Surprised? This woman is Smoukahontas, and she has really surprised me as she can imitate the sound of any language in the world, and she doesn’t need to know it! How is that possible? Click more… and you’ll discover it.
Pronunciation is a big issue when it comes to languages, how can we improve it? The answer can be in the music, are you a musical person? Music is the origin of languages and each language has a musicality within we need to imitate.
The odyssey of the human species has been quite long and hard. Becoming a modern human from a monkey was tough, see how we were at this picture I took myself from Lucy, the female Australopithecus Afarensis you can visit at the London Natural History Museum.
Of course this is not the real one, but I thought is was more interesting than her bare bones which are next to this sculpture. Do you think she could speak? well, I don’t think so, even though she could probably communicate quite well with her own kind.
She had to learn the sounds her own species made by listening to her mother and relatives, and imitating, babbling and making mistakes. That is what you have to do, as you are the most refined individual from her lineage.
Human imitation
Once we started learning, in order to keep the new knowledge throughout generations we needed imitating others. Imitation is what babies do the best, and what any language student should learn. Exaggerate, change or destroy a language sound, but please, do not speak using your own language’s sounds! You will sound as if you were singing opera with the melody of a Polska, weird!
If Smoukahontas has imitated the language you speak, you’ll probably feel she’s not doing totally right, but she sounds fairly well doesn’t she? But if you got lucky enough to listen the language you are studying in her imitation, next time you speak, you just imitate her.
Be a good actor
Everyone can imitate a Russian accent, or a chinese tourist. Focus on that accent and no matter how well or badly you speak, just imitate sounds. You could feel it is ridiculous, but believe me when I tell you what it is really ridiculous -with my truly respect :)- is how you sound now.
If you can’t, once again, YouTube will help you. Find an actor or a comedian imitating the particular accent and sound of the language you are studying, and he or she will present a point in between your mother tongue sounds and the sounds of your target language. Whatever comes, will be better than you are doing now.
Do you feel embarrassed? Many people do, I will let you know about this and other issues on my next post.
Keep Thinking!
Lingua-Franca 