Does anyone have any tips about learning a new language?

[Leith]

46. These Are All Great Tips

But I'm going to offer some tips that are completely different. These come from my many years of learning foreign languages (now mostly gone through lack of practice) and teaching English to people who don't speak it.

First of all, relax. Yeah, really - relax. You are going to make mistakes in vocabulary, pronunciation, and sounds. Don't expect perfection.

Second, do not, do NOT pronounce sounds like their closest English equivalents. Sure, the "ts" sound at the beginning of a word it unnatural to a native English speaker so we want to just say the "s" sound. I cringe in embarrassment and irritation when I hear "sunami." That's a girl's name, not a natural disaster.

More on pronouncing unfamiliar sounds: one of my more frustrating memories of teaching sounds was trying to get a Japanese student to pronounce the English "th" sound. I was battling Japanese etiquette more than anything else because it is bad manners to show one's tongue. The best I could get her to do was place the tip of her tongue between her teeth. Then she took her tongue back into hiding and pronounced the "s" sound.

Lastly, it may feel to you like you are mocking native speakers, but try to imitate the accent as much as possible. This means:
- copying vowels: The Japanese "u" is more like in the English word pull than pool. Someone who pronounces "cot" like "coat" will always sound foreign and be more difficult to understand.
- stress on syllables: I once lost some important points because a speaker said a word with the accent on the wrong syllable. It sounded like "STADDidicts" and it was a good 20 seconds before I realized that he said "statisticts."
- rising and falling tones in sentences. Say these two sentences naturally:
"It's an icehouse."
"It's a nice house."
A native speaker will instantly know which one you are saying even without context.


Very sorry for being longwinded. But sometimes little things can mean the difference between sounding like you are having a conversation and just being a student whose turn it is to read from the textbook.