I am slowly becoming more knowledgeable about pronunciation, intonation and stress patterns. The only stress patterns I had previously considered were the stress patterns of my own documented life. The overwork and over-obsess and the bang fizzle pop of oh no Catherine has been doing too much again.
In language learning, stressed syllables and words are those with a tad more emphasis. In the English language the words you stress are the ones that carry meaning. If you can’t sense the stress change then you lose part of the meaning.
We show this stress too by the rhythm of the language
Between any two stressed words in an English sentence exists the same length of space, regardless of how many little bits fall in between. Spanish, on the other hand, is like machine gun fire, it’s steady and repetitive. When you apply the machine gun technique to the English language, you get something that sounds flat and ambiguous. When you try to stress time the Spanish language, you end up changing tenses and creating a lot of blank looks.
Intonation especially is a nebulous creature
Look it up in a teaching book, and the first thing you learn is that it’s hard to recognize. Or no. It’s hard to recognize by the human rational thinking brain. The lizard part of you which doesn’t know much about dictionaries or teaching theory understands it instantaneously.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Faked intonation, purposely changing the pitch of your voice as to manipulate, just sounds wrong. This, I guess is why actors really have to get into character. Intonation is hard to comprehend, hard to fake, hard to model, and hard to learn.
But without it we’re blind
The true meaning of language is hidden from us. This is the part that I think children learn faster than adults. Children are more willing to imitate, so they listen with more than just their ears. Adults often have their brains distracted running multiple tasks, emotions blinded by an earlier disagreement or a nagging doubt. Children are comfortable play-acting the words. Adults focus on the words themselves and forget the playfulness.
My tutor recently reminded me that intonation is also a kinaesthetic process. Sometimes when we’re trying to understand intonation it’s better to watch people speaking and notice the movement of their head or hands rather than focus on listening to the pitch. Again, when adults restrict their body movement because they are aware of their own body language or through their own insecurity, they limit their opportunity to learn this way.
No wonder language learning is so tricky
You cannot simply memorize words and structures, you have to play.
play
