I am going to write a guide on how to best "study" English in Japanese and am looking for advice from you fine folk. As it is in Japanese, it will be aimed at Japanese learners, but I want it to not be too targeted at Japanese people.

I have written a similar thing about Japanese in Japanese, but I am not so sure on the best way to study English. I think there are some nuances that mean you can't just apply the AJATT principles exactly as is and expect it to be as effective for English.

For example, pronunciation is in my opinion much harder for a Japanese learner than Japanese pronunciation is for an English speaker. For Japanese you can get away with huge amounts of listening, but I think techniques like shadowing and recording your voice and comparing it to a native are needed for studying English. I partly base this due to the fact that I have met many speakers with many years of exposure and almost perfect grammar but poor pronunciation.

There is also the question of if, when and how to learn the phonemic (some say phonetic) script. You may not know but the spelling of the words doesn't correlate so strongly with the pronunciation, however using phonemic script you can write the exact pronunciation. Dictionaries typically express English pron this way. This discrepancy between spelling and pron is particularly hard for learners of English. A classic example is the different pron "ough" can take.

1. of - cough
2. ü - through
3. au - bough
4. &f - enough
5. O - though
6. o - thought
7. & - Flamborough
8. &p - hiccough
9. äk or äk - lough
10. äf - Gough
11. ä - nought, ought

No idea what 7, 9 and 10 are, but you get the point.

Further more, there is linking that we do when we speak. Here are some example of what we actually say.

I have an apple = I ha va napple
ten bottles = te(m) bottles
678 = si kseve naight
What did you do? = Wha joo do?
go away = gowaway
the other one = the yother one

Lastly, has anyone read http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...n-japanese ? I have almost read the first book and am trying the process in Japanese now. Khatzumoto describes it as a Korean Antimoon in Japanese and whilst it does adhere to many similar concepts, it is actually a lot more detailed and claims better results. (6months to a year to native like fluency. 6 months if you are good at your native language and a year if you aren't). It has 5 detailed steps and does include specific stuff to deal with pron, so maybe this is worth incorporating in. If anyone has had a look at this would be interested to hear your thoughts.

Anyway, advice and thoughts are appreciated.

My thoughts:

- Obviously a huge amount of immersion is needed.
- I think facts going into your SRS should always go both ways, since spelling and pron both need to be checked.
- I would only put in sentences that you have the audio for and do shadowing every time you review a fact. Eventually, this will no longer be necessary, but I think this should help tie the pron to the words and improve pron.
- I would do dictation when fresh, to cement spelling and tie the pron to the words.
- I think a lot more sentences need to be added and a slower rate maintained. There are 2000 or so irregular verbs (the past and past participle (eat ate eaten<-pp) and not just the verb + ed) of which many should be SRSed. Unlike Japanese learning one form of the verb wont be enough.
- Step one for the Korean books is to listen to the same English audio over and over. I think this is a good way quickly skill up listening (each time you can catch a bit more of it) and would recommend it as part of immersion work.
- The Korean books also recommend having a 1 day break from L2 every 7 days to allow you mind to process the English you have been absorbing. Not sure about this one, sometimes I do this and feel like it helps my Japanese.
- Once an intermediate level is reached, recording and comparing one's voice against a native recording is needed.
- I would leave phonemic script until an intermediate level is reached and through immersion all the different sounds can be distinguished.

The same can be said with Japanese,
n sounds go to 'm' sounds, ga sometimes has an ng(a) sound depending on its location. I didn't learn these things in a book, nor were they even mentioned. I simply heard, then reproduced.

You grasp these things with immersion, you cannot learn them off something written. Learn the language properly first and laziness will do the trick, that is if you wish to speak like that. I prefer to pronounce each word clearly.

And also, recommend English/Australian sources only. I cant stand English learners with an American accent =D

So, what does that say about English speakers with an American accent?

CharleyGarrett Wrote:So, what does that say about English speakers with an American accent?

That they are annoying. Of course.

Learn to speak english proper good like!

Personally I've never learned phonetic script, and I don't know anyone who has. It's just not needed. Sure, Japanese people definitely need more time than westerners to learn to pronounce English, but it should be done the "natural" way of shadowing, not be reading how to pronounce each word. It's like Japanese: You CAN learn the tonal work in Japanese, but 99% of all schools do not teach it, even though it can even bear meaning (雨 and 飴 being one example). You simply have to learn it from exposure, and Japanese people can definitely do the same thing.

