My Stories of Learning English IV
Dear friends, if you’re interested, please go on to read. All these are my true stories. I’m sure every one of you will get something from my experiences. And by writing out my learning stories, I want to show you that one can always go from bad to good, and it’s never too late to learn.
When you listen to Prof. Yang speaking English with your eyes down, you will often be surprised to look up and find it is actually a Chinese that is talking. It’s no surprise that you think I’m exaggerating. But I’m not. You must be familiar with the broadcasting of those BBC announcers and hosts. If someday one of them was replaced with Mr. Yang, you won’t notice that. He speaks standard Britain English and has a magnetic, deep-sounding voice.
He chose a wonderful teaching book on phonetics and phonology for us. It was about one and a half centimeters thick, dealing with each sound with three or four pages. There in the book were detailed explanations of each sound, with pictures illustrating the accurate position of the speech organs and the flow of the wind, pairs of comparing words showing subtle differences, and drill words and sentences, exercises, study problems etc. I had kept the book for many years but finally lost it when carrying it to and from the school where I teach. It was indeed a good book. Yet without Mr. Yang, it would have been one of the thousands of academic books lying on the shelves of a library or bookstore, marvelous, but of little use to you. It is he that has turned those quiet printed symbols into interesting and living real sounds.
We had the book. However, it seemed he had prepared them only for our own use, for he seldom referred to the book except when he wanted us to look at certain illustrating pictures and read some drills. He just taught along according to himself, laying emphasis on our actual pronunciation and would often call us up and correct one by one. From time to time, he would add some interesting tongue twists in to make the class lively and exciting. He must also have some other magic tricks there, which I can’t remember or didn’t detect. For in his class almost all of us were eagerly engaged, in learning those otherwise boring sounds. He spoke good English, much better than our grammar teacher, but he didn’t insist on giving his lessons totally in English, as dear Mr. Grammar did. He would switch to our mother tongue wherever he felt we might fail to understand or it was more convenient.
It’s worth mentioning that Prof. Yang is also good at mandarin sounds. This is very important. When we learn English, as everybody knows, it’s very easy for us to speak English using Chinese sounds, or the combination of the two. Only when one knows definitely what are the differences between an English sound and a close Chinese one, he can be saved from falling a victim. For each English sound, Mr. Yang would make a reference to a similar Chinese one. This did us a great help. Instead of causing problems, our skill in Mandarin had enabled us to produce some difficult English sounds easily and correctly.
My enthusiasm for the study of English pronunciation was greatly aroused. I still remember that once I kept practicing the sound /s/ for a whole week. I pronounced it in my seat before lectures began, on the veranda during breaks, on my way to the dining room, until my tongue get used to it perfectly.
Prof. Yang’s phonetics and phonology course went on for a whole semester. After that, most of us got a bit of real English tongue. We could now pronounce an English word in a clear and unmistakable way and read a sentence smoothly and continuously, as a native speaker would do, rather than read it word by word, as once we did in the same way when we read Chinese characters. He didn’t teach me enough so that I could have a free talk with an English speaker or grasp a piece of news on the radio. That was to happen a few years later through my own efforts. But still, I owe much of my speaking and listening skill to him. You know how it works. When you read, there is usually an inner voice speaking out what you’re reading (we are told by experts that it’s a bad habit of reading, but I don’t think so. The speed of reading depends largely on how familiar you are with the content and the language of the text, rather than a certain reading habit. When you’re familiar with both enough, you certainly can do without that inner speech. You needn’t read at all. You just skip it through and get what you needed. I’ve got that experience from reading Chinese), sorry, I say when we read or think, there’s an inner voice sounding along the lines. When this inner speech has correct pronunciation and intonation, then after plenty of reading, you don't need much special training for speaking and listening at all. I don’t know what’s the situation with you, but it’s truly the case with me. When I returned to the campus three years later, and had a smooth and pleasant chat with an American guy (the university has begun to accept overseas students), I’m sure he had never expected he was the first native speaker whom I had got the chance to have such a talk with. ----To be continued.
