Translator: 宛蓁 謝 Reviewer: Helen Chang
I’m going to play a recording for you.
Please listen very attentively,
and please don’t play with your cell phones!
Don’t let yourself be distracted,
just try your best to understand the content.
I’ll warn you beforehand that it's a bit long.
If you start to feel a bit impatient,
please try to savor that feeling of impatience.
OK, here we go.
(Mark Zuckerberg giving a speech in Chinese with tone errors)
Karen Chung: So, now let me ask you:
How do you feel about what you just heard?
Did you understand it all?
Or maybe, like my freshmen, you're asking,
"Uh, could you maybe make the sound clip a bit shorter?"
Were there words you had to think about for a while
before you could figure out what he meant to say?
When you heard fǎmíng 法名 [dharma name] instead of fāmíng 發明 [invention]?
Or huǒyáo 火窯 [kiln] instead of huǒyào 火藥 [fireworks]?
When it's just a few words, it's little matter.
But did you find
correcting the tones of so many words from start to finish in your head
was actually rather tiring
and consumed quite a bit of brain energy?
So let me ask you,
I teach English, why would I be playing a recording like this for you?
Can you figure out why?
When you speak English,
would you like your conversation partner to feel this way?
Think for a minute, and put yourself in the other person's shoes, empathize.
Does it at all change your attitude towards English learning,
especially pronunciation?
Would you want your partner to feel this tired talking with you?
In Chinese-speaking regions,
Chinese TV shows and movies mostly display Chinese subtitles.
So let me ask you: Do you usually listen to the program, or read it?
Let's watch this clip.
(Video clip)
I expect you probably finished reading the subtitle
before you heard the line spoken.
Chinese speakers are shrewd.
It does take around three to four years to learn enough Chinese characters
to read most things,
For us English speakers using the Latin alphabet,
it takes just a year or two,
leaving aside the issue that lots of us are not wonderful spellers.
However, although you have to spend a lot more time learning to write Chinese,
ultimately you will read Chinese faster than English speakers read English.
You sail through a written text in units of two characters at a time,
while we plod along,
slowly putting the consonants and vowels together into words.
When reading Chinese,
you can largely skip over the step of phonetic processing
and thus you read faster.
For this reason, many Chinese prefer to acquire information by reading
rather than more slowly by listening.
As an example, say you are learning to play the piano.
You learn to read the printed notes,
you study the piece, memorize it, analyze it.
You become intimately familiar with the score.
But can you play it?
You may have a head full of theory,
but you haven’t trained your fingers to play it.
Let's look at another example.
Suppose you have a foreign friend
who agrees to practice English conversation with you,
in exchange for you teaching him Chinese.
You have to start from scratch,
so you teach them the four tones of Mandarin.
You tell them that every character, every syllable, comes with a fixed tone.
Change the tone and you change the meaning;
a character pronounced with the wrong tone is not understood correctly.
So you show them this diagram, and say, "Let's start with 'ma'.
Now, please say 'ma' in the four tones, following the lines in this diagram."
Could you do this if you were a foreigner taking your first Chinese lesson?
Would it sound like Chinese?
Everyone I've asked laughs and says, "Impossible!"
So I ask, "How would you teach it, then?"
They say, "Of course I'd read it aloud to them, then ask them to repeat it."
So I say, "Exactly."
So why is our English curriculum mostly written texts and almost no sound?
Do we expect the students to guess the correct pronunciations?
What does that lead to?
If the words aren't pronounced correctly,
we won’t know what you’re saying.
Mandarin relies on the four tones -
of course the vowels and consonants are important too -
but the four tones are especially important in distinguishing words.
In English, we rely on the correct vowels, consonants and stress.
If the pronunciation isn't right, what do you get?
Listen to these four words:
(Audio file)
I promise you these are four different words.
This was read by a fairly typical Taiwanese learner of English.
These were the four words she read:
rain /reɪn/
ran /ræn/
wren /rɛn/
rang /ræŋ/
rain, ran, wren, rang.
Do they all sound the same?
Or like this:
rain, ran, wren, rang.
When they hear the words in sequence,
my students say, "Wow, there’s actually quite a big difference between them."
If you compare and contrast the words like this,
everyone can learn them correctly.
