Sound Instruction for Learning Languages: Why You Should Start with the Sounds

Apr 19

Little Will Learns French: A Common Experience

I was in 2nd grade when I decided to learn French. I went to the local library and picked up a French textbook, and was astonished to learn how easy French was! It used the same letters I already knew, and I already knew how to read, so I learned very quickly. I went home and proudly declared to my mom “jee parlee fransayss!!!” which, sadly, is not French, nor would it have been particularly intelligible to a French speaker. Applying English conventions of reading to French text just creates an unintelligible patois.

But let’s imagine I had vigorously continued my studies in this manner and somehow managed to learn all the words and grammar from all the French textbooks the library had, and in doing so, I had soliloquized until I was perfectly fluent in this new French idiolect. Then imagine I went to France. There, I would discover three things: First, I would realize that nobody could understand me. Second, that I couldn’t understand them either. Third, after setting out to relearn French, I would realize that retraining an ingrained habit is harder than developing a new habit.

This is similar to many a diligent student’s actual experience with learning a language. They memorize words and practice applying them in their verbal paradigms, noun declensions and syntactic gymnastics, but find that even the most benign communication is impossible because no one can understand the vehicle of all that linguistic complexity; the sounds sound wrong.

Starting language instruction by mastering the sound system is a more natural, efficient and effective approach to becoming proficient. Here are some reasons why:

Reason 1: It Mirrors Natural Development

One of the miracles of child development is language acquisition. Babies are born with only one means of communication: crying. Yet they start babbling and cooing very quickly, and those babbles, coos, goo-goos and ga-gas soon turn into words, then phrases and sentences. Around the age of nine, most children will have developed all the sophisticated speech habits that the adults around them use. That first step of babbling is essential and serves two functions:

It develops the motor skills that allow for articulate speech
It neurologically partitions sounds into salient categories

For learning a second language, both of these steps are still essential. The speech sounds of languages can differ a lot from each other. For example, with French and English, few sounds are common between the languages. Everyone knows about the “French R”, but even the sounds that are represented by the letters [t] and [d] differ from English, both in place and manner of articulation. One can approximate the sound by using the [t] or [d] of English and be understood, but even being aware of these differences will help learning to “hear” and understand spoken French more quickly.

The second point is even more important for the language learner. That neurological partitioning of sounds enables learners to hear the difference between sounds. For example, the vowels in the words “bit” and “bet” are very distinct to the ears of the native English speaker, but sound pretty much the same to speakers of a language that has neither sound. These learners have not partitioned vowels in the same way, so they need to be trained to perceive that difference. For English learners of French, it is important to know that few vowels map onto each other. Thus, the French words tu and tout which sound very distinct to a Frenchman, both tend to sound like the word “too” to an English speaker. Notice the difference in the International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions of the three words: too [tʰu:ʷ]; tu [t̺y]; tout [t̺u]. These words here look as different as they would sound to someone who had a perfect ear for both languages.

Language is encoded in sound. It is the foundation of first language acquisition, and it makes sense to start there in subsequent language acquisitions.

Reason 2: It Avoids the “Relearning trap”

Articulating sounds is a physical process and it can be practiced. We practice our skills in articulating English every time we speak it. And for better or for worse, practice reinforces the skills practiced. For this reason, the wise coach doesn’t say that “practice makes perfect”. Practicing bad habits reinforces bad habits. Thus, the student who practices saying things wrong develops habits of saying things wrong, and each successive attempt reinforces and ingrains that wrong habit. The wise coach says “only perfect practice makes perfect”. The student who practices clear articulations from the beginning develops good habits, and these habits are reinforced with every successive attempt until the good habits are ingrained. For those that have ingrained bad habits of speech, they will need focused retraining to make their speech intelligible.

For those that would like an entertaining example of what “retraining bad speech habits” looks like, two movies are highly instructive. In Pygmalion (1938) or its musical adaptation My Fair Lady (1964), you will watch Professor Henry Higgins put Eliza Doolittle through various tortures in order to transform her Cockney into “proper English”. The means of retraining in the movies, or the play which it is based upon, are exaggerated, but they do illustrate the difficulty of retraining a habit so deeply ingrained as speech. Henry Higgins himself was based upon the real life philologist Henry Sweet who emphasized the importance of starting language learning with the sounds due to the difficulty of correcting errors in articulation after those errors had become ingrained.

Reason 3: The Sounds Clarify the Grammar

Languages are “closed systems” where every aspect informs and transforms other aspects of the language. In learning Spanish, the coherence of the grammatical tenses makes more sense if one first understands the intonational system of the language. For example, hablo means I speak. Habló, by contrast, means (he) spoke. Students who are not in the habit of emphasizing the (very regular) intonation pattern of Spanish words will find themselves confused how “the same word” can have diametrically opposed meanings. The student who is aware of the basic penultimate stressed syllable of words will here understand that this ultimate stressed syllable contrasts with the entire present tense verbal paradigm. Later, the student will understand that the whole tense system of Spanish is undergirded by intonation patterns.

Understanding of the sound system from the beginning equips the student with an auxiliary means of understanding grammatical phenomena.

Reason 4: The Experts Agree

I am being a bit facetious here. The experts don’t agree, but let’s look at the bona fides of a few.

Dr. Stephen Krashen is one of the most influential academics in America when it comes to language learning. Our schools and our colleges largely follow methodological models that he recommends. This obviously should not be seen as a recommendation, considering how poorly the American model of foreign language instruction performs. Why is it that most Germans learn English in school to such a high degree that they often embarrass English speakers with their eloquence in English, and then again in French, Spanish or Italian? Is there something in der wasser? No. A big difference is that they have academics like Wolfgang Butzkamm instead of Dr. Krashen.

