The Mimic Method - Blog

Travel Hacking 101: How I Flew To Brazil for $5

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 05:28:10 GMT

The Brain Grenade

Last fall I brain-grenaded all my facebook friends when I posted the above screenshot of my $5 airline ticket from New York to São Paulo, Brazil. The comment I attached to it was :

"Shout out to my man @Erik for putting me on Travel Hacking!"

Within the hour, the post received 50 likes and 20 comments ranging from the heavily Caps-Locked: "OMG WTF!!! PLEASE TELL ME ABOUT TRAVEL HACKING!!", to the bitterly sardonic: "I hate you...fml."

Of course a strong response was to be expected. As a friend of mine so aptly put it to me the other day:

Everyone wants to travel, but nobody can afford it.

Of course, world travel is most definitely achievable if it's important enough to you. I personally would never let money get between me and a destination that I am aching to visit. But I represent the minority; most people let expensive airfare deter then from going the places that they want to go.

Good news is, it's not only possible to both have your cake and eat it...you can even bump yourself up to first class for free and eat even more cake!

I teamed up with a friend to put together a comprehensive course showing you how to Travel Hack and book absurdly cheap international airfare the way I do. We're offering a discount on the course and 2 private consultations to help you travel hack your next trip.

Read on to learn more about the offer and how I hopped the equator for $5.

I have teamed up with a good friend and fellow digital nomad, Erik Paquet (the guy who introduced me to travel hacking) to create a comprehensive course on how to become a travel hacker and travel the world for dirt cheap. We're calling the course Travel Hacking 101, and the video below is from our introductory unit. It's a bit long at 7 minutes, but I encourage you to watch the whole thing, as it gives a good overview of how travel hacking works.

Don't worry if certain elements are still unclear to you. When Erik first told me about Travel hacking, I had an extremely difficult time trying to comprehend what he was talking about. He would explain things to me and forward me all these ebooks and articles, but I never had any idea what the hell he was talking about.

Then finally one day last summer on a skype chat, he made me an offer that I couldn't refuse:

Just do exactly what I tell you, and I guarantee you that you will get to Brazil and back for less than $100."

So I followed his exact instruction each step of the way, and as the process slowly unraveled in front of me, I slowly got the hang of it and realized that it was never really that complicated in the first place.

At first I thought I was just dense for not getting it immediately, but then I tried explaining travel hacking to my friends and family members and found that they were just as confused by it as I was initially.

That's how I got the idea for Travel Hacking 101. For whatever reason, travel hacking is too difficult to understand by just reading or hearing about it - you have to do it yourself.

So I proposed a project to Erik to build a comprehensive course with visuals and screencasts to walk people through the process of travel hacking step-by-step the same way he did with me.

Sold on the idea, Erik found an apartment for us to share in Rio de Janeiro after New Year's, and we've spent the past few months cranking out tutorials in between beach sessions and açai bowls. Now we're looking for beta-testers.

The Travel Hacking 101 Beta Tester Program

We're about halfway done with the course now and looking for beta-testers to try out our tutorials to let us know what things still don't make sense. As a beta-tester you get:

30% Off the course ($99 instead of the $139 full price we'll be charging when it's complete).
2 Free Google+ Hangout Consultations with Erik and I to personally guide you through the process of becoming a travel hacker.
The same guarantee that Erik gave me - Get your first ticket for dirt cheap or your money back!

Before I give you the sign-up link though, I need to make a few things clear:

There is no risk: Travel hacking is not illegal or fraudulent, and as long as you follow the rules and pay your bills on time you'll have no problems.
Most of these hacks require your to be in the US credit system: Unfortunately, these big frequent flyer point offers and manufactured spending hacks are not available to other nationalities. You can, however, still benefit from the second half of the course, where we talk about the best way to redeem miles.
Travel Hacking Requires at Least Average Credit: If you have a poor or young credit history, you will probably not qualify for the premium rewards cards that we travel hack.

So if you fit the profile and are interested in helping us beta test, click the button below to get started today!

Signup as a Beta-Tester!

Two Infamous Polyglots Challenge You to Self-Record your Language-Learning

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:30:05 GMT

Forget about The Mimic Method approach and all the other language philosophies out there for a moment and take some time to consider this simple fact:

You learn skills ONLY after many hours of practice

People are always amazed at how polyglots like Moses McCormick and I are able to acheive fluency in a foreign language in a matter of months when they themselves have spent years studying the language and still struggle to hold a basic conversation.