But since this kind of training is neglected, this is the result we get.
Okay, let's look at another set of words.
Which five English words are these?
(Audio file)
Again, these are five different words. Which five words are they?
Can you tell them apart?
Actually, b-a-t and b-a-d differ
in that the last sound is voiceless in one and voiced in the other.
But that's not the only difference.
If the sound after a vowel is voiced, like "d", the vowel will be lengthened.
So the two words are pronounced "bat", 'ba...d"; "bat", 'ba...d".
Can you hear a clear difference between the two?
But in Taiwan, we mostly don't teach that vowel length changes
depending on whether the next sound is voiced or not,
so most people will say "bat, bat" for "bat, ba...d".
Next, lots of people have trouble differentiating short "a" /æ/ and "e" /ɛ/.
To make a short "e", push your chin up, like this;
it’s not "bat" but "bet", "bet".
If the next consonant is voiced, the short "e" is lengthened.
Compare "bet" to 'be...d'; "bet", "be...d".
The last word is pronounced "bait".
So the five words should be pronounced "bat", "ba...d", "bet", "be...d", "bait".
Do you hear the differences?
Or would you read them like this:
bat, bat, bat, bat, bat.
OK, let me give you another example.
Remember that language exchange partner mentioned earlier?
Let's say you're going out for a meal, and you ask him what he'd like to eat.
He says, "I'm hungry for bíng [second tone]."
What do they want to eat?
Can you be sure?
There is no such word as second-tone bíng in Mandarin. Not at all.
In order to know what he wants, you need to ask him,
"Uh, do you want the cold kind [first-tone 'shaved ice']?
Or the hot kind [third-tone 'flatbread']?"
So, in our English teaching,
can we say it is just an issue of "accent,"
having a foreign accent?
Lots of people say, "Ah, pronunciation doesn't matter that much,
as long as you’re understood."
Sure, you may be understood,
but how much mental effort was spent guessing first?
In fact, it's not a problem of accent.
In reality, some of the key phonetic features
we use to distinguish one word from another are being ignored.
All of these four words can form a phrase:
A little bit? A little bid? A little beat? A little bead?
They all make sense.
How can we tell what is meant
if they are all pronounced as "a little bit"?
Also, if you asked someone, "Hey, where did you go on holiday?"
and he replied, "yuu aas! [meaning U.S.]"
Was he naming a country or insulting you?
He certainly didn't mean to insult you.
In fact, many English words become profanities if you get the vowel wrong.
I'm not going to give any more examples.
(Laughter)
Imagine what would happen
if we taught math, physics, history, or music,
with this level of imprecision.
Would that be acceptable?
What sort of education would that be?
Yet this seems to be par for the course in English teaching - the norm.
Students think, "Since I can't learn pronunciation well,
I might as well just give up on it altogether.
And besides, it won’t be in the exams."
Is it really that hard to learn?
Here's another example:
The two vowels long "ee" /i/ and short "i" /ɪ/ are a bit similar,
but they’re two entirely different vowels.
Do they exist in Mandarin?
Does long "ee" /i/ exist in Mandarin?
We have /i/ in the number '1', yī, as in yī èr sān [one, two, three].
So learning to say the long "ee" /i/ shouldn't be a problem.
But what about short "i" /ɪ/? Is there a short "i" sound in Mandarin?
Yes, under special circumstances.
When marching in the army, you say: "ih uh, ih uh" for "one, two."
(Laughter)
That pronunciation of the number "1" is exactly like the English short "i" /ɪ/.
So if you say you can't tell them apart, I don't believe you.
OK, so what is necessary in order to learn a language well?
Most importantly, you must have a strong desire to learn, and a need.
And you must set a clear goal.
What is your goal?
What is the main goal for most Taiwanese?
Passing exams.
In exams, the listening component isn't all that critical.
You don't need pronunciation at all.
So who’s going to "waste time" working on speaking skills?
So, when you go to the States
and you can't understand or speak English well,
are you going to be surprised?
However, might it be different if you set a clear, concrete goal,
and decide you simply must achieve it?
Have you ever run into caregivers from Southeast Asia
who, not long after arriving in Taiwan with little or no knowledge of Mandarin,
can surprisingly communicate quite well and confidently in Mandarin?
