![]() For other languages (Italian, for instance), I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding good pairs, and have had to resort to guessing (I know cagna is a word…so what about cania?) and checking in a dictionary or online (Italian Wikipedia says Cania is a commune in the Cantemir district of Moldova…not a particularly common word, but I suppose it counts…). When I began studying Hungarian, for instance, I found a great list of minimal pairs right in the beginning of my textbook that covered every problematic sound in the language. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find a centralized source of minimal pairs, and each language’s resources differ considerably. To train your ears to recognize these two O’s, you’ll want to find a few words that contrast them directly, like nôtre/notre or hausse/os. In French, for instance, there are two “O” sounds that are unfamiliar to English speakers:, or “closed O” and, or “open O”. To train your ears on a new sound, you’re going to need to find some words that contrast that new sound with some other, extremely similar sound. So let’s get started: Get a list of minimal pairs to play with Depending upon how many sounds you want to train, this process may take some time, but I’ve found that the work is pretty fun – you’re mucking around with your target language’s sound system and playing with a bunch of computer programs – and in the end, it’s really empowering, as you’re teaching yourself your language. ![]() To do this, you’ll need to assemble a list of interesting word pairs, get them recorded, chop those recordings up into individual sound files, and get those files into the Anki flashcard software. To sum it up in a sentence, you can rewire your ears to hear new, foreign sounds by testing yourself using recordings of very similar words (“rock” vs “lock”, “rue” vs “roux”, etc.) If you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a handy video introduction to the topic. (Warning! This one gets pretty technical!) Pronunciation Tutorial 4: How to improve your pronunciation using IPA (French Pronunciation) Pronunciation Tutorial 3: English and the IPA – Vowels Pronunciation Tutorial 2: English and the IPA – Manner Enjoy! Pronunciation Tutorial 1: English and the IPA – Voicing and Place In Appendix 4 of the book, I use different (significantly less terrifying) vocabulary than I use in these videos, but the content lines up, and the fact that videos can show you pictures and actually make sounds will make these pretty accessible and interesting. This is a series of 3 videos on English pronunciation that will teach you about what’s going on in your mouth when you pronounce English words. We’ll break this up into two chunks: The Pronunciation video series, and a discussion about Minimal Pair testing.
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