Conversation Islands - Shekhtman (Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies) Language Learning Forum

Conversation Islands - Shekhtman
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Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies

10 messages over 2 pages: 1 2

rdearman
Senior Member
United Kingdom
rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5038 days ago
881 posts - 1812 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin

Message 9 of 10

28 May 2015 at 2:28pm | IP Logged

Great advice everyone! Like grayb, I have stock phrases and conversation pieces in French & Italian, because people do tend to ask the same thing. But I thought I would be a bit more proactive with Mandarin and hence the question.

@Iversen, Do you mean phrases like:

That sounds interesting, tell me more?
Who said that?
I haven't really thought about that, what is your opinion?

osoymar wrote:

There are other benefits to working on the islands with tutors, of course- my favorite
is that you get to develop prosody of speech, rather than focusing on just
pronunciation of individual words.

Could you explain that a bit more for me?

1 person has voted this message useful

osoymar
Tetraglot
Pro Member
United States
Joined 4538 days ago
190 posts - 344 votes

Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese
Studies: Spanish, French
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Message 10 of 10

29 May 2015 at 7:09pm | IP Logged

I'm a big fan of how Luca describes prosody
in his
blog.

To briefly summarize, the goal is to develop a more native-like rhythm and intonation
of complete sentences. To use an extreme example, consider a stereotypical American who
has more or less mastered the phonemes of Italian, but never developed the proper
rhythm. Or vice-versa. I'm really not sure how to write this in text, but I hope you
see how that can be a major problem. I don't want to get on too much of a tangent, but
I'm of the opinion that prosody is more important for communication than mastery of
individual phonemes.

I'm much, much lazier than Luca, and I don't follow his rather extensive system of
marking up texts. But I do find it enormously helpful to focus on the prosody of
sentences, especially when working with native teachers, and this dovetails nicely with
the language islands method.

I hope that's not too cursory an explanation, but let me know if I've been unclear.
1 person has voted this message useful

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