Musical Language American English Pronunciation
Hi everyone. I was recently listening to a
podcast that was very exciting to me. The
podcast was NYC’s Radiolab. It’s a great weekly
podcast, I really enjoy it. And this particular
episode was called Musical Language. Now,
those of you that know a bit about me know
that my background is not in Linguistics,
but rather in singing and music. I studied
weekly voice lessons in classical singing for well
over a decade, and that really informs my
approach to teaching pronunciation. This is
an excerpt from that podcast.
And this is exactly what I try to do with my imitation exercises.
If you’ve seen those, you know that I’ll loop
something three times, a phrase or a part
of a phrase, and there will then be a gap
for you to repeat it. And it’s my hope that
in that looping, you will take your mind out
of ‘these are the words I want to say’, and
put your mind into ‘this is what I’ve heard
pitch, rhythm, melody, and spit it back out
the exact same way. Each language really has
its own individual musicality to it. And if
you learn all the right parts of pronunciation,
but still do those American pronunciation
parts within the musical language of your
native language, there will still be something
missing. So I hope with these imitation exercises
that I can get you to hear the musicality
of American English in a new way. So I just
wanted to share this with you. I think the
best way to study pronunciation is to really
come at it from more than one direction. I
think the intellectual part, where you understand
the sounds physically and you understand the
rules is great, and we need to come at it
from that way, but I also think we need to
come at it from the other way which is pure
imitation, opening your ear to what you are
really hearing. That’s it and thanks so much
for using Rachel’s English.