning new words and grammar. You really have to live and breathe the language. You have to mold your mouth around the thing again and again to achieve a modicum of success.

This may sound a little defeatist, but the challenge is not motivation for me. Just technique and opportunity. I need to work on both.

Jiaozi on the zhuozi

I started a new language exchange recently with a Chinese girl who works in Tokyo. I'm very glad I did it. There's no substitute to practicing with a native speaker, especially when it comes to Chinese it seems.

You have to hit those tones spot on, or you won't be understood at all, it's like fine tuning a frickin harp! One missed vowel sound and the comprehension level just completely disappears.

I've been doing a lot of practice listening and repeating to try and get my pronunciation down, but I think I need to be more conscientious of the tones when I learn a new word, and perhaps practice my vowel sounds a bit more too. I couldn't get her to understand 桌子 (zhuozi: table) all night, but that's because I had it written down as zhouzi (o before u) and I kept pronouncing it wrong, I also fouled up and said 饺子 (jiaozi: dumpling) by mistake once aswell.

She kept repeating it for me, and I would copy her 5 or 6 times, move on, and then make the same mistake 5 or 6 minutes later. In the end I decided to make a mnemonic connecting the pronunciation to "Jaws" the movie in my head—it's not a perfect match, but it'll do for now.

It was only later that I realized I had written the damn word down wrong and this was probably the reason for my repeated failure to get the pronunciation right.

Anyway, when your in the thick of these conversations it makes you wish you'd spent a bit more time on the tones and pronunciation of the words when you first learnt them, so I'll be trying to do that a bit more in future.

He's a lazy git

Continuing the function based language-exchanges today. Today's function was describing people.

This was useful, and I got the chance to go over some vocab that I hadn't used for a while, and pick up some new vocab too.

It occurred to me as I was asked for the tenth time to describe my friend/coworker/boss/girlfriend, that it's pretty much the same as when your describing people in your first language, you search around in your head for the vocab you have available to describe these people—for the most appropriate word. A case of making do with what you've got to satisfy the questioner's curiosity. How good a job you do boils down to how much vocabulary you have at your disposal.

So it was good to go over exactly how much vocab I actually do have today.

I also got advice on which words are commonly used versus ones that are not so common, which is always useful to know.

Here is a list of some of the useful vocab that I went over/learnt today.

Positive describing words:
やさしい　＝ nice / kind
おもしろい　＝ interesting / funny
気さく　＝　friendly / open
真面目な　＝　serious / diligent
行動的　＝ active

On the negative side:
いじわる　＝　mean
だらしない　＝　lazy (I'd always used なまけもの, but apparently this is more common)
気難しい　＝　difficult (to get along with)
不真面目な　＝　Not 真面目
内向的　＝　introverted

So I think another one of the benefits of this type of lesson is the opportunity to collect all of this info in one place, giving you the chance to think about what vocab you have available next time you find yourself having to describe someone, pay a compliment, order a pizza, etc.

Functioning

I had a really good language-exchange session today, and came up with a new and easy way to make the sessions interesting and productive.

When I meet up with my language-exchange partner, we usually go through an English lesson in a textbook from the company I work for during her study time, and then switch roles so I become the student and she is the teacher for the remainder of the time. However, I have never really settled on a good resource to use for my half of the session.

Most of the Japanese texts I have are very grammar based and it can become pretty dull pretty quickly for my friend, and me, once we get bogged down in some grammar point. I've tried using newspaper clippings and the like as conversation topics, but that can be time consuming to prepare, and can prove difficult if the subject matter contains a lot of tricky vocab. The English texts on the other hand are very communication focused and are designed to teach one function of language usage at a time: for example, today's function was starting a conversation with a stranger, so the student gets to practice saying things like, "I see you're wearing a Redskins jersey, are you a fan?", so the whole time is spent practicing, what really is the main aim of language learning, communication.

Anyway, at the end of the English half of the exchange today I was feeling pretty tired and wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, when it occurred to me to try out the English texts in Japanese—why this didn't occur to me earlier, I don't know. Basically, we just translated all the activities into Japanese—not really that challenging when the language is only lower-intermediate level—and repeated the lesson in the other language.

It was great!! It was the first time I'd really had the chance to be a student using the method that my company promotes, and it does work. I really feel like I can retain the language I used as it is all contained within this one language function, and next time I feel the urge to start a conversation with a stranger, the language, topics and questions we covered today will all be ready and waiting in my head.

I'm really pleased to have confirmed to myself that this method of teaching works, and I'm looking forward to my next language-exchange to try out another function.