Tower of Babelfish
The Blog

Tips, tutorials and resources to aid you on your path towards fluency.

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  • Tag Archives: pronunciation

    Announcing Fluent-Forever.com and the Kickstarter!

    After a loooong delay, I’m happy to finally have some announcements and updates!

    Fluent Forever Proofread

    Announcement The First: The book is done. It’s been edited, copy-edited and proof-read. Now, the letters and packages my publishers send me start off with “Here’s the book. If you want to change something, please don’t. Seriously. Stop. We’re taking any changes out of your advance. No. Stop it.” For those of you curious about what a proofread book looks like, feast your eyes on this baby: 350 single sided sheets of printer paper, corrected with a red color pencil. Awesome.

    Fluent ForeverAnnouncement The Second: The site is moving to Fluent-Forever.com. All future updates will be located over there. Why? Because no one knows what a Tower of Babelfish is, and because Fluent Forever is a friggin awesome book and brand title. Apologies to all who enjoyed the fish theme; you have 30 days to appreciate it before I take it down foreverrrrrrr.

    Announcement The Third: For the next 29 days, the whole Fluent-Forever.com/TowerofBabelfish.com world is going to be all Kickstarter, all the time. Thus the giant, unignorable banner up top. This Kickstarter is my baby. It’s a tool I created when my editor asked me “OK, if pronunciation is so important, how do you actually learn it?” And I realized that my answer was “Well, if you had the right resources, you could learn it this way, but no one has made those resources yet…”

    Kickstarter LogoI’ve been planning it for about a year, and I’m currently unable to sleep out of excitement, and am writing to you now at 4:30am, after a hefty 4-hour-night’s sleep. The Kickstarter is off to a tremendous start: more than 25% funded after less than 14 hours, and I haven’t even announced it on the site yet. Insane. If you’re reading this, then do these three four five things:

    1. Check out the Kickstarter. If you like it, back it. Even $1 makes a huge difference; the more backers we get, the more the project will show up on the front page of Kickstarter.
    2. Share on Facebook. If you want something to copy/paste, try this:
      If you have ever wanted to learn a foreign language, check out this Kickstarter campaign: http://fluent-forever.com/kickstarter. It’s an amazing project; help spread the word!
    3. Share on Twitter, if you use it! If you want 140 characters to copy/paste, try:
      Ever wanted to learn a foreign language? Check out this awesome Kickstarter campaign and help spread the word: http://fluent-forever.com/kickstarter.
    4. Share on Google Plus, if you’re into that kind of thing.
    5. Share via eMail. Email tends to be a bit more likely to actually reach people, given all of Facebook’s promoted posts and ads and baby announcements with 700 Likes. Here’s a generic email to copy/paste:
      Happy December! A blogger I’m following – Gabe Wyner – is developing an amazing language learning app. He launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund its development and I’m helping him spread the word. Check it out at http://fluent-forever.com/kickstarter, and if you like it, please share it with your own friends and colleagues!

    That’s all for now. Now that the book’s done, my life’s starting to get in order and the Kickstarter has launched, I’m going to start updating the site frequently. I’ve said that before, but now I’m not lying to you. I promise.

    (PS: To everyone signed up for site updates via email, sorry for the double email today! Shouldn’t happen again!)

    How to learn a language’s sound system with Anki

    I’ve been fielding questions about my methods for Hungarian and how they might work for a less phonetic language like French, with multiple ways of spelling a single sound. Today, I made a 44-card sample deck for French, which you’re welcome to download and use as a model here.

    The sample deck includes 3 chunks:

    • Minimal pair practice
    • Spelling rules
    • Basic picture words

    Continue reading

    Hungarian: Pronunciation and what’s next (Concrete Vocabulary)

    Using the deck I made on Dec 21, it took me 9 days at <20 minutes/day to basically learn the sounds of Hungarian and the Hungarian alphabet. Total time spent: 4 hrs of deck creation, 2.5 hours of reviews over a 10 day period. This is working very well so far (and it’s a lot of fun!), and I’m ready to move to the next stage: concrete vocabulary.

    Continue reading

    A Two/Seven minute quiz for *non*-German speakers (and a much overdue update)

    First, the update: The book is chugging along, and will take substantially longer than I had predicted (and will be much better for it!).  So far, I’ve gotten my thoughts, theories and research down on Memory, Pronunciation, Word Learning, Grammar, Vocabulary lists and Mnemonic Use, and the next step (aside from some remaining research and thoughts on Reading/Writing/Listening/Speaking) is reworking it into a friendly, clear presentation that’s an enjoyable book to read (and not a textbook).  As we start cutting textbooky sections out of the book, I’ll be posting them here.

    My current goal, aside from finishing the book, is to provide some high quality pronunciation tools here, because there’s just not very much available that’s easy to use and effective.  

    Continue reading

    Video: The Sounds of French (aka “How to learn lots of new vowels”)

    The first French video is done, and it should be helpful for learners of any language.  French is an extremely vowel-heavy language, and the stuff I recommend in this video for developing those vowel sounds in your ear/mouth will be applicable to any new vowels.

    Here’s the link (or go to YouTube directly)

    Reader Q&A: What to do when - How to use a pronunciation guide, daily routines, custom Anki models

    Part two in Reader Q&A, we’ll talk about the order that you should learn things.

    Q: I got one of the Pronounce it Perfectly Books.  How do I use it with your approach?  Should I learn the base vocabulary concurrently? A: I’d follow the book and put the spelling rules into my Anki deck  (so words ending in ‘ou’ are pronounced /u/, and words ending in û are pronounced /y/, for example).  At the point where you can easily hear the differences between words (between roux and rue, for example), and you know what to expect from a given spelling, then start adding words to your Anki deck in a hurry.  At that point, you’ll know how to say 95% of the words you encounter, and if you look a word up in a dictionary and discover that it has an irregular pronunciation, then you can add that pronunciation to your Anki deck. 

    Continue reading

    What opera singers study, and how it can help… (Guest post at Fluentin3Months!)

    I wrote an article for Benny at Fluentin3Months.com about the opera singer perspective and what it has to offer to the language learning community.  Check it out!

    Dropping Barriers: What opera singers study, and how it can help you learn languages easier

    There’s another guest post in the works, and I’ll post a link here as soon as it’s up!

    Other updates: • Small addition to the Other Languages section - added a wonderful Portuguese frequency list for the first 350 words, with numerous example sentences.

    • Added links to Forvo and Rhinospike as pronunciation resources.

    • Added links to Linguee for English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.  It’s a really neat dictionary service that provides tons of example sentences and tells you about a given word’s frequency.  I wish it was available for Russian! (Anyone have any good Russian dictionaries, especially monolingual ones? When a word’s not well described in Wiktionary, I’m kind of out of options)

    • Fixed the email subscription widget - anyone who subscribed prior to today isn’t on the email list; sorry! Please subscribe again - it’s working now.