Re: rhotics (was Hellenish oddities)

On Wed, Dec 06, 2000 at 12:51:26AM +0100, BP Jonsson wrote:
> At 14:54 2000-12-03 -0500, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >I can pick up tones fairly accurately too (but perhaps not
> >surprising because my L1 is tonal).
>
> That never helped me, I'm afraid.  I am very sensitive to differences in
> tone realization in Swedish and Norwegian, but I never pick them up in
> other languages.  Weird.
[snip]

Well, it's not trivial for me either... I do find that it helps a lot to
"think like a native speaker", if you know what I mean. I.e., don't try to
pronounce it by translating the sounds into your own L1, but try to speak
it like a native. I don't know how to explain this... but I find myself
"switching modes" when I need to speak in Mandarin or Hokkien, because I
habitually think in English. If I don't "switch mode", then my sentences
come out jumbled and I don't get some of the tones right :-P


T

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