My experience with other languages

Hello Steemit people.

My experience learning English while being self-taught.

I have been exposed to English since I was a child and therefore I am very familiar with the language. In the beginning I was self-taught, with the classic formula of listening and repeating. As time passed, I was able to read and listen to the language almost perfectly, with difficulties in formulating sentences in a spoken conversation despite knowing the grammar rules. It was from this moment that I decided to enter an academy.

The academy: its contributions

The contributions of the academy were diverse but precise to complement what I already knew in a self-taught way, so I could discover on my own the pronunciation of certain words, to the point that it already becomes an instinct to know how to pronounce a word that I do not know.

Shocks? the academy vs my previous experience

Of course there were clashes with what was already learned and what was being learned.

First, the classes were very slow and boring at the beginning levels. The knowledge imparted had no application for me because I had already learned it. I did not have to study for exams. They were not a challenge. I had to hope to reach the advanced levels.

Second, there were certain words that I learned to pronounce them in a certain way because, just as I listened to them in any medium: movies, videos on the net, television, among others. However, this does not imply that they were being applied or pronounced correctly.

Finally, the process of re-learning was a bit tedious and challenging because it was to replace what was already instinctive for something that was thought before being executed. For example, the indefinite article "a" can be heard in the media 90% of the time pronounced "a"; however, it is really pronounced "ei" or with the correct written expression: ə

My advice

To begin with, we must take into account that in the pronunciation of words in another language. We are practicing, essentially, other sounds, and there are many sounds! Therefore, we understand that for the correct we have the language. In the same way that there is a grammar of the language, it also has its own sounds.

Therefore, the first step in improving pronunciation is knowing the vowel sounds and the consonant sounds!

Know the phonemes: the phonemes are the sounds that the letters represent. As I showed earlier, the indefinite article "a" is pronounced "ə". Even though we do not know "ə" formally, when reading and trying to pronounce, a sound will be heard that is close or exact to the sound represented by the phoneme.