美语发音秘诀- AAT
Can I Learn a New Accent?
Can a person actually learn a new accent? Many people feel that after a certain age, it's just not possible. Can classical musicians play jazz? If they practice, of course they can! For your American accent, it's just a matter of learning and practicing techniques this book and CD set will teach you. It is up to you to use them or not. How well you do depends mainly on how open and willing you are to sounding different from the way you have sounded all your life.
A very important thing you need to remember is that you can use your accent to say what you mean and how you mean it. Word stress conveys meaning through tone or feeling, which can be much more important than the actual words that you use. We'll cover the expression of these feelings
through intonation in the first lesson.
You may have noticed that I talk fast and often run my words together. You've probably heard enough "English-teacher English"—where ... everything ... is ... pronounced without having to listen too carefully.
That's why on the CDs we're going to talk just like the native speakers that we are, in a normal conversational tone. Native speakers may often tell people who are learning English to "slow down" and to "speak clearly." This is meant with the best of intentions, but it is exactly the opposite of what a student really needs to do. If you speak fairly quickly and with strong intonation, you will be understood more easily. To illustrate this point, you will hear a Vietnamese student first trying to speak slowly
and carefully and then repeating the same words quickly and with strong intonation. Studying, this exercise took her only about two minutes to practice, but the difference makes her sound as if she had been in America for many years .
Please listen. You will hear the same words twice.
Hello, my name is Ramond chen.
.....................
You may have to listen to this CD a couple of times to catch everything. To help you, every word on the CD is also written in the book.
By seeing and hearing simultaneously, you'll learn to reconcile the differences between the appearance of English (spelling) and the sound of English(pronunciation and the other aspects of accent).
The CD leaves a rather short pause for you to repeat into.
The point of this is to get you responding quickly and without spending too much time thinking about your response.
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