Categories
Experiences

3 lessons I learnt from missing my Summer Recording Challenge goal

I messed up. I knew I’d be busy teaching at a summer camp in July so I came up with the idea of a Summer Recording Challenge. I still maintain it’s a great idea, but I made a few mistakes in my approach. That’s ok, we’re all human and we can learn from our mistakes. Here are the lessons I learnt:

1. Test your equipment early and often.

Mic có nhiều gió lắm.
Mic của Thảo có nhiều gió lắm. Buồn quá!

I’d used my headset many times in Vietnam while skyping as well as to record on Rhinospike. I continued skyping when I returned home but little did I know, the headset had been damaged a little in my trip back to the UK and now features a heavy dose of static. It wasn’t until I attempted a trial run the day before I hoped to start the challenge that I found this static.

I tried to remove the buzzing noise with Audacity but it didn’t turn out right. I bought a new cheap headset when I had a day off and the chance to go to town, but I was already more than a week behind and had nothing but several static-filled recordings of the same text to show for it. I never caught up.

2. Get into a language routine before other big changes in your life.

If you know you’re going to have a busy month – an important project at work, moving house, a friend staying over – get your routine down before the busy period starts. It was a huge error to have the first day of the challenge coincide with the day that real work began at my summer gig. I wish I’d started a few days earlier, sorted out any problems before I got busy and built some momentum with the project, making it easier to stay committed.

3. Find it hard to stick to goals? Read this.

Last month I read an article which blew me away – finding it difficult to stick to rules or goals is a personality thing, which may have contributed to my lack of consistency with recordings. I don’t think this was the whole problem but given limited time and equipment problems as mentioned above, a so-called upholder or obliger probably would have made more effort to find a solution so they could keep up with the goal. Perhaps next time I should blackmail myself or just keep it a secret until it’s finished.

What now?

The summer isn’t over, I kept up with skyping every day so Vietnamese is still fresh in my mind. I have a new mic and some free time so I’m still going to try and complete the project, starting on Wednesday. It will be later than planned, but at least I learnt some valuable lessons along the way!

Over to you: How’s your summer language learning going?

Categories
Learning

How to improve your pronunciation in 10 steps

Skribu kie vi aŭdas spiron kaj xxx.
Record yourself
Record yourself. Credit.

Every language learner wants to, or should want to, improve your pronunciation.

Here’s a technique I picked up while teaching English in Vietnam: how to noticeably improve your pronunciation in just 15 minutes.

What you need

  • A short recording of a native speaker either talking or reading a short text. (I’d recommend 200 words maximum.)
  • A transcription of this recording. I like to have it printed out with double spacing so I have room to make notes, mark pauses etc.
  • A recording device (your computer, phone etc).

10 steps to improve your pronunciation using recordings

  1. Listen to the native recording.

    Listen to how the native is speaking and the rhythm they use.

  2. Record yourself reading the transcript.

    You can read it through a couple of times but there’s no need to practice at this stage.

  3. Listen to and compare the native recording and your recording.

    Listen out for pronunciation differences and make a note of them.

  4. Practice these problem sounds and words.

    Imitate the pronunciation of the native speaker. Practice repeating individual problem sounds. Try techniques such as backchaining for problem words.

  5. Listen to the native recording and mark where the speaker pauses.

    There will be short pauses (eg. to breathe) and long pauses (such as the end of a sentence). Noting this will help you say each sentence with a correct rhythm.

  6. Mark the stress.

    If your language has stressed words within a sentence (like English, Spanish, etc), listen to the native speaker again and mark these stresses. There isn’t an exact science to this, just mark it where you hear it. You probably need to play the native recording twice.

    Annotate your transcript
    Make notes on your transcript to help improve your rhythm and stress.

  7. Practice reading the transcript with these corrections and modifications.

    You may wish to play the recording and mumble along (like when you’re listening to a song and singing under the breath, or when you don’t know all the words) to practice the timing and build up to recording yourself.

  8. Record yourself again.

  9. Listen to the difference in your first and second recordings.

    Congratulate yourself on how much you’ve improved already!

  10. Share your recording

    Share this second recording with a native speaker to get more feedback on what else you need to correct.

To increase the impact, do this again tomorrow with another recording! After all, it only takes 15 minutes.

Want to challenge yourself? Get your materials ready and make a 30 day challenge of it!

