A humble suggestion for our daily learning plan..

Greetings to all MyEC friends!

First, I’d like to ask something to you my dear friends who are serious in their want to improve their spoken English. How do you spend your time studying and improving your speaking skills? What are your learning plans daily to achieve fluency?

Hmm…I know… I know these are very common questions. We have read and discussed this kind of questions for thousand times here in our site. But what I’m appealing to you here my dear friends is that please hear me out my humble suggestions and let me share how I spend my learning time here in MyEC.

Would you agree to me if I say, the best way to learn Spoken English is to speak it? Well, I just read it from somewhere else but I feel this really influences me now and have a huge impact in achieving my goal: to improve my pronunciation and eventually be a fantastic speaker someday! But the big question is how?...I think the key is repetition, my friends. My method now is listening, listening and one more time listening...Then repeating, repeating and one more time, repeating what I’ve listened…

Can you guess what and how I do it? Tan tararan taran! Newscasting!!! Yes, it is. The simple news reading every week in our Audio Speaking Group. It is posted by our kind teacher Tara every Tuesday. Hmmm.Ok, let me share why I chose this activity to be included in my daily learning plan.

First, it is very easy because it’s not time consuming. Only a less than a minute reading won’t hurt my daily routine. I download it to my mp3, so that anywhere I go and every time I have the chance, I could listen to it. So very handy, isn’t it?! I can listen and practice to it up to more than 10 times a day for 2 to 3 days before I submit my own recordings. And because it’s very short you can focus for every bit and details of the readings without exhaustion. You can study how Tara stresses the syllables in each word, how she links some words, the intonation etc,etc. Isn’t it amazing! It’s already a completo recardos (ingredients) you can find here.

My second reason is that I know that I need to have someone to look up to as my model, native speaker whom I could visioned to be like him/her someday. And Ms. Tara has a perfect voice. She has a very lovely and very clear, understandable voice to say the least. So that’s why I’ve been magnetized and keep coming back there every week. And of course also, because of our kind,friendly, supportive friends there, too.

And the last reason is that…you have an instant feedback to yourself. What do I mean by that? When you keep listening and keep repeating the news report (maybe in a 10th times) with a loud voice even yourself can know what’s wrong with your voice, your stressing pattern and pronunciation. You can easily detect it because you can do comparison to your own voice to Ms. Tara who is native speaker and you will know what’s missing or error in your speaking. and now you can correct them. Isn’t it wonderful? to know your mistakes and know that you are now doing the right thing to undo and remedy them? Plus a big bonus from Ms. Tara because she is always there to assist the members in their issues.

So, my dear friend why don’t we take newsreading and record it to be included in our daily learning plan? A short daily dose of practicing our ears and tongue in repetition manner will surely gives us confidence in speaking, right? What do you think?

Ps: this is the link in our group discussions

http://my.englishclub.com/forum/topics/be-a-newscaster?groupUrl=audiospeakinggroup&xg_source=msg_com_gr_forum&id=2524315%3ATopic%3A906122&groupId=2524315%3AGroup%3A893114&page=40#comments

Ranu my friend hi,

As for your question whether I have a dictionary that has international phonemic chart, hmm no I don't have. For my references how to pronounce the sounds, vowels sounds and consonants sound, I study the lessons from Pronuncian (www.pronuncian.com) the site I referred to you the first time we talk. There I've learned a lot about the long and vowel sounds and their common spellings because as we know English is based not on spellings but from sounds. Then also the consonant sounds, th-sound unvoiced and voice..etc. It's also a great site because there are minimal pairs or lessons drills you can practice with. For example the -th sound, there are over hundred words where you can find and listen to the -th sound.

Of course to learn a particular sound, it will take time and effort because sometimes the sound that you gotten used to is almost permanent in our tongue and ears. We say, to copy exactly as what the native do, is to relearn the sound, to retrain our tongue and ears as what the native speakers do.

I'd say it's a bit difficult when you want to be very particular with the sounds. Even me still struggling. But of course, we want to achieve precious speaking skills and because it's very precious and highly valuable it's also requires our valuable investment of effort,sweat and dedication.

What I really mean to say here my friend Ranu is that maybe we have to begin with the small and tiny part of pronunciation before we can learn to pronounce the words exactly correct. That is to learn the short, and long vowels sounds, consonant, etc. I think these are really the foundation of pronouncing the words..Then of course, don't forget to try it to practice this in our weekly news reading. This will be our test if our old habit of pronouncing the words have already change or not as we can track our recordings through weekly.

