The Importance of Mimicry
When you start thinking about the role that intonation plays in language, you realize it’s more than just memorizing vocabulary and grammar.
Remember: language is simply a way of communicating meaning through sound. So learning a foreign language essentially has two steps to it:
- Learn the sounds
- Attach meaning to those sounds
This is how we all learned our first languages as children. We mimicked the people of our environment as they expressed meaning through sound.
We started by linking sounds to familiar objects like food and family members. Then we learned to string sounds together to communicate more complex emotions and ideas.
Eventually our ears and mouths started to lock in on the rhythmic, phonemic and tonal patterns. At this point, mimicry became more or less automatic, since these new meanings were just new arrangements of the same sounds.
- When I talk about “The Flow” of a language, I am talking about these sound patterns.
- When I talk about “mastering The Flow” of a language, I mean your ability to hear and mimic sounds in that language.
If You Cannot Mimic it, You Cannot Learn it
Hey…check out this picture an exotic bird I found. Ever heard of a “Mevlin” before? Pretty cool, right?
My guess is that you never have, since I just made the name up right now while writing this.
I have no idea what this creature is, or if it even exists. But notice how it was easy for you to pronounce in your head “Mevlin” even though I completely fabricated it. There’s a reason for this.
Because the sounds I used to make up the name fit into the sound patterns or Flow of the language. If you cannot mimic it, you cannot learn it!
If you tried to bring this bird up in conversation the listener would not understand what you meant since he wouldn’t recognize the sounds you were making.
The common (and wrong) solution for this is to replace the foreign sounds with similar native language sounds.
The learner will then write the word down as you spell it in English and memorize that spelling, which just makes things worse. The learner repeats the same process for all later vocabulary and runs into difficulties…
You know you are having this problem if:
- Natives have a hard time understanding your strong accent.
- You “know” a lot of vocabulary words but struggle to pick them out of native speech.
- You can read and write fine, but you can’t get your mouth to speak with any degree of fluidity.
Don’t waste your time learning a bootleg version of your target language. First learn the sounds, then learn how to communicate meaning with those sounds.
Which brings us to our original question.
How does one go about learning foreign sounds, particularly intonation?