Over to you: How do you improve your pronunciation? Are you going to try this method?

Categories
Learning

4 steps to prepare for Summer Recording Challenge

How to prepare for Summer Recording Challenge 2013Yesterday I announced the Summer Recording Challenge. I hope you will join me on a 40 day quest to improve your pronunciation this summer.

I’m not going to rope you into this without any advice on how to do it, though. Today it the first of a two part guide preparing you for the challenge. The second, and most crucial, part covers the technique to improve your pronunciation.

1. Decide what you want to work on

And I mean exactly what you want to work on because ‘pronunciation’, or even ‘tones’, is a bit too general. Likewise, if you’re learning English and want to improve final constant sounds – that’s also quite general. Focus on a particular sound such as the final -s.

When setting your goals for this challenge, you need to be specific and then choose materials that will enable you to meet each of them. Personally I’ve set 4 goals for the challenge – giving me 10 days to focus on them, one at a time. You can set more or less, depending how big each goal is.

For example, I know I need to work on a particular tone. Let’s call it tone X. I’m choosing materials that have several words with tone X in them. From Day 1-10 of the challenge, I will be using recordings that have a lot of tone X. I will start off mastering the sound, then I’ll work on sentences that have tone X in them and phrases with two or three tone X’s in a row. From Day 11-20 I will be working on something else.

2. Prepare your materials

Find native speaker recordings to use as your model. The last thing you want to be doing during the 40 day challenge is scrambling around to find new recordings every day. Find all of them now to allow your focus later to be purely on improving your pronunciation.

Try your course CDs, short monologues from a TV show or a famous speech, poems, nursery rhymes or extracts from a (audio) book. Songs might even work. If you really can’t find some suitable recordings, find short pieces of writing (from single sentences up to about 200 words) and get them recorded either by a friend or via a website like RhinoSpike which allows you to get any foreign language text read aloud for you by a native speaker.

Most of the texts I will be using for Vietnamese are from here, mainly pronunciation drills and these riddles and poems (unfortunately they, like all my textbook CDs, tend to have northern accents whereas I have a southern one so I’m supplementing the recordings where necessary). If you’re an English learner wanting to work on British pronunciation, see here.

You may also want to print out your transcripts so you can take notes… More on this next Monday!

3. Prepare your equipment

Play with your recording software. So far I’ve been using Ubuntu’s default recorder which is perfectly adequate, but I’m going to look into open-source Audacity which has a lot more features that look ideal for language learners.

Once you have your software set up, practice making recordings in your native language. (This is also a perfect chance to help someone out by recording on RhinoSpike!) Doing this allows you to familiarise yourself with the logistics of recording and figure out if you need to change any settings as well as getting a feel for how easy you find it to read from a text – and how long a passage is too long.

It’s this step that causes me to recommend your text is no longer than 200 words or ideally a lot less. When recording English texts, I found I’m much more likely to make mistakes with longer texts and usually have to make 2-3 recordings…and this is in my native language! Remember your focus is not to read aloud perfectly, but to copy a native speaker’s pronunciation.

4. Prepare your feedback

Find someone to review your recordings. After you’ve practised and recorded yourself, you’ll want to have a native speaker listen to your recording and tell you what else you need to work on. You can ask your friends or language exchange partner but if you’ve known them a long time they may be used to your pronunciation and unable to pick out all of your errors. You can try finding someone new through a language website you regularly use or check our participant list.

Further reading

Over to you: How do you prepare for your language goals? Do you have any great pronunciation links to share?

Categories
Experiences

How I pushed myself to learn more Vietnamese before leaving Vietnam

Pushing myself as time was running outAs my time in Vietnam started running out, I felt an urgency to learn as much Vietnamese as I could. I decided simply attending my regular classes wasn’t enough (especially as the pace was too slow) and I’d been letting myself get stuck in a routine that wasn’t helping me learn or practice beyond my comfort zone. It was time to shake things up.

Here’s how I levelled up my Vietnamese.

1. Getting a motorbike licence

For quite some time I’d been toying with the idea of taking the full A1 motorbike test in Vietnam. Most expats get their home car licence translated which exempts them from taking the theory test, so only the practical test is needed to get a Vietnamese motorbike licence. However, this kind of licence comes with an expiration date.

I saw it as an opportunity to set and achieve a goal: study for and pass the theory test in Vietnamese.