And not just in Mandarin,
but sometimes also in Taiwanese as well?
How are they able to achieve this?
Because they've left home,
with their parents taking care of their kids:
they have to succeed in Taiwan.
They need to learn Mandarin to perform their duties.
So they find ways to learn it.
I've asked them how they learn it so well, Filipinos, Indonesians.
They say, "I learn by listening."
I find that awesome. I couldn't do it myself.
But in addition to a powerful desire, you need a good learning method.
Often when I ask my students to repeat a sentence after me,
they interrupt and start repeating before I’ve even finished giving the model.
What does this mean?
It means that they're not listening at all.
They may be reading the sentence, or they may have memorized it,
or they may be using the model only as a signal
that they need to start preparing their response.
Their attention is completely on themselves.
They're not listening to the actual sounds at all.
When I thought about it,
I realized that the human brain has an amazing function:
it's called "echoic memory."
When we hear a sound,
like a sentence or just something falling to the floor,
our brains will automatically replay that same sound in our head.
So if I say, "Please come in!"
you will immediately hear the sentence repeated in your head, in my voice.
Later, I found that using echoic memory in language teaching
could help students fully absorb the sounds they hear
and enable them to practice "deep listening."
This method is called the "Echo Method."
It has three steps.
First, find an audio file with a written transcription
and choose a short section from it.
Then, read it carefully,
and Google all the words, phrases and cultural allusions you don’t know,
making sure you thoroughly understand everything in the whole section.
When you're ready to practice,
press "play" and listen to three or four words, then press "pause".
Don't repeat the words out loud immediately after hearing them.
Take a moment to first listen to the "echo" in your head.
Then, after you've heard the words echo in your head, repeat them out loud.
Three steps: Listen, Echo, Repeat.
Listen, Echo, Repeat.
Let's try it out now.
Here's a short clip of a conversation.
Let’s listen.
(Movie clip) What's that song they're playing? I love it.
I have no idea. But it is nice.
That last sentence, "But it is nice," has a special intonation.
If you didn't have this audio model to follow,
you might read it choppily, like "But! it! is! nice!"
in a deliberate and stiff way.
But that’s not how it was said.
Now let's try it out.
I will give a model,
and when I put up my hand like this,
it means "Echo!"
Let the sound echo in your head.
So I'll give the model,
you wait for the echo, and then you repeat.
Make sure you don’t jump the gun
and start repeating before you’ve finished listening to the echo.
Let's try: "But it is nice."
Audience: "But it is nice."
KC: "But it is nice."
Audience: "But it is nice."
KC: "But it is nice."
Audience: "But it is nice."
Great, excellent!
You said it beautifully.
What happened was you listened fully to how it sounds,
then you internalized it, making it your own.
Because of this, when you say it, it more closely resembles the original.
The next step after this is to repeat directly after the original.
Then, finally, say it at the same time.
Follow my gestures:
"But it is nice."
Audience: "But it is nice."
KC: "But it is nice." Audience: "But it is nice."
Together now: "But it is nice."
KC and audience: "But it is nice."
You will feel you've repeated the same thing a lot of times.
That is indeed so.
You must "overlearn", you must overdo it in order to remember it,
in order for it to enter into your long-term memory,
so that when you need it, it will pop out by itself.
Now, what sort of learning material is best for Echo practice?
I suggest good television series,
such as "The Big Bang Theory" or "Gilmore Girls."
Practicing daily like this, you will learn,
not just pronunciation, but also vocabulary and grammar at the same time.
But do you have a lot of time to work on your English?
One or two hours a day?
Most people don't have that kind of time.
But do you have 10 minutes a day to spare?
10 minutes is in fact enough, but you need to do it every day.
Here are three takeaways to bring home with you:
First, don't just think of yourself when learning a language:
you also need to think of how the other person feels when listening to you.
Second, when setting your learning goals,
don't decide to learn English just for the exams;
you should be aiming to communicate comfortably and enjoyably with others.
Finally, persist, stick with it.
Don't try to cram at the last minute.
Practice a little every day, just 10 minutes a day.
I guarantee your English will improve beyond your expectations.
Thank you.