As for me , I was born in Hubei province located in the middle of China, people there have difficulty in pronoun "L" and N" in Pingying ,sometimes we even can't recognize that we have made a mistake, if someone point the mistake out, we will mistakes next time we use it. It will be a life long problems because people in our hometown are used to the sound. that's why we have so many jokes about dialects in different Provinces.When I started to learning English, teachers all have accent and as a consequence, the students will speak like the teachers until we can learn how to read from the phonetic symbol. When we learned how to read the words ,we usually don't use them in our daily life cause a lack of the environment of speaking so we usually have little chance to find the faults. When we have to speak English, we are to shy to open our mouth and fear to make mistakes. When a native speaker told me that I pronoun "the" in the wrong way, I felt very surprised ,he said I also can't tell tongue-flatted and tongue-rolled apart, and I said that I make this mistakes in Chinese ,too.
Habit is hart to change but we need to change it, and I am trying to make progress in Chinese and English pronunciation,which will take a long time but worth to try.
it is amazing for me that you have problem about Chinese. I also feel it's unique problem deriving from largeness and history of your country. Also, we Japanese have many dialects and accents. But, even though we have a few exception, we usually don't think there are obvious problems of pronunciation among those dialects.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I always feel Chinese people are good at English than Japanese. Off course, I know it depends on people. But interestingly, almost all of Chinese people I have met before spoke English fluently. It might derive from education in China, or earnest of Chinese. But I think it is caused by the distance between Chinese and English. It means Chinese and English might be close linguistically. It might help Chinese people get good at English, I guess. I suggest this idea without any evidence. So, as it were, it is my fantasy. But I feel that there is linguistical distance among our languages. As for languages in China, it is very large country, and it has complicated history. They might make liguistical area of China larger, I imagine.
you are right, it is hard to change an habit, and how we speak is something we've been doing since we were around 1 year old. But I think the first step is to be aware of what you do, how we speak, and then aware of difficult sounds and try to improve little by little. Also by noticing how others do it could later help us improve. And, after all, we don't need to pronounce everything like native speakers do in English (which also varies a lot across the states and throughout different English speaking countries), so we can try whatever we feel could improve our communication with others.
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