IceCream Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Personally I've never learned phonetic script, and I don't know anyone who has. It's just not needed. Sure, Japanese people definitely need more time than westerners to learn to pronounce English, but it should be done the "natural" way of shadowing, not be reading how to pronounce each word. It's like Japanese: You CAN learn the tonal work in Japanese, but 99% of all schools do not teach it, even though it can even bear meaning (雨 and 飴 being one example). You simply have to learn it from exposure, and Japanese people can definitely do the same thing.

I'm not sure about that. The very first thing I learned when starting Japanese, was how to pronounce the hiragana syllabarys. I didn't just "pick up" that の isn't pronounced like no (the word). When I teach other people some words in Japanese, they find it much more difficult to get the pronunciation and timing, because they haven't learned this. For learning English, it's much more complex, but that doesn't mean that it has to be picked up gradually, or naturally. For most languages, learning to make the sounds correctly is the first step, otherwise it's really easy to end up with bad habits that are hard to break.

Of course you have to learn how to make the sounds: By hearing them and mimicking them. Instead of learning how to read phonetic script, learn how to read English directly. Get an audiobook. Read it while listening. Done. You don't have to understand anything, you just need to see how a written word sounds. Learning how each character sounds in English is useless since that changes in almost every word, so it's not worth the effort. That's how I learned how to read Japanese, I didn't read any "え is e from extra", such guides are never accurate anyway.

Main summary and fact: Before you can learn how to pronounce a language, you have to learn how to hear it. If you can't hear it properly, you'll pronounce it incorrectly regardless.

I disagree. English contains 44 fundamental sounds. No matter how the words are spelled the sounds don't change. Just learn the sounds and you can pronounce any word. You do not even need to hear a language properly. You can always ask the other person to spell the word and go from there.

Essentially, you're doing a Spelling and Reading Bee every day [Can you use that word in a sentence? Yes Sara.]. However, you need to know not only how to spell or pronounce the word, but what the word means as well. [Can I have the definition? No Sara, that's your job.]

It's the English equivalent of the Kanji and Japanese Writing and Reading Bee that I do everyday :^P

Tobberoth Wrote:Main summary and fact: Before you can learn how to pronounce a language, you have to learn how to hear it. If you can't hear it properly, you'll pronounce it incorrectly regardless.

I very much agree with this. However, do you believe that no special handling is needed for English pronunciation and it can be and is most effective to approach it in the same way we approach Japanese?

blackmacros Wrote:

CharleyGarrett Wrote:So, what does that say about English speakers with an American accent?

That they are annoying. Of course.

Learn to speak english proper good like!

Proper like Australian English? That's too annoying, 笑
I've seen so many books and courses saying: 'Learn AMERICAN ENGLISH' or 'Speak with an American accent in just weeks' and actually, they're quite popular. The promise: don't you want a cool American accent? attracts a lot.

Phonemic script? I've never seen this before. And it's a hobby of mine to check out English learning materials in places I visit. I have seen a lot of IPA, the best being a vocabulary-building book that had for each vocab its phonetic pronunciation in IPA and an example sentence. Practically built for sentence mining.

Wish I had the name of it for you (sorry). It was a chinese book, if that helps.

chamcham Wrote:I disagree. English contains 44 fundamental sounds. No matter how the words are spelled the sounds don't change. Just learn the sounds and you can pronounce any word. You do not even need to hear a language properly. You can always ask the other person to spell the word and go from there.

You're not getting my point: Even if I list 44 fundamental sounds, you won't be able to understand them if you can't hear them. You will mix them up and not be able to pronounce anything regardless. Shining example: shi, si, xi, qi, chi, zhi, zi in Chinese. Fundamental sounds. Just say them and you're good to go. Oh, you think you're saying them right, but every chinese person in the world disagrees? That's right. If you can't hear the difference, how do you expect to pronounce it?

thermal Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:Main summary and fact: Before you can learn how to pronounce a language, you have to learn how to hear it. If you can't hear it properly, you'll pronounce it incorrectly regardless.

I very much agree with this. However, do you believe that no special handling is needed for English pronunciation and it can be and is most effective to approach it in the same way we approach Japanese?

