🔤 Pronunciation - Tips for a hard part in learning a new language (get the Glot in PolyGlot) | Polyglot ABC

* Blog post with a polyglot's list for learning a new language

You got words for learning a new language, and now you want to put the 'glot' in polyglot…

As you may remember from the "🔤  Learning a new language - Step 1 to becoming a polyglot" blog post, I explained that pronunciation isn't necessarily a first priority when learning a new language, because you'll learn to fine-tune it over time. But the point to start getting some resemblance of the correct pronunciation when learning a new language, does come quite early on in a new language learning process, and can aid you with internalizing words through multiple associations.

Let's carry on with the "Hello" list, this time with an approximation of the pronunciation for each of the new languages (in English; underline = particular stress on a syllable):

🇬🇧 English - Hello (Hello)

🇳🇱 Dutch - Hallo (Hall-low)
🇩🇪 German - Hallo (Hall-low)
🇳🇴 Norwegian - Hallo (Hall-oh)
🇸🇪 Swedish - Hallå (Hall-oah)
🇩🇰 Danish - Hej (Hi)
🇪🇸 Spanish - Hola (Oh-la)
🇵🇹 Portuguese - Olá (Eh-la)
🇮🇹 Italian - Ciao (Chow)
🇨🇳 Mandarin - Ni hao (Knee how)
🇫🇷 French - Salut (Salew)
🇷🇴 Romanian - Salut (Sal-oot)
🇮🇱 Hebrew - Shalom (Sha-lome)
🇷🇺 Russian - Privet (Pre-vyet)
🇧🇬 Bulgarian - Zdraveĭ (Zdrahv-hey)

I bet some don't sound like you imagined before :). Dutch and Norwegian are written the same but pronounced differently, Spanish sounds like you would expect Portuguese to sound, yet Portuguese doesn't pronounce the 'O' the same way. French and Romanian are also written the same but pronounced distinctly different.

And that's immediately the first association anchor in learning a new language you'll get when you (1) DON'T check the pronunciation first/immediately… *now* you'll remember that some of these sound quite different than what you initially had in mind for that new language. An association you wouldn't have gotten if you had checked the pronunciation for that new language immediately.
In short: DON'T check the pronunciation immediately when learning a new language! 😉

A second memory association anchor you'll get when learning a new language, is when you now take the effort to (2) do more extensive research into the actual pronunciation of a new language you're learning… you already recognize how a word in the new language is written, so your brain doesn't need to 'write' 2 types of information (written form + sound) at the same time. Instead, all its processing for learning a new language is now focused on associating the sound with the, already known, word. And the act of researching, listening, trying to associate & convert the sound of a new language into something you can recognize, creates a new memory association anchor.

So how do you find out how something sounds in a new language, and how can you best internalize that sound?

As a first step, simply using Google/Bing translate to find a pronunciation in a new language, works perfectly fine
(Tip: when Google translate doesn't have an audio file for a word/sentence in a certain new language, check Bing and vice versa).

You can also use other specific language apps or Youtube to find a pronunciation in a new language you're learning. Probably you'll notice some differences in how the one or the other actually pronounces the word. The main thing for you is to (3) try and break the word into sounds you're already familiar with in your own -OR- another language.

In the list above, I wrote down how I associate the sounds from a different new language… but my associations come from English, Dutch AND Surinamese (the languages I grew up with). In some cases I already knew the sounds from a language from firsthand experience, so for the purpose of this blog post, I even had to 'translate' those sounds from certain languages back to sounds in English. What this means, is that *you* could have a totally different association than what I wrote down for each new language (especially if your reference language isn't English).

So my advice for learning the pronunciation in a new language: Just listen to multiple translations/apps for a new language, and try to associate it with sounds from a language *you* know. Don't let others tell you it *should* be pronounced like this or like that (unless they're actually native speakers of course), especially in the beginning of learning a new language, and beware of intralingual and interpersonal differences like dialects and such while learning a new language!

An example of intralingual and interpersonal differences in pronunciation in a language… the female singers in both clips pronounce the Spanish "cio" in "Tracionera" quite differently, while both being from Spain (as opposed to one from Spain and one from Latin America for example; There are even some more differences between the pronunciation of other words -- Can you hear them? :) )

Of course this ties into my next advice for learning the pronunciation in a new language: (4) Get a feel for the overall sound of a new language!

The minute details and specifics in the pronunciation of a single word in a new language will hardly be the thing preventing native language speakers from understanding you (even in a tonal language like Chinese). But if you get a 'feel' for the flow of the sound of a new language, even those single words which you aren't 'nailing', will sound right.

To do this, you can listen to songs in that new language, watch movies in that new language, and instead of trying to pronounce separate words in that new language, try to sing or talk along. Audio books and language teaching videos are NOT the right tools for this, because they are slower and more pronounced, in the sense of being too clear to get a 'feel' for the natural flow of a new language.

But we're not there yet!…

Once you've taken the steps above to learn what the pronunciation in a new language sounds like, you (5) write down *your* phonetic associations next to (or underneath) the word in a new language, like I did for the list above. Over time, you'll start noticing that some of your associations for a word in a new language change. You'll find other sounds and words that come closer to your interpretation of the pronunciation for that new language, maybe even hear more native language speakers saying the word in a particular way, putting more, or less stress on specific syllables etc. And you adjust your associations for a word in a new language accordingly

(If you tackle multiple new languages at the same time, you'll probably even notice that you can use the same sounds from one new language, to better associate & pronounce a word in another new language… for example: the English "Salute" sounds closer to the Romanian "Salut" than the French "Salut" does, even though English and Romanian are even further apart as language families than French and Romanian)

Share *your* (new) language learning/polyglot experience in the comments section below:
- How do *you* go about improving your pronunciation when learning a new language?

Feel free to become a new language learning/polyglot friend on Facebook: Genaro van der Werff

Wikipedia entries on languages mentioned here:
Bulgarian | Danish | Dutch | English | French | German | Hebrew | Italian | Mandarin Chinese | Norwegian | Portuguese | Portuguese alphabet | Romanian | Russian | Spanish | Swedish | Swedish alphabet

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