How do I overcome speech problems?

[Amy27]

I've had speech problems ever since I was young. I took speech from the age of two to twelve. There were many sounds I had problems with at that age. I still have problems with English sometimes, mostly r's. In that, I mean I can easily correct myself, but sometimes I will say some words weirdly the first time. Even still, there is at least one word I cannot pronounce. So of course, I had some apprehension starting Chinese.

 

I wasn't wrong. I have trouble with sounds that aren't normally produced in English such as c, bo, po, mo, hun, and probably others. I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problem and has overcome it. If so, how? I assume it's similar to overcoming speech problems in English, but maybe there are other methods that seemed helpful.

 

Also, I'd like to mention that I am getting help from my teacher, but any other help would be great. My teacher has a friend who was born in China and is a grad student majoring in pathology. I assume Chinese was her second language since she probably went to an international school. She said she was willing to help me, but she hasn't spoken Chinese in several years. Not sure how much time she will be able to help me since I am leaving for China in a month and she is not entirely sure how to go about helping in Chinese. Also, my teacher, who is a native speaker, is going to send me a video with her speaking the different pinyin.

[edelweis]

Please note: I am not familiar with speech pathology (even though people sometimes tell me I have a slight speech impairment in my native language hehe).

 

When learning a foreign language, everyone will have trouble with some new sounds.

What helped me when learning Arabic and Chinese pronunciation was:

 

1) Lots of drills with audio tracks to learn how to distinguish sounds when hearing them. Generally pronunciation courses have some beginning tracks with pairs (like c/z), then once you've mastered a pair you move on to the next one, etc. If you don't have such a course, ask your teacher to make such audio tracks (or directly dictate the sounds in a private lesson).

So you do dictation everyday. Gradually some pairs become easier to distinguish, then you can use tracks that mix several pairs and so on.

 

2) Learn about the tongue position, lip position,  etc... and experiment (doing lots of odd noises hehe), with a teacher if possible, or recording yourself and comparing to a good audio record from a native speaker. You can use the same audio tracks as in step 1, since it is important to enunciate the pairs so that the sounds can be differentiated.

 

Doing 1 and 2 everyday, it took me only a few days to learn the easier Arabic sounds, but the more difficult ones took up to a month.

 

3) for Chinese especially: because pinyin can be misleading, it is important to also read the explanation of the pinyin table. Do not trust the orthography alone (e.g. mu / xu). You have to learn the sound for each syllable.

 

4) for Chinese especially: I started with Assimil's Chinese with Ease. Yes, the audio tracks are painfully slow, you really don't want to talk like that in real life. But for beginning, it's nice to have some full sentences at very slow speed in order to learn the full articulation.