About a month ago I started helping a friend from Toastmasters work on her pronunciation of American English. She is originally from China and would like to improve her English vocabulary and pronunciation because she think it will help people understand her better and it would help her at work. I agreed to help but told her that her English is already very good and that I have no problems understanding her. Besides, her English is much better than my Mandarin. 我的汉语语言技能约有好一只狗.
但至少我知道如何点菜,并说"对不起" . Anyway... :-) My recommendations in general were to try to read a newspaper or book in English every now and then and sometimes tune into the English language news or TV shows since she usually tunes into Chinese TV and reads Chinese text when she goes home. I also went over some of the weirdness of American English pronunciation. And that got me thinking about how they teach American English to call center employees in Bangalore based on what Thomas Friedman wrote in "The World is Flat". You guessed correctly if you guessed that I'm currently listening to that audio book. :-) At any rate in American English we roll the letter T when it occurs in a word in any place other than the beginning. So the world "turtle" would be pronounced turdle. And the word entity would be pronounced en-a-dee. I guess we're weird that way. But there is one great phrase from the book that has some real tongue twisters in it. Here it is:
"A bottle of bottled water held thirty little turtles. It didn't matter that each turtle had to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a bit of noodles, a total turtle delicacy...the problem was that there were too many turtle battles for less than oodles of noodles. Every time they thought about grappling with the haggler turtles their little turtle minds boggled and they only caught a bit of noodles."
I bet even native American English speakers will either have some trouble with that one or have to slow it down a bit. Overall I think the way to improve your vocabulary and pronunciation for pretty much any language is to read books in that language and watch tv shows or movies in that language. Exposure is key. But I also told her that her kids have a distinct advantage. They will be fluent in both Mandarin and English without any special effort which should help them out tremendously when they enter the workforce in 10 - 15 years. I wish I were fluent in two languages instead of only knowing a smattering of 4 or 5.
Posted by troutm8 at June 18, 2007 12:16 AM