Using the deck I made on Dec 21, it took me 9 days at <20 minutes/day to basically learn the sounds of Hungarian and the Hungarian alphabet. Total time spent: 4 hrs of deck creation, 2.5 hours of reviews over a 10 day period. This is working very well so far (and it’s a lot of fun!), and I’m ready to move to the next stage: concrete vocabulary.
Tower of Babelfish
The Blog
Tips, tutorials and resources to aid you on your path towards fluency.
Tag Archives: minimal pairs
My next language project: Hungarian
Today marks the end of Russian and the beginning of Hungarian. I plan to spend 6-12 months on the language, and I’m aiming for an intermediate, moderately comfortable level of speaking (and the ability to read a book and handle a dubbed American TV series [which hopefully exists! Haven't yet checked])
Pronunciation Trainer Betatest!
Happy December to all! I’ve designed an early beta version of a pronunciation training deck that should hopefully teach you to hear several new sounds in French, Italian, German, Russian and American English (and a voiceless palatal stop, for good measure). I’m looking for volunteers who meet the following three requirements:
Survey Results (The Difficult Sounds of German for English speakers)
Thanks to all who participated. Here are the (most important) word pairs that caused problems:
Scale: 1 – Sound the same (mit/mit). 2 – Very Similar (drücken/drucken). 3 – Similar (Pfüte, Pföte). 4 – Different (Pfeet/Pfit). 5 – Completely different (Meat/Mat)
A Two/Seven minute quiz for *non*-German speakers (and a much overdue update)
First, the update: The book is chugging along, and will take substantially longer than I had predicted (and will be much better for it!). So far, I’ve gotten my thoughts, theories and research down on Memory, Pronunciation, Word Learning, Grammar, Vocabulary lists and Mnemonic Use, and the next step (aside from some remaining research and thoughts on Reading/Writing/Listening/Speaking) is reworking it into a friendly, clear presentation that’s an enjoyable book to read (and not a textbook). As we start cutting textbooky sections out of the book, I’ll be posting them here.
My current goal, aside from finishing the book, is to provide some high quality pronunciation tools here, because there’s just not very much available that’s easy to use and effective.
