Happy December to all! I’ve designed an early beta version of a pronunciation training deck that should hopefully teach you to hear several new sounds in French, Italian, German, Russian and American English (and a voiceless palatal stop, for good measure). I’m looking for volunteers who meet the following three requirements:

• 10-15 minutes of time per day for a week or two to review an Anki deck full of recordings. • A willingness to send me a couple of recordings of a repeat-after-me text (I say [si]. you say [si], I say [su], you say [su]). You’d do one recording before using the deck, and another one after you’ve done it for a week. • A willingness to send me your general impressions, record how difficult/easy it was, which sounds caused you problems, etc.

If you have the time and desire, shoot me an email at [email protected]!

Thanks!

PS: Updates on book progress, website progress, etc.: I turned in my near-final draft of the first couple of chapters (Introduction, detailed outline/table of contents, Memory) last week and they were approved (and much enjoyed). Phew! In the next few weeks, I’ll be working on a new draft of the Pronunciation chapter. I wrote up a lengthy guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet in an earlier draft, and I have a strong feeling that it’s not going to end up in the final book. If my editor and I make that decision, I’m going to put the whole thing here for free. I would guess that that’ll happen around a month from now.  I’m going to start Hungarian soon, and I intend to do it by following the plan of my book precisely, in order to test the method out (In my past 4 languages, I’ve always had some earlier exposure because of my conservatory training (German/French/Italian) or high school (Russian). Hungarian will be my first clean test of my methods, so I suspect I’ll work out a few kinks that way. I intend to keep you updated with what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and how well it’s working at each main step of the way; it’ll be a sort of preview of the book.