There's this one language app that I've always seen on TV that I thought would be just horrible since it focuses on implicitly teaching you grammar, which I hate as a language learning method since it's a very inefficient way to learn basic stuff. You're better off just being taught it explicitly and memorizing it!
But, I was talking with this one resthome resident's daughter and I was saying that I needed to find good resources to help me with (Romanian) pronunciation and listening comprehension, and she brought up the app, which is free, so I thought, "Why not?".
And, it turns out that I love it!
Because they have native speakers record short-to-medium-length sentences that use a limited vocabulary but vary forms, and because you can easily replay a recording as many times as you want, it turns out that it's *great* for listening comprehension.
And, it was interesting for me to figure out part of why (Romanian) sounds so foreign. I think a big part of it is that their word for "and" (a very common word!) has a palatalized "sh" sound that's different from the way a(n English) speaker would usually pronounce "sh," and so that particular sound not only just leaps out in conversation, but it's a very foreign sound that does, as well.
Also, a very common word ending meaning "the" for masculine nouns is "-ul," but the "L" is a "light l" like in "lemon" and not a "dark l" like in "pool," so again there the sound pattern of something very common is hard for a native speaker of (English) to catch on to or produce, since they'll always want to produce a "dark l" in that particular sequence of sounds.
No comments:
Post a Comment