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:
Tower of Babelfish
The Blog
Tips, tutorials and resources to aid you on your path towards fluency.
Tag Archives: research
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.
