Re:How to Master an Accent
by yoz-y on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @03:55AM
(#13069360)
I agree with the idea but disagree about the romanisation part. There are many reasons why people should start with romanised versions first. The main reason is that one should concentrate on the language first and on complex writing later, otherwise there is too much information to process. The other reason is that any useful actual writing in those languages will be done in the romanised alphabet (i.e.: on a computer). The barrier of unlearning the pronunciation of different characters is no larger when learning Chinese pinyin while being english, than learning Slovak pronunciations of Latin letters while being French.
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With Japanese learners at least, you can tell with a great deal of accuracy whether someone used a romanization crutch or native script from the get-go based on how bad their accent is (anecdotal, but observation over many students). I'm don't know if this holds true of Chinese, though.
Hiragana and katakana are pretty easy to learn, so if someone doesn't learn them quickly, it might be evidence they aren't working hard or efficiently to learn the language or aren't really ambitious. Chinese characters are a different story. I studied Chinese intensively for a year, and now I know almost know Chinese. I blame my failure partly on being forced to learn the characters from the beginning. The characters took 90% of my study time.
A similar comparison would be learning Bopomofo and using that when knowledge of the characters fails.
Is that because learning the kana helps? Or because being willing to learn to kana upfront is correlated with being willing to put effort into learning pronunciation?
Probably both. I think kana helps you process the words as sequences of "syllables" instead of characters. At least it did for me. I suppose that English speakers would get even more benefits because English pronunciation is often very far from how a word is written and sometimes doesn't make much sense.
Re:How to Master an Accent
by _samihasan_ on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @07:16AM
(#13070084)
I agree with you completely and I even developed an open -source writing system called Eskéndereyya [1] to help learners of Arabic in reading and pronunciation and to prepare them to make the jump to the Arabic script very confidently because I noticed that some beginners are put off by the notion of learning a completely new script just to read and write few sentences and when taking into account how usually Arabic is communicated in writing without diacritics, it becomes very frustrating for them to get any immediate return for their efforts to learn the language.