Quality Practise Pronunciation With Audacity – The Best Method! A tutorial by Olle Kjellin, MD, PhD

Quality Practise Pronunciation With Audacity – The Best Method!
A tutorial by Olle Kjellin, MD, PhD

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/51074116/Kjellin-Practise-Pronunciation-w-Audacity.pdf

I had heard of Olle Kjellin, but I don’t think I’d seen this paper before.

In section C, “Plasticity”, there is this:

In experimental conditions it has been found that automating a new (simple) motor skill takes about 15 minutes. Can you practice the same sentence for 15 minutes? It seems like a good idea to do so. However, depending on the difficulty of the task and your previous experience with similar skills, of course, it may take longer or shorter time than that to learn a new motor pattern. For example, the 15 click consonants in Zulu are quite a challenge for English speakers, but
presumably easy-peasy for Xhosa speakers (who have 21 click consonants). When, however, you can say 20-30 sentences in a native or near-native way in your new language, after hours of deliberate, persistent practice on only them, you will also be able to say 20-30 million other sentences in the same way. Because they all follow the same rules of prosody and pronunciation. So part of the trick for the adult language learner is to have a very limited curriculum for
the initial pronunciation training period.

If he is correct, then I’d say that provides a pretty good validation of the SSi method. It doesn’t give you a massive vocabulary, but it provides you with the means of being able to speak the vocabulary you will learn in future correctly!

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