The flaw in their thinking lies in their perception of “time”. You may have taken a language class for 2 years, but in a 1 hour class you’ll be lucky to get your lips moving for more than 10 total minutes; the rest of the time is typically spent listening to the teacher, other students, or writing some stupid stuff.

So even if you got to class three times a week, you’re only getting 30 minutes tops of speaking practice per week, not to mention that the quality of that practice is low since it’s an artificial classroom context instead of a real world one.

Calendar time is irrelevant for polyglots like Moses and me - we focus on output.

Moses makes a point to get at least an hour of raw conversation output on his single level up missions. It takes me a good 30-40 total hours of intense flow-training in a language before I develop a strong enough command of the accent and flow to start learning through mimicry.

Moreover, I only start learning to communicate through mimicry once I get to the target country/locale, where I end up spending the majority of my waking hours speaking the target language. So in the same week the average classroom student accumulates 1 hour of artificial output, I’m putting in between 50 and 70 hours.

Do the math and you’re realize that there’s absolutely nothing amazing about what Moses and I have accomplished. As Moses puts it simply in the video:

“The more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. That’s just how it is.”

The Self-recording Challenge is our way of encouraging YOU to put more into it…

Our Self-Recording for YOU!

The only way to keep yourself honest about what you accomplish in anything is by keeping track of it. Since language is about sound, it only makes sense that audio-recording yourself is the most powerful motivational tool.

There are two main advantages to self-recording for language-learning:

Being able to hear your errors
Keeping track of your progress

The focus of The Mimic Method of course is on pronunciation and flow, and I recommend the folllowing self-recording techniques for honing your language flow:

Break down song lyrics and teach them to yourself (Click here to learn how I do this)
Use the “flow-verlap” and give yourself feedback on your own pronunciation (Click here to learn about Flow-verlapping)
Use The Flow Forum to share your tracks publicly and invite others to correct your mistakes (Click here to learn about the Flow Forum)
Sign up for my Flow Series Program and have me personally train you through the Cloud. (Click here to learn more about the Flow Series)

With Foreign Language Roadrunning, Moses focuses on getting out there and seeking the nearest native speakers to practice speaking with in order to “level up”. For measuring your progress in speaking ability, just seek out “level up” opportunities as often as you can and use the Soundcloud app (both Droid App and iOS apps available for free) to record and store these conversations on the cloud.

Because soundcloud stores your tracks chronologically, it’s extremely easy to go back in time and see how much worse you are compared to now. There’s nothing more motivating than a measurable sense of progress.

The Self-Recording Challenge

I can write about this all day, but you wont’ really appreciate the power of self-recording for language-learning until you start doing it yourself.

Click here to access the flow forum and make your declaration for your “self-recording goal”. Start with something modest like “I plan on self-recording myself reading out loud for ten minutes a day” or “I plan on self-recording myself practicing Spanish with my co-worker for 1 hour total a week”

Once you build your rhythm, you can start upping the ante and accelerating your language learning process even more.

The most important thing is that you start.

SO START NOW!

Wanna get your friends motivated as well, click the side-bar link on the left to share this post with your networks so that they know about the challenge. Also be sure to:

Subscribe to The Mimic Method and The Foreign Language Roadrunner Youtube Channels
Like The Mimic Method on Facebook
Join The Flow Forum
Check out my Flow Series Courses.

Like always, keep on flowin!

Stop trying to Suffocate Language with "Rules"; Just Go with The Flow!

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 21:38:05 GMT

Instead of treating language as the fluid and beautiful thing that it is, certain people want to confine language to a strict set of spelling and grammar rules. Then to get everyone to conform to their rules, they create a stigma around people who don't spell or conjugate the way they do, labeling them as "uneducated" or even "unintelligent."

This is why people get super embarrassed whenever they realize that they accidentally wrote "there" instead of "they're," or answered the phone "this is her" instead of "this is she."

Seriously, who cares?

The point gets across either way, so don't ever think for a second that you're better than someone because you know the difference.