Definitely. I mean, most people who has studied Japanese for months are still unable to correctly pronounce 範囲, why should Japanese people be faster? I think Japanese people need structured ways to learn pronunciation (such as shadowing etc) to a slightly higher degree than westerners learning Japanese, but I don't think they need anything else. Just more time doing it.

Overall, I agree with your approach listed in your My Thoughts: post. Using audio in an SRS to train the reading and pronunciation by shadowing, to go both ways to some training of spelling is maintained. Most of this should only be needed in the start though. Once you know how to pronounce English, it's not like you need to keep training it and it's generally the same with spelling.

Quote:English contains 44 fundamental sounds. No matter how the words are spelled the sounds don't change. Just learn the sounds and you can pronounce any word.

English phonetics is million times harder than Japanese. You can't simply say that English has 44 fundamental sounds. Look at this to understand what I mean:

http://www.americanaccent.com

[move the cursor over any sentence in the regular spelling column and wait for 10 seconds]

Which non-native can understand that "Jeet? No, joo? Nachet" = "Did you eat? No, did you? Not yet" if he did not live in an English speaking country for many years?!!

IceCream Wrote:there must be the basic phonemes with sound around somewhere as well?

The main benefit of learning the phonetic thing while learning english is 1stly, to learn the basic sounds, but secondly, when you come to a word you haven't got any sound for, you can look it up in a dictionary and find out how it's pronounced, in the same way that when we look at the furigana, we can know roughly how a kanji is pronounced.

Native english speakers DO learn the phonetic alphabet, even if they don't know how to read it. That's whats happenning when a child learns to read phonetically, by sounding out the words. Except, for native speakers, we have our parents or teachers to tell us when we go wrong. Learning the phonetic alphabet would achieve the same thing.

This isn't needed. I'm not a native speaker and I will pronounce unknown words just as correctly as any native speaker. Sure, some words are pronounced in an odd way so as natives will pronounce them incorrectly as well. In such cases, just go to dictionary.com, input the word and click the sound symbol. There you go, no need for phonetic alphabets.

IceCream Wrote:there must be the basic phonemes with sound around somewhere as well?

The main benefit of learning the phonetic thing while learning english is 1stly, to learn the basic sounds, but secondly, when you come to a word you haven't got any sound for, you can look it up in a dictionary and find out how it's pronounced, in the same way that when we look at the furigana, we can know roughly how a kanji is pronounced.

yes, you can look up the words in a dictionary and look at the IPA transcriptions, but, in all honesty, who does that? after a while of listening/speaking english you get an intuitive sense for how an unknown word is to be pronounced. i don't know if this is because you've been exposed to the spoken version of the word at some point, or because there are in fact underlying spelling rules (most likely, at least once you know the roots of the word), but in the end, you do know how to pronounce it.
i'm not sure if the same works for japanese; i mean, you have several readings for a kanji in your brain, and you have a notion of the meaning of the word by context, it's possible to associate that meaning with a word you know from verbal exposure, and chech whether the readings you know match. this wouldn't give 100% accuracy, but then again, you don't get 100% accuracy when reading unknown words even in spanish or italian (whose writing are very phonetic).

and in my humble opinion, learn brittish english first; it's easier to dumb down the phonetics into the realm of american english, than it is to go from american->any branch of brittish.

Yeah, I think while there are good arguments as to why you don't need to know the phonemes, there are only about 44 of them. They would have to be pretty useless for them to not be worth the effort to learn. I can think of some benefits:

- analyzing your own pronunciation. Lots of immersion and good hearing are a prerequisite for good pron, but they won't necessarily get you all the way there. A knowledge of phonemes and thus the breakdown of a word would help pinpoint which sounds you are not producing correctly.

- you can get audio on dictionary.com, but knowing the phonemes would assist in comparing similar words.

The English equivalent of AJATT is antimoon.com (actually, AJATT is the the ideas of antimoon applied to learning Japanese.) So, translating the ideas from that site into Japanese seems like a good place to start. It seems like a good site because they have experience in learning English as a second language.

Every in this thread is debating IPA (yum... India Pale Ale... no, wait) and pronunciation. Take a look at this page:

http://www.antimoon.com/how/pronunc.htm

1. Learn the English sounds and IPA (it also has audio for American and British version of those sounds)

Then they can look up words in a dictionary that has IPA pronunciations listed.

