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 Personal Language Map
| 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
|
This discussion contains 10 messages over 2 pages: << Prev 1 2 If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum
This page was generated in 0.1719 seconds.
DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
|