Wolfgang Butzkamm advocates for learning sounds from the start, whereas Dr. Krashen states that sounds are learned largely “subconsciously” and need not be instructed directly. An Italian-American academic celebrity from the 1950’s, Mario Pei, wrote many books on the subject and always emphasized the sound system as being foundational. His books are still available, and worth reading, but his estimation of the value of learning the sound system first is mostly absent in the current educational paradigm of the United States. Anthony Burgess, the polymath author, composer, linguist, polyglott wrote his opus on the subject A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages… especially English. In this masterfully accessible book on linguistics he spends some time explaining his methods of teaching English in Malaysia, where he used Malay as the language of instruction, and how he invented phonetics terms in Malay in order to precisely teach his students the sounds of English. Henry Sweet himself spent a bit of time fighting a losing battle against “natural method” language teaching proponents (the intellectual forefathers of Krashen) who did not believe that teaching sounds was important. Sweet went on to help invent the International Phonetics Alphabet which is used around the world in foreign language classes, but is mostly unknown in America.

In America, public schools and universities use textbooks that must adhere to strict instructional paradigms in order to be used for these accredited programs. The instructional considerations allow for the study of the sound systems of a language - in 400 level college courses. I attended such courses after having learned French in the manner that I recommend (starting with the sound system). The look of dawning comprehension and attendant horror on the looks of my classmates was one I will never forget. College students who had been studying French for years asked the professor why they hadn’t learned these things earlier. The professor explained that the instructional sequence of the schools did not allow for it. It was deemed only appropriate for students who sought “a deeper understanding”, demonstrated by their declaring French as a major in university.

If it is wise to emulate the actions of those that do well in a particular field, then we should emulate a more German model of language education - one that starts with the sound system as a foundation of the endeavor.

First Steps:

Aside from enrolling in Eulexia Tutoring’s Spanish Fiesta of Sounds, French Sounds Like Fun workshops, or the comprehensive FrenchFlow and MandarinRise programs, which begin instruction with learning the sound system, here are some practical steps you can take to start your language learning experience off on the right foot.

Learn the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA) for English. You already know the sounds of English. If you learn the IPA chart for English, you will learn about the places and manners of articulation that make English English. Understanding this gives you a framework for understanding the IPA charts of French, Spanish or any other language, where those places and manners of articulation are subtly different, and how to conceptualize sounds that use entirely different places and manners of articulation.
Develop your ear through “minimal pairs”. Minimal pairs are words that contrast in only one sound. As discussed earlier, tu and tout sound totally different to a French speaker. They are minimal pairs whose only contrasting feature is the vowel sound: /y/ vs. /u/ respectively. By listening and trying to identify the difference between these words, you will neurologically sensitize yourself to the contrast.
Watch the mouths of people who speak the language you want to learn. For French, there is a distinct jaw tension and “puckering” of the lips that contrasts with the American “slack-jaw” and relaxed lips. For Mandarin Chinese, speakers tend to speak without opening their lips too wide. Just noticing these features, and trying to mimic them is a worthwhile exercise.
Apps. If you play with the settings on Microsoft Word, you can do voice-to-text with the language of your choice. If it can understand you, you are probably speaking fairly clearly. With voice-recognition software though, be aware that it prefers phrases to singular words. For humans and voice-recognition alike, context gives helpful clues in fluent speech.
Learn one phrase accurately, and practice saying it repeatedly. If you haven’t mastered the French or Spanish Rs, maybe avoid those in your phrase. Perfect practice makes perfect.
Learn the phonetic descriptions of the sounds first. To learn the French R, learn what “voiceless uvular fricative” means first. To learn the Spanish Rs, you already say the singular R (in pero) when you say “bitter”. This is called an “alveolar flap”. For the double R (in perro), you’ll have to learn the “alveolar trill” which is a foreign sound to English (outside of the Scottish variety). It’s description will at least give you something to aim at. The /y/ vowel in French is called a “high front-rounded” vowel. This will let you know that your jaw should be very high, your tongue tip towards the front of the mouth, and the lips are round. These physiological descriptions give us a more concrete understanding of how we make sounds.

Conclusion: Don’t Learn a Language Twice

People who successfully learn languages find a great degree of satisfaction in the feat. It is not easy, but the task is not insurmountable either. If particular care is taken to learn the fundamental skill for all spoken communication first (the sounds), the efficiency is greatly increased and the hurdles of developing fluency (in speech and in listening) is greatly reduced. The frustration of retraining will also be avoided.

To bring it back to my younger self, I am very happy that I abandoned my studies then, and did not have to follow the “hypothetical path” I laid out (or that my college classmates essentially lived out after reaching 400 level French courses). My personal impetus for returning to French was studying Arabic in a Defense Language Institute workshop while in the Army. There I learned about the primacy of sounds. Afterwards I found a program that incorporated the sound system of French from the start, and my learning journey was fun and my practice was accurate. In six months of intermittent self-study I learned enough to begin reading comic books and then novels in French. I then moved to France and activated my knowledge through immersion while working on farms, renovating apartments, or engrossed in weird French conversations with the locals.

I no longer live in France, but I get a lot of enjoyment hearing my children speak clear French sounds as they learn the language. There is nothing cuter than hearing little kids speak French, more so if you can perceive the sounds accurately.