I got a copy of the booklet of questions but left it on the shelf for a while. Sensing I needed a date to work towards to push me to study, I registered to take the test and started working through the booklet with a friend, picking out the vocabulary I needed to understand the questions. As I do in fact have a UK car licence, I found most of the questions quite straightforward once I understood them, then just memorised the rest.

Two days before the test itself, I went along to the second practice session (I missed the first the day before) which involved taking a practice test on paper then another on the computer. I scraped a pass both times. Confidence now high I was left to worry about the tricky “number 8” on the practical test.

To cut a long story short, I not only passed the theory test but I got 15/15. I’m not sure who was more amazed – myself or the guy who printed out my score sheet.

My Vietnamese motorbike licence
My licence which lasts forever

2. Attending a Korean class…in Vietnamese

Not content with one goal that took less than a week to accomplish, I also attended Korean classes for a month. I was the only non-Vietnamese person in the classroom, teacher included. I certainly didn’t understand everything and I took longer to pick up new structures, but with a bit of effort and preparing for class, I made enough progress.

While I didn’t have a SMART goal for this one, aside from learning some basic Korean the aim was mostly just to stretch myself. To put myself in a unfamiliar, challenging environment using Vietnamese and prove I could step up to it. I struggled, but it was an interesting experience.

3. Stop using ‘Vietglish’

This is embarrassing to admit, but with a couple of my closet friends we don’t actually speak proper Vietnamese. Nor could it be called English. We switch between the two, even in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes it is down to efficiency (even my friend will sometimes say ‘she’ as it’s quicker than choosing ‘cô ấy’, ‘bà ấy’). Often there is no real reason for it, it’s just become habit. But a lot of the time, it is because I don’t know (or don’t want to pause to remember) a word. Uh-oh.

Surprisingly, this has not become a problem when I’m talking to anyone else. Still, it’s a bad habit and I decided it was time to start kicking it.

So I armed myself with a notepad and wrote down every English word I used in a Vietnamese sentence. I went through my list with a friend, and got example sentences for each new word. I’ve put these new words in my Anki deck and I’m learning them. I’m trying not to speak Vietglish with my friends, but I’m aware it’s going to take time to totally stop.

Even after these three steps, I’ve still got quite a way to go to improve my Vietnamese but it was nice to leave on a high, with motivation to keep on learning. After all, I’ll have to come back to Vietnam to make use of that licence. 😉

Categories
Learning

When should you quit language classes?

when to quit language classes

when to quit language classesClasses can be a great way of getting good, consistent input in your language learning journey. For many people, myself included, learning stagnates without a push to keep going (and there’s nothing like having paid for classes to make sure you go, and therefore learn). But sometimes the classes are not worth your precious time and hard-earned money.

I’m sure everyone, at some point in their lives, has been in a class that was simply moving too quickly or two slowly. Perhaps you aced biology and didn’t get why the teacher was explaining photosynthesis yet again. Or maybe nothing your biology teacher said made any sense, but when you got home and your mum/brother/cousin explained it to you, it all clicked into place.

Mass education is always going to have a mix like this in a class, even if classes are grouped in levels.

And actually, it’s not always a bad thing. For starters, a good teacher will address this issue when they’re planning their lessons, thinking about ways to help the weak students and push the strong ones. Moreover, being a weak student for that level can be excellent motivation to work hard and catch up with the rest of the class. Stronger students can likewise compete to stay at the top.

However, sometimes the pace is not just a bit out of sync, sometimes it’s so far off that you need to stop attending classes.

If your class is totally above your level, you’re going to spend a lot of time feeling lost or confused. You’ll feel like the language is too hard. It’s not. Anyone can learn a language, but we all progress at different rates. You’ve been thrown in at the deep end of the swimming pool before you’re ready. You need a little more practice at the shallow end and before you know it you’ll be able to move up. That’s it. Just like learning to swim, dropping down a level will make you feel more comfortable, as well as broaden your knowledge on details you felt like you whizzed through before, and ultimately increase your confidence learning and using Vietnamese.

On the flip side, if your class is moving too slowly this is also when you should stop attending. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that these classes are still better than nothing, but if you leave every class frustrated and fed up because classes are moving as slow as the slowest student or you’re staring at the clock waiting for class to finish, it’s time to quit.

A different class, a private class one-on-one with a teacher or taking a new approach like a language exchange could be just what you need to spice things up again and keep moving forward.