2. LISTEN to how they sound in real words and sentences

3. practice your pronunciation — listen to English words and sentences, and try to repeat them as well as you can

I just realized that they are selling software to help with this, so I guess they are not exactly unbiased.

drivers99 Wrote:Every in this thread is debating IPA (yum... India Pale Ale... no, wait) and pronunciation.

Hahaha, I do that too. Every time.

I could never be a serious linguist.

I am planning on returning to Japan in 4-6 months. Though I might change my mind last minute. Every morning when I watch the sunrise over the ocean here in Hawaii, I think "Only a complete nutcase would leave this paradise". Alas, I might be that nutcase. Once (if) I return to Japan, I will most likely work for an English conversation school again.

What is the best website for practicing English grammar? Even as a native speaker, I sometimes guess as to the correct form to use especially when it comes to punctuation. I know I also pick up bad habits living in Hawaii where most people speak "Pidgin English", an extremely butchered form of English used by locals here. One gets so used to it, it starts to feel strange and actually becomes harmful to a guy's social life to use correct English.

Edit: I can't believe it, but Pidgin actually has a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Pidgin

Tomasz Szynalski, the owner of Antimoon, is asking people who speak other languages to translate his website (or the 15 core articles) into these languages:

http://www.antimoon.com/wiki/Main_Page

You can find the 15 core articles at the bottom the page.

Re: Antimoon.

I realized I should have said this in the first post. AJATT came from Antimoon and Steven Krashen, but AJATT is more detailed and simply better when compared to Antimoon in my opinion.

Antimoon gives lots of good advice, but it doesn't go into how to start from scratch and go all the way to becoming a native (for example, it talks about how E-E dictionaries are good, but doesn't give advice on when to switch). It explains why input is good, but doesn't go into the concept of immersion. I don't feel it gives the reader much of an understanding of what they should be doing everyday.

There are other parts that AJATT has advanced. For example Antimoon recommends just adding words to your SRS and then goes onto say you can add sentences for grammar, when I think every word should be in a sentence.

Antimoon also has some stuff AJATT doesn't have (AFAIK). For example the pause and think reading method. So i'm not saying that AJATT is the be all and end all of learning languages, just that Antimoon is not enough.

Some food for thought that I found whilst browsing Antimoon.

Quote:The conclusion: you can't do without reading. Listening is great — for example, watching movies in English helps you to learn slang vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation. But if you are a beginner, you simply can't understand natural spoken English. Reading is the best way to learn a lot of English words. Only after you have learned a large vocabulary can you try to understand natural spoken language.

Phonetic transcriptions vs. recordings

Quote:Phonetic transcriptions vs. recordings

Virtually all software dictionaries nowadays have audio recordings. If you can listen to a native speaker pronouncing a word, do you still need written pronunciations? Yes, for four reasons:

* Your ears are not perfect. Even if the dictionary has high-quality recordings, it is always good to see all the sounds in a word. Sometimes you hear a "t"; then somebody tells you it should be a "d", and then you start hearing a "d".
* Recordings are never perfect. No matter how high the quality of recordings, there are always some bad ones. For example, here is the recording for the word back from the Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Not very clear, is it? Phonetic transcription (/b@k/) is always clear, because it represents each English sound with a different symbol.
* Dictionaries often have more transcriptions than recordings. For example, the transcriptions may show two ways to pronounce a word, but the recording will show only one. Or a dictionary may have British and American transcriptions, but only British recordings.
* Reading a transcription is faster than clicking a button and listening to a recording.

If you're looking for pronuciation you should try Wordweb. A Japanese people will find the phonetic system used in this dictionary very easy to use.

About the English accent...Almost everybody in my school speaks English with US American accent, I really don't like the British, I don't find it annoying, I just don't like it. Besides it's much more common to find US American movies, radio, news, etc.

armando_amaya Wrote:If you're looking for pronuciation you should try Wordweb. A Japanese people will find the phonetic system used in this dictionary very easy to use.

About the English accent...Almost everybody in my school speaks English with US American accent, I really don't like the British, I don't find it annoying, I just don't like it. Besides it's much more common to find US American movies, radio, news, etc.

Californian American would be the safest bet because every english speaking country around the world watches movies made in hollywood california