One of the many challenges I've had when learning languages is the ability to speak properly. And the reason for this is "making faces". That may seem silly, but if there is one thing I do understand about English, is that the more adept at it you are, the less you tend to express with your face.
How does that work? Ventriloquism. The ability to speak without or barely moving your mouth, lips and teeth. It's an awesome skill, yet I personally don't have the ability to "throw" my voice. It's one of those skills that leaves most people in awe, or it used to anyway. Or even the skill to talk through your teeth. Moving your lips, but not opening your mouth.
While all the cool and awesomes ways to speak are, awesome, the downside is it makes learning languages hard. The skills that look great, in fact tend to lead to a lazy mouth which some languages are unforgiving about. I know for a fact Vietnamese is like this. The ability to move your lips, open your mouth and place your tongue properly, is necessary to get the correct sounds. Otherwise you will not be clearly heard or you're just plain wrong in pronunciation.
This is also true for German. In fact, what I like about this FSI course is it's extremely clear and concise (it has to be, to enable the military to quickly learn languages valuable to communicating at different stations). They explain quite clearly the need to open your mouth and make a certain face, a "screw all" how stupid you look. It's really the only way to make the sounds properly. And so it began.
I finish Unit 1 and finally sharpened up my hearing of words that were given and was confident and curious to see what lay in Unit 2. Let's say, I had a lovely time and will be doing review of those two Units tomorrow.
So I learned how to hear "kaffee and café" and also I was able to hear the syllables in other new words presented. I will however be reviewing this is unit again to correct so listening mistakes.
In Unit 2 the focus was on hearing, properly speaking, memorisation, and participation.
They start you off with hearing the word properly from the native speaking woman, and then the wrong way with the native English narrator and his awesomely monotone voice. Hearing this was actually quite important. Why? Because it's one thing to always hear how it sound the right way, but when you self-study particularly, it is very helpful to have a comparison of what it sounds like when it's horribly wrong. Otherwise you will be practising your errors, which is really what this whole introductory course is about. They want to get you set straight on hearing and basic speaking, before you start with the Basic Course.
Thankfully I've had exposure to German in my youth from various sources, Are you Being Served: Dutch Week, 31 Languages of the world CD (horribly out of date, but fun to explore all 31 languages), and passively from tv shows or my own searches. So that when Guten Tag, Guten Morgen, came up, I was not surprised. However, I DID better pronounce it compared to how I used to. There is a certain hard and soften that plays out vs fully one or the other.
Guten Tag = sounds like = Goot'n Tahg
Guten Morgen = sounds like - Goot'n Moahr-gen
Gut = sounds like = Goot
In fact it makes me wonder what the key of this languages is. Meaning, when I hear Gut, I also automatically think of the Scottish language. Although gut, is just a little bit of a different sound. For example gut (as in your stomach or belly) sounds a tad like "goat". But it has a very slight oo. So it's g-oo-uht
Another phrase I learn was "Danke, auch gut"
Now when the woman first spoke it, I heard Auf, however when I looked at the script afterwards, I realized it was Auch. Having said Auf, all I had to do was change the ending sound.
"Wie geht es Ihnen" was interesting to learn and look at afterwards. They don't show you the word you need to learn at the forefront as, again, it's based more off listening. So when they taught it it was " Ve gate-is Een" I knew "W" sounds like "Vee" so that didn't suprise me, but the word Ihnen was interesting to say without struggling over.
The fun part was practising speaking after the woman and the participation exercises. You would take turns with her and speak. You would first be a greeter, the thanking person, then the supplying information, then it would be her turn to take the lead. You practise this way for 3 times and then it's the end of that unit.
The listening exercise has definitely helped in making it easy to somewhat hear what she is saying, but of course she is speaking with great diction and care and that along with listening makes for a fun learning process!
Auf Wiedersehen!
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