How to Master Successfully Any Language of the World 21
(In your native language: ) It’s cool. How is the weather today? (Pause to let yourself say
in the target language that it is cool today)
(In your native language: ) How do you say: “It’ rains today”? (Pause to let yourself say
in the target language that it’s raining)
And so on.
Accent – How Do You Master It
Pay attention to the proper accent from the very beginning. It will be much more
difficult to re-learn it later.
Generally accent consists of three parts: music of the language, pace and articulation.
Music of the language consists of which sounds are pronounced stronger or weaker, and
what is the relative (audio) pitch of a sound. Do you pronounce it higher or lower than
other sounds in the phrase? Music of the language may be specially drilled with
“howling” – teacher exaggeratedly howls the intonations and you howl them after the
teacher. Sometimes a single vocal may start at relatively low pitch, then the pitch goes up
and then down. The importance of music of language is explicitly stressed in Chinese,
Vietnamese, Thai, and many African languages. These languages are considered to be
“tonal”. The whole meaning of a word may change due to different music of language. In
other languages it is not that crucial, but it affects the meaning anyway. Example: You
aren’t hungry, are you? – If the pitch for “are you” goes up, you want to know if the
person is hungry. If the pitch for “are you” goes down, you suppose that the person is
NOT hungry and you just want a confirmation of it.
Some parts of a sentence, or even of a single word, are said faster than others. And
sometimes a stop should be done. Stops don’t need to be only at the end of a sentence.
They may be in the middle of a word, too. That’s all about pace.
Articulation is by itself nothing but creating sounds with your vocal chords, tongue and
lips. Yet your lower jaw and your throat are related to the process, too. Generally, in
order to properly articulate words, you should master proper positioning and proper
movements of the tongue (its various parts – tip, middle and back) and lips, with respect
to other parts of the mouth. Try moving your jaws, try speaking while with the tip of the
tongue is at the upper palate or at the lower palate or near the upper or lower teeth. Place
the back of the tongue properly, too. Once the native reduction of words starts to seem
most natural for that specific placement, you may be sure you are on the right way.
Mastering proper articulation, pace and music of language would be a significant step for
a learner towards being accepted as a native speaker. Rather, accepted in the native
society. Foreign accent will be excused to a beginner. But it won’t be tolerated to an
Copyright © 2012 Dmitry Slomov. All rights reserved.
Dmitry Slomov is a language learning consultant, a tutor and the author of the Russian Language Course – Lessons with Dmitry
Contact Dmitry at: http://www.courseofrussian.com/en/contact.html
