Teaching chinese to pronounce english correctly.

[webmagnets]

I found this site very useful in learning to pronounce chinese:

http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/pronunciation/

Is there something I can use to help a chinese person pronounce english properly. We are going to have daily meetings to help each other learn.

I particularly like the drawings of tongue placement and the detailed descriptions of how to make the sounds.

I will have to trust the choices set forth in this forum because I cannot read chinese characters.

Of course he has trouble with R's and L's. Any ideas on how to help him with things like that?

[aeon]

How about Teaching Pronunciation and Sounds of English ? Any good?

The only help for consistent mispronunciations is to point them out each and every time they occur without fail until the ability to hear them is learnt.

You can also try word pair drills "Read, Lead", "Red, Led", "Wreath, Leith" or whatever you can think up.

If I know someone well, I like to find the most embarassing definition or implication of a mispronunciation and explain it. It's a good incentive to getting things right... I almost instantly cured a friend of consistently vowel shifting the "iy" sound to "ee" by introducing them to someone called Simon (think about it)...

[stephanhodges]

They also need to develop the ability to hear (not listen) to the sounds and speed of changes between the sounds. After that, then they will know what to listen to, so that they can correct themselves by shadowing (repeating after someone).

There is a good deal of information about this in Dr. Alfred Tomatis' books. I recommend "The Ear and the Voice" which specifically talks about singing, and learning to listen to your voice. However, it has a lot of information directly related to language learning as well.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810851377/sr=1-2/qid=1138456176/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-2272961-8032062?%5Fencoding=UTF8

[Lu]

It can help if you find Chinese words that have a sound in it that is also in the English.

I'm helping some Chinese people learn Dutch. One guy is from Nanjing, and often says l- instead of n-. I taught him the sentence 'Klinkt logisch' (means 'Makes sense'), he said 'Klinkt nogisch.' 'Logisch,' I said, but he didn't hear the difference. I asked him 'How do you say 'dragon',' he said 'Long.' 'Ok,' I said, 'same sound.' 'Lllogisch,' he said. Mission accomplished.

Another girl had trouble with the sound -ui- (actually, all Chinese learning Dutch have trouble with this). Someone told her: it's like e4yu2 (crocodile). She got it, now she can say ui.

[mr.stinky]

chinese have major difficulty with the english (or at least the american version of) 'R,'

where the sound always seems to come out as 'L.' (tomallow) no amount of making

faces or changing the position of the tongue seems to help.

but relate it to the chinese reflexive -er and they can usually get the sound within a

half dozen tries. start with yidianr, and substitute various prefixes and suffixes.