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An Outline of English Pronunciation: 3rd Revised Edition
156 pages.
156 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2000
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April 19, 2017
The ultimate randomizer in choosing books is a reading challenge item “A book, which you will find on the month of March in the library, at the bookstore or at your friend’s house and which is fifth from the left on the third shelf from the top”. Most of the people I know have no more than one bookshelf. Also, in March I ended up in Denmark and, since I don’t speak Danish, my possibilities were restricted.
I went to the university’s library and found the books like this in the requested place: Gary Nash, Julie Roy Jeffrey, John Howe “The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, Volume I to 1877, Chapters 1-16”, Lawrence Rainey “Modernism: An Anthology” and a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories “Eclipse 3: New Science Fiction and Fantasy”. None of them sounded interesting enough, especially regarding their size. (And can you imagine – the forth book on the same shelf was John Green “The Fault in Our Stars” or the book two shelves below was J. K. Rowling “The Casual Vacancy”.) So I went easier way (as long as I wasn’t cheating) and took this 150 pages book about English pronunciation. It might even be useful for me, as I will be working and living in the international environment with English as the main language for the next few months.
At first I learned that this actually is a textbook for Danish students enrolled in a specific study programme and originally it was published in Danish. So the author compares the two languages and tries to be as helpful as possible for Danish students to learn correct English spelling and avoid them sounding “un-English”. Even though I am not Danish and comparisons didn’t make any sense to me, it was interesting to learn a bit about Danish language too.
I bet the students were not very happy to read this book as a compulsory material, especially if they had to do tests from it. But as this was my own choice and I was willing to learn, I took enough time to read everything carefully and even try to spell all examples out loud. It might sound weird, but it is no big deal if you are living alone. I really loved the way they portrayed pronunciation of phonemes with images of tongue placement – it really helps a lot to better understand how a sound has to be said in order to sound correct and to not be confused to any similar sounds.
The last chapters were harder to read and I got lost frequently. It happened after the author decided to switch from differently sized dots and dots with tales above the words for intonation to specific symbols in-line with words. The symbols take up additional space and I couldn’t read the example from the first try, because some words appeared as two separate words instead of one.
I am not sure, if I learned something that will last, but for the next couple of weeks I will definitely be more aware of how I pronounce English words. And I will pay more attention to what I hear around me. You can read a lot of theoretical books, but practise is still the only thing, which makes it perfect. This book could be a good start for an English learner if it would be adjusted to particular country. And this is how teachers should teach kids to pronounce sounds correctly: “If a language teacher does not have this knowledge but speaks language well, she will probably be able to hear that something is wrong with the student’s pronunciation and will, accordingly, be able to point out errors, but she will be in no position to define what is wrong or to prescribe how the errors should be remedied.” [pg. 25]
P.S. Sometime after finishing this book I stumbled across this video: Talking backwards by Smarter Every Day. I was very glad what I already knew what plosives are!
I went to the university’s library and found the books like this in the requested place: Gary Nash, Julie Roy Jeffrey, John Howe “The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, Volume I to 1877, Chapters 1-16”, Lawrence Rainey “Modernism: An Anthology” and a collection of science fiction and fantasy stories “Eclipse 3: New Science Fiction and Fantasy”. None of them sounded interesting enough, especially regarding their size. (And can you imagine – the forth book on the same shelf was John Green “The Fault in Our Stars” or the book two shelves below was J. K. Rowling “The Casual Vacancy”.) So I went easier way (as long as I wasn’t cheating) and took this 150 pages book about English pronunciation. It might even be useful for me, as I will be working and living in the international environment with English as the main language for the next few months.
At first I learned that this actually is a textbook for Danish students enrolled in a specific study programme and originally it was published in Danish. So the author compares the two languages and tries to be as helpful as possible for Danish students to learn correct English spelling and avoid them sounding “un-English”. Even though I am not Danish and comparisons didn’t make any sense to me, it was interesting to learn a bit about Danish language too.
I bet the students were not very happy to read this book as a compulsory material, especially if they had to do tests from it. But as this was my own choice and I was willing to learn, I took enough time to read everything carefully and even try to spell all examples out loud. It might sound weird, but it is no big deal if you are living alone. I really loved the way they portrayed pronunciation of phonemes with images of tongue placement – it really helps a lot to better understand how a sound has to be said in order to sound correct and to not be confused to any similar sounds.
The last chapters were harder to read and I got lost frequently. It happened after the author decided to switch from differently sized dots and dots with tales above the words for intonation to specific symbols in-line with words. The symbols take up additional space and I couldn’t read the example from the first try, because some words appeared as two separate words instead of one.
I am not sure, if I learned something that will last, but for the next couple of weeks I will definitely be more aware of how I pronounce English words. And I will pay more attention to what I hear around me. You can read a lot of theoretical books, but practise is still the only thing, which makes it perfect. This book could be a good start for an English learner if it would be adjusted to particular country. And this is how teachers should teach kids to pronounce sounds correctly: “If a language teacher does not have this knowledge but speaks language well, she will probably be able to hear that something is wrong with the student’s pronunciation and will, accordingly, be able to point out errors, but she will be in no position to define what is wrong or to prescribe how the errors should be remedied.” [pg. 25]
P.S. Sometime after finishing this book I stumbled across this video: Talking backwards by Smarter Every Day. I was very glad what I already knew what plosives are!
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