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TheNEET
mentally crippled by sleepoverless teen years
★★★★★
- Joined
- May 27, 2018
- Posts
- 12,070
so recently I've started making conscious effort to get rid of my Slavic accent and improve my English in general
I've found some in-depth resources about English phonetics and I've realised I'm knees-deep in shit, it's so over it's not even funny
I have some superficial knowledge of both Polish and English phonetics as well as IPA, but it turns out the phonetic transcriptions used in most books are terribly simplified
idk if it was indicated in the materials I've used in the past and I've deliberately skipped it (because it was in the footnotes or simply because I thought I could rely on the IPA symbols only) or the materials just were shit
for starters Polish /ʃ/ ("sz") and /ʒ/ ("ż") are lies - it's actually /ʂ/ and /ʐ/, completely different consonants, but Polish books about phonetics as well as IPA used in most dictionaries use the former symbols (probably because they're less similar to /s/ and /z/) and the former sounds are actually used in English (so if you're a Polishcel you probably say e. g. /ˈɪŋɡlɪʂ/ instead of /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/)
second of all, this table is a bloody trap
you have dental, alveolar and post-alveolar (not even mentioning denti-alveolar or post-alveolar retracted, palato-alveolar etc. not even included in the table) consonants with the same symbols (probably because you don't have both variants occurring in the same language) and it does matter
there is additional notation which can differentiate between these pronunciations, but it's used almost nowhere
Polish consonants are dental while English ones are alveolar (i. e. your tongue is placed slightly deeper in your mouth), so Polishcels probably don't even pronounce, among others, /t/ or /s/ properly because Polish /t/ and /s/ are actually /t̪/ and /s̪/
this shit occurs in many languages and you're probably not told about it, so check your native language on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative
there's also a lot of minor stuff like aspiration or sentence stress (learnable with shadowing), but it's not that terrible, because I've been always aware of that
long story short, I'm fucked and I'll probably always be dissatisfied with my accent (as well as English in general, but that's a whole different story)
Polishcels, read up (the recordings are not included, for that you probably have to actually buy the book, but they're not essential): https://rebus.us.edu.pl/bitstream/2...zuczek_Praktyczny_kurs_wymowy_angielskiej.pdf
I've found some in-depth resources about English phonetics and I've realised I'm knees-deep in shit, it's so over it's not even funny
I have some superficial knowledge of both Polish and English phonetics as well as IPA, but it turns out the phonetic transcriptions used in most books are terribly simplified
idk if it was indicated in the materials I've used in the past and I've deliberately skipped it (because it was in the footnotes or simply because I thought I could rely on the IPA symbols only) or the materials just were shit
for starters Polish /ʃ/ ("sz") and /ʒ/ ("ż") are lies - it's actually /ʂ/ and /ʐ/, completely different consonants, but Polish books about phonetics as well as IPA used in most dictionaries use the former symbols (probably because they're less similar to /s/ and /z/) and the former sounds are actually used in English (so if you're a Polishcel you probably say e. g. /ˈɪŋɡlɪʂ/ instead of /ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ/)
second of all, this table is a bloody trap
you have dental, alveolar and post-alveolar (not even mentioning denti-alveolar or post-alveolar retracted, palato-alveolar etc. not even included in the table) consonants with the same symbols (probably because you don't have both variants occurring in the same language) and it does matter
there is additional notation which can differentiate between these pronunciations, but it's used almost nowhere
Polish consonants are dental while English ones are alveolar (i. e. your tongue is placed slightly deeper in your mouth), so Polishcels probably don't even pronounce, among others, /t/ or /s/ properly because Polish /t/ and /s/ are actually /t̪/ and /s̪/
this shit occurs in many languages and you're probably not told about it, so check your native language on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative
there's also a lot of minor stuff like aspiration or sentence stress (learnable with shadowing), but it's not that terrible, because I've been always aware of that
long story short, I'm fucked and I'll probably always be dissatisfied with my accent (as well as English in general, but that's a whole different story)
Polishcels, read up (the recordings are not included, for that you probably have to actually buy the book, but they're not essential): https://rebus.us.edu.pl/bitstream/2...zuczek_Praktyczny_kurs_wymowy_angielskiej.pdf