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Transcript: Hi, Steve Kaufmann here again, I’m in the interior British Columbia in Osoyoos playing golf with friends (a lovely part of British Columbia). I was on the internet and someone talked about the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the need for some set of symbols that would accurately represent sounds in a language. As we know, especially in English, the alphabet doesn’t really represent the sounds accurately because the letter ‘o’ for instance can be pronounced as letter ‘o’ or ‘a’ or whatever, depending on whether it is ‘women’ or ‘come’ or ‘over.
However, I don’t think the International Phonetic Alphabet is all that useful. I have never bothered to learn the symbols of the IPA, because to me I have to first hear the language and hear it accurately. And as a non-native speaker it’s often to hear, it’s often difficult to hear where one word ends and the next word begins and so forth.
So one of the really useful tools that we have today to teach ourselves to hear the language accurately so that we can pronounce it, is text-to-speech. One of the things that I do (which unfortunately I can’t do for Ukrainian because there is no Google text-to-speech, but it works for Polish and Russian extremely well) is that I save phrases at LingQ. I then review those phrases in the dictation function that we have. So I hear the text-to-speech sounds and I have to write it down. It’s amazing how much I miss, because I don’t accurately hear what the native speaker – or in this case the text-to-speech – is saying. So it’s a very good way to train yourself to hear what the person is actually saying. That’s one thing that I can do with text-to-speech.
Another thing I have started to do with text-to-speech, but again only in Polish or Russian where text-to-speech is available, is that I would have saved these phrases in my text at LingQ, and then I review then in flashcards. We also have text-to-speech and the flashcard. So I start up an audio recording, I will press the text-to-speech, I hear the text-to-speech, then I repeat it in my own pronunciation, then I go to the next flashcard and do the same for the next phrase and so on and so forth. So pretty soon I have a sound file of two minutes long or so, which consists of the text-to-speech pronunciation of the phrase and then my own pronunciation. I then listen to that sound file while reviewing my flashcards. All of this is helping me to notice what actually is being said, and I think a big part of pronunciation is actually accurately hearing what is said. I mean, we know for example that often Japanese speakers have trouble distinguishing between ‘l’ and ‘r’ when they speak, but they make the same mistake when they write and that suggests to me that they’re not hearing the ‘l’ and the ‘r’ when they listen to the language. So we have to train our ability to hear.
There are even other ways in which you can use text-to-speech to help your pronunciation, but I won’t go into those today, but we are going to be experimenting on those with the members of our LingQ Academy live. You should be following their activities, I will leave a link to the videos about their activities. We’re going to be working with them on their pronunciation using text-to-speech, but we won’t be using the International Phonetic Alphabet. However, for those people who find that useful, by all means! The main thing in language learning is to do what you like to do and what you find useful. Now I’m going out to play golf, thanks for listening!
