English has been my pain for 15 years

Re:English has been my pain for 15 years by phrasemix on Monday September 02, 2013 @10:57AM (#6315428)

This is a fantastic idea! Do you mind if I share that with my English students?

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Re:English has been my pain for 15 years by malandrew on Tuesday September 03, 2013 @01:18AM (#6319137)

Certainly. I have another excellent trick for you that I was able to use to teach my all my Chinese students back in the day how to pronounce the word "usually", which is a notoriously difficult word for Chinese speakers.

Exploiting the technique above, start with a word in the language of the audience that share phonemes with your target word. From there you essentially play something similar to Lewis Carroll's "Doublets" game from the end to the beginning. So for the word "usually" I would usually start with the city in China, "Guanzhou" and proceed as follows (excuse my poor man's phonetic spelling):

    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-jo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joooo-aaaa
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    Gwan-joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee
    yoo-joo-a-lee

The repetition is performed until your student(s) ha(s|ve) properly pronounced the current temperoary utterance.

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Re:English has been my pain for 15 years by argumentum on Monday September 02, 2013 @02:18PM (#6316362)

I wouldn't take the risk .. he might sue you for copyright infringement.

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