Yesterday, Yi-Jhen and I met inside of the Goldstein library to work on pronunciation. She told me that she struggled with pronunciation quite a bit and wondered what she could do to improve her ability. The best advice I could give her was to listen to how Americans speak and try to imitate the sounds as closely as possible. For the actual lesson, I had a sheet of paper on which I had written words that were very close in pronunciation, but had drastically different meanings, e.g. "pin" and "pen," "bull" and "bell." We went over the list one word at a time, correcting mistakes as we went. Once we had finished pronouncing the list, I would randomly point to a word on the page and have her pronounce it. Overall, she did very well, but was rather confused by some English pronunciations. For example, she couldn't understand why "hear," "bear," and "heart" were all spelled similarly but had such drastic differences. She also told me that Chinese speakers struggle with pronouncing the hard "th" and the soft "th" sound. I struggled explaining how to make the different sounds, until I came up with two phrases: "finger things" (soft "f" and a soft "th") and "zip this" (hard "z" and a hard "th"). I can't explain how it works, but it really helped Yi-Jhen sound the differences!
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