At some point in our lives, we are all forced to sit through a lesson on something we do not care for at all, yet that particular thing later turns out to be very beneficial to us. For me, this happened in my second year at university. It came in the form of a phonetics class, uniformly the most dreaded course everyone studying American or British Studies has to sit through – and pass. The final exam is split in three parts: 1. a pronunciation exam 2. a theoretical exam 3. a transcription exam.
The first should be self-explanatory. For those completely unfamiliar with phonetics, the second takes a closer look at such concepts as sound production, articulation, word stress, etc. In short, any and all things that go into the production of sounds and how they can be explained, categorized, produced, etc.
And for the final part of the exam, we all had the dubious pleasure of studying the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and then transcribing an English text in phonetic script. Sounds easier than it is, especially if you’re not a native speaker and may not even know how some of the words you’re supposed to be transcribing should be pronounced correctly. The failure rate for that class, as a result, is a whopping 80%. Before you applaud me for triumphing despite the odds: I did, in fact, not make the 20% cut of this statistic.
But let me start at the beginning of my classes. (more…)
If you love languages, you are always looking for new ways to keep learning more and more. Study books, interactive websites, conversation cafés, and immersion in a foreign country are only a few of the many ways that one can learn a language. Within these methods is another strategy that I recently “re-found”, a strategy whose effectiveness, I realized, is seriously downplayed. What is that strategy? Movement.
Dyslexia has always been thought of as a learning disability having to do with literacy impairment. Many people who have it are unable to read properly when they are younger, or read a lot slower than a non-dyslexic reader. They may also have trouble spelling or reading things like nonsense words. In short, dyslexia is a learning disability in which people have trouble translating visual language into language that the brain can understand. It happens to be one of the most common learning disabilities among children, affect anywhere from 10% – 15% of our population, according to various sources.
