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Screw Idahosa – I Can Learn Pronunciation and Flow on MY OWN with “Flow-verlapping!”

December 3, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

Wait…screw me???

As second language learners, our ears and speech organs need a bit of time to process foreign sounds. So when you first try to mimic speech in your target language, you will hear and pronounce sounds wrong.

To make things worse, you’re probably not going to know when you’re doing this.

As I write in my post on “How to Tune Your Foreign Language Vowel Pronunciation“, foreign speech sounds often get magnetized to familiar ones in our perception, so two different sounds will initially sound the exact same to you unless you pay really close attention.

This is why feedback is so important. The first step to improving is awareness. So we need some sort of feedback system to make us aware of the sounds that we are getting wrong.

Why Pronunciation Is The Most Important Part of Learning a Language

November 27, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

If you’re not convinced, ask yourself: of all the people you’ve ever heard fluently speak a language, how many speak with bad accents?

There’s a reason for this, but it requires a few things to understand first…

How to Find Your Foreign Language Spirit Guide

November 9, 2012 By Idahosa 2 Comments

Have you ever seen or heard something for the first time that deeply resounded within your being? It’s as if you had a vague notion of something that ought to exist, and the moment you find out that it does, all you can think is:

Oh my God…yes…EXACTLY!

By the end of the five minute video, I was completely blown away. But it only took 15 seconds for me to know one thing for certain – Seu Jorge was going to be my Brazilian Spirit Guide.

How to Tune Your Foreign Language Vowel Pronunciation

November 5, 2012 By Idahosa 2 Comments

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Without a doubt, most foreign language pronunciation errors are vowel pronunciation errors. There are two reasons for this:

Vowel relationships are the first thing you learn in your first language, so it’s more deeply ingrained in your muscle memory and native Flow.
Vowels simply occur more often than consonants in any given language (that’s why they cost more on “Wheel of Fortune!)

As any good Mimic Method student knows, an authentic foreign language accent isn’t just a “bonus skill” – it’s the most important step in achieving fluency.

The 4 Secrets to Fixing 80% of your Foreign Accent

July 13, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

After providing feedback on thousands of submissions to students in Spanish, Portuguese, French and Mandarin and English, I have identified four key errors that account for 80% of errors that Native-English speakers have when speaking other languages.

As deeply ingrained as these habits are, they’re not hard to fix; it’s just a question of awareness. Develop a physical awareness of your errors, and you will eventually phase them out.

In this post, I will review these four errors and provide tips for developing your awareness of them to avoid sounding like a foreigner.

How to Dissect The Sound System of a Foreign Language: French Case Study

July 4, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

In my last post, I posted a video of me rapping my first full verse of French. In accordance with The Mimic Method philosophy, the purpose of this activity is to train the motor memory in my speech organ so that I can produce French sounds at normal speeds.

Before I could rap in French, however, I needed to familiarize myself with its component sounds, or phonemes. Every language has its own phonetic menu, or list of possible sounds. In the case of “Standard French”, there are roughly 36 different items on the menu.

This may sound like a lot to digest, until you start to cross off the sounds that already exist in English. Of the 36 French sounds, 27 already exist in English. From a learning perspective this makes things much easier.
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