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Re: rhotics (was Hellenish oddities)

From:Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
Date:Monday, December 4, 2000, 16:26
On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Sun, Dec 03, 2000 at 11:14:25AM -0500, Yoon Ha Lee wrote: > [snip] > > One of my housemates finds it really irritating that I can't just hear > > the thing and produce it, but a) he's a vocalist and has been trained to > > do so and b) he spent a good portion of his life in Argentina, and speaks > > Spanish. I'm not a vocalist, I'm just a Yoon Ha and I have to learn it > > the long way. :-p > > Hmm. I daresay I'm quite good at picking up sounds and reproducing them, > but sounds like trills are hard for me because I've never in my life > "trilled" my tongue before. I've picked up a few Korean words just by > listening to my Korean friends speak, and they tell me my pronunciation is > very accurate. I can pick up tones fairly accurately too (but perhaps not > surprising because my L1 is tonal). However, the problem is, although I > *know* how a trill should sound, I just can't reproduce it no matter how > hard I try. I've been trying to follow Dan's suggestion, but all I get is > a very dry tongue tip from so much blowing :-P
I can recognize rather more sounds than I can produce reliably. I've been getting better with more exposure. When I started French in middle school I was abominably bad. :-) Practice, as with all things, seems to help. And phonetics helps too because if I can look at diagrams and figure out what's *supposed* to happen in my mouth, instead of guessing, I have a better chance of producing the sound in question. Most of the "fuzzy" descriptions (halfway between sound A and B in English) I've seen in language books don't help me very much.
> It's one thing to be able to "pick up" a sound easily, but it's another > thing whether you can produce it yourself. I don't think it's fair to > demand that someone "reproduce the sound" just by "hearing it". For one > thing, whether or not you can distinguish between phonemes isn't exactly > trivial. (Try asking a typical L1 English speaker to tell the difference > between Chinese tones.) OTOH, even after you have learnt to identify the > sound, doesn't mean you can produce it.
I agree, but I guess it can be irritating to someone who speaks the language well to listen to someone stumbling through. I have perfect pitch and my nerves go on end when I hear some people sing, even though it's completely unfair to expect everyone to be in tune even relatively (heck, I'm sometimes off when I sing; the only difference is that I know it). Typical L1 English speakers can't tell the difference between Korean "s" and "ss," and I have met very few Americans who can pronounce part of my sister's name, which starts with [kj]; they usually end up aspirating the [k], and it makes a difference. As long as they're trying.... YHL