Hope the tips help. :)

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Comments

Forget-me-Not April 29, 2011 21:28

Waouuuuu, Mayumi, you seem to be a very serious english learner ! The tips you gave us here should be very useful. No wonder your english is already so good :))

Thanks for sharing your secrets with us :))
Mayumi April 29, 2011 15:14

Hello, hello Zul.. Thanks for commenting in my blog (and liking too:)..Yep, hope to be sound like here someday:)

We really appreciate her untiring effort to train us and support us till we become fluent. I have the same hope as yours..

Have a nice time,

mayumee
Zulkifli Alinazar April 29, 2011 14:43

Hallo Mayumi, I absolutely agree with what you say that Tara has a very lovely, clear and understandable voice; and it's one of the reasons why I like her blog. I hope she keeps on training us till we really become fluent in English both in speaking and writing.

Cheers,

Zul
Mayumi April 29, 2011 14:29

Hello rismawati, how are you?

Thanks for passing by here in my page.

Hmm...I'd like to invite you in our discussion. Would you like to try the news reading for this week and post it there under the (Be a newscaster) discussion?
Mayumi April 29, 2011 14:23

Hi dear Saif,

Thanks for reading my blog. I'm happy to know that it is helpful to you and that you want to try it.

Would you like to join us in our group? Hope to see you there:)
Mayumi April 29, 2011 14:19

Dearest Anele,

I'm so glad to see you here in my blog.:) Thank you for your comment (nakakataba po ng puso) as it came from one of the after-sought commentator here in myec because of your infallible wisdom. By reading your comments I really learned a lot from you..

Thanks also for taking a look in our discussions there..I hope one of this days we could have a chance to hear your voice there too..*_^
Mayumi April 29, 2011 14:07

Enthusiastic girl Kim ahn!

I adore your eagerness to learn. I never forget your simple yet so energizing blog about how enthusiastic you are in learning to speak English well. You're in a good track, girl. I've learned from an English teacher A.J. Hoge that learning to speak is 20% right method and 80% psychology. Psychology of self motivation,eagerness and attitude towards learning.

By the way, would you like to join us in our discussion in our Audio Speaking Group? Every week there we have news reading. You can record yours in vocaroo or other audio recordings.

Hope to see you there:)
Mayumi April 29, 2011 13:50

Ranu my friend hi,

As for your question whether I have a dictionary that has international phonemic chart, hmm no I don't have. For my references how to pronounce the sounds, vowels sounds and consonants sound, I study the lessons from Pronuncian (www.pronuncian.com) the site I referred to you the first time we talk. There I've learned a lot about the long and vowel sounds and their common spellings because as we know English is based not on spellings but from sounds. Then also the consonant sounds, th-sound unvoiced and voice..etc. It's also a great site because there are minimal pairs or lessons drills you can practice with. For example the -th sound, there are over hundred words where you can find and listen to the -th sound.

Of course to learn a particular sound, it will take time and effort because sometimes the sound that you gotten used to is almost permanent in our tongue and ears. We say, to copy exactly as what the native do, is to relearn the sound, to retrain our tongue and ears as what the native speakers do.

I'd say it's a bit difficult when you want to be very particular with the sounds. Even me still struggling. But of course, we want to achieve precious speaking skills and because it's very precious and highly valuable it's also requires our valuable investment of effort,sweat and dedication.

What I really mean to say here my friend Ranu is that maybe we have to begin with the small and tiny part of pronunciation before we can learn to pronounce the words exactly correct. That is to learn the short, and long vowels sounds, consonant, etc. I think these are really the foundation of pronouncing the words..Then of course, don't forget to try it to practice this in our weekly news reading. This will be our test if our old habit of pronouncing the words have already change or not as we can track our recordings through weekly.

Hope the tips help. :)
rismawati April 29, 2011 13:06

Thank u for your sharing...I wanna try it
Ario April 29, 2011 5:21

Thank for sharing your experience,Mayumi...

10 times a day for 2- 3 days? Wow..I should follow this method.

By the way, do you have a heavy and thick English dictionary that has international phonemic chart and shows us how to pronounce each word?

I still confuse with how to pronounce some English words...and I wonder how you learn to pronounce words...

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