I find spelling and grammar nazis irritating enough, but what's most insidious about our society's obsession with rules is its negative effects on our ability to learn second languages as adults. Since all "educated" adults have been socialized to value "familiarity with rules" over "ability to communicate," second language education focus has always been on stupid, and ultimately arbitrary things, like the difference between "they're" and "their".

If you obsess over such insignificant things, you inhibit yourself from "feeling the flow" and learning to communicate fluently.

That's why there's nothing more refreshing to a Flow-Junkie like me than languages with no rules, like Montreal Joual...

Montreal Joual is a mix of English and Quebecois French, and I became fascinated by it during my 3-month stay in Montreal last summer. People would just switch back and forth between the two languages every second without thinking about it, and none of the listeners would even bat an eyelash. As an American who grew up thinking of French and English as two very different things, this was a very ear-opening experience for me.

Of course, the grammar and spelling nazis can't stand to see a language running free in its natural habitat, so traditionally people have looked down on joual as being a "fake language" that should never exist outside the street. French purists look down on Joual speakers for their heavy use of English words and grammar, English purists look down on Joual speakers for never spelling things correctly.

Fortunately, Joual speakers just don't give a shit.

Since there is no governing body of wrinkled academics to cram spelling and grammar edicts down everyone's throats, people just focus on the only things that matters - communication and Flow.

That being the case, Joual Hip Hop is the richest hip hop cultures I've gotten to know in my travels. As I will write about soon, rapping is about playing around with meaning and Flow, so when you have two languages intertwining with one another, the potential for rhythmic wordplay doubles.

In the Dead Obies song I sing in this post's video - "D'lautre Bord" ("From the other side"), the artists mix French and English so fluidly that your brain doesn't even notice the switch. I can think of no better example of the universality of Flow than this song.

Check out the transcription of the lyrics below. So you can see how mixed it is, I highlighted the English text in red. In the right column, I include an English translation of the entire song.

Dl'autre Bord by Dead Obies

J'aurais pu jeter l'éponge,
qu'elle s'gonfle on and on

j'voulais peter les plombs,
release le stress de mon bedon

So j'ai lever le ton,
spit jusqu'à fill la piscine

Après on chill dedans, drink dedans,
j'feed mes cats, j'fill l'épicier

P ça feel bizarre,
des fois j'en perds des boutes

Check le monde se faire du coude,
j'suis pas l'seul qui rêve d'écoute

Mais c'est all goood....
Moi jfais mon thang pi j'suis out cuz...

-------

Ça va comme "Hi, Hello, Holla."
Sip a piña colada

Flip l’ananas, split bananas,
put the beat a little louder

Comment j’ai get high pour climb jusqu’au lait de coco Fall down une couple of times,

J’ai le hunchback de Quasimodo

Comment j’ai get wild,
dodgé les balles, rafales des popo

Get wild, jungle around,
j’ai marché sur des têtes de crocos

tu peux pas judge man, step back,
ravales tes propos

Peep le Dead Obies Show,
six cats qui rap p hustle….peep pal

I could have thrown in the towel,
it was inflating more and more

I wanted to blow a fuse,
release the stress from my belly

So I raised the tone,
spit until I fill the swimming pool.

After we chill a bit, drink a bit,
I feed my cats, I fill my pantry.

And it feels weird,
sometimes I lose my my mind.

Look how the world makes money,
I'm not the only one who dreams of being heard.

But it's all good.
I do my thing then I'm out cuz....

---

It goes like "Hi, Hello, Holla,"
Sip a pina colada

Flip pineapples, split bananas,
put the beat a little louder.

Oh how I get high by climbing until the coconut milk falls down a couple of times

I did the Hunchback of Quasimodo

Oh how I get wild,
dodging the bulles and rifles of the police.

Get wild, jungle around,
I walked upon the heads of crocodiles.

You can't judge, man. Step back,
swallow your proposal.

Peep the Dead Obies Show, six cats that rap and hustle...peep pal

Since Montreal, I've really gotten into mixing languages - it's just so much more fun than speaking with just one language. For example, if I meet a Brazilian who speaks good English, then I'll purposely speak Portunglish to him. If I meet an Argentine who speaks portuguese, then I'll purposely speak Portañol to her.

I even met a Taiwanese-Brazilian the other day whom I spoke for an hour in Mandarguese! It was amazing!

It takes a bit of practice to be able to switch back and forth between language flows, and you have to make a bit