Re: Furrin phones in my own lect! (YAGPT warning!)

On 3/27/06, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> writes:
> >...
> > Ditto. But very few intro.courses get into non-book-standard speech very
> > seriously.
>
> [6] is definitely part of Standard German pronunciation.
Yeah.  It's probably something they don't go into until later.  IME,
most foreign language courses in the US start out with an approximate
pronunciation and only bother with the details as part of an advanced
course in "how to develop a native accent".  Guess it's too much work
to go through the phonetic details with the students who won't stick
with it anyway.  After all, you will no doubt be understood perfectly
by Germanophones if you say [R] instead of [6] - you'll just obviously
have an accent.  I wonder, though, if the average linguistically-naïve
L1 German speaker would be able to tell you exactly what was wrong
with your speech that was giving you the accent?

Heck, they didn't tell us about intervocalic fricatization in Spanish
until year 3.

The exception would be my college course in Russian, where we learned
how to properly pronounce all the phones even before we learned to
read Cyrillic.  Unaspirated stops, palatalization, the works.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>