Re: Pronunciation

>   So I focus on the r/l confusion common to
> Chinese rather than trying to correct those who say
> t'die, rather than tuh-d'Ay.
>Mert

But why focus on l/r confusion? I think because NS of major Englishes
make this distinction and so we want Chinese learners to make it too.
We want our learners to sound and hear more like NS. Accents are a
continuum. There are many Chinese accents some light, some heavy. All
are more or less intelligible if you try hard enough but the nearer
the learner gets to one of the major NS accents the easier they are to
understand, especially in extended speech.

Just try these two Glaswegian accents:

Billy Connolly
http://bennyhills.fortunecity.com/ball/157/other.htm

Ivor Cutler (I suggest Bounce Bounce Bounce to start)
http://www.ivorcutler.org/sessions.html

Both are intelligible (well, to me as a Brit who has heard Weegies
speak before) but if you aren't used to it, Cutler is much easier to
follow. I know, I shouldn't use Weegies but it has such a lovely
sound. I apologise to any Glaswegians reading this. "Y'd better,
Jimmy, y'd better"

When it comes to t*day and tooday, it's usually the case that the
speaker hasn't mastered weak forms and thus hasn't mastered the stress
patterns and stress timing of English. They can probably be understood
but imagine a businessman giving a 20 minute presentation on a topic
that needed sophisticated selling without using stress as an aid to
meaning, without the ability to focus our attention on keywords and
phrases. Imagine the monotony. Imagine a Chinese teacher of English,
as some of my students will be in a year or two, who can't teach
stress patterns. 

It's all a question of level and needs. The more communicable you need
to be, the nearer you need to approach the "inner circle" of English
dialects. Look at Singlish. Street Singlish, spoken between
Singaporeans is much more heavily accented than the Singlish used by
shopkeepers to tourists and this in turn is more heavily accented than
the Singlish spoken by educated Singaporeans in an international
environment.

Dick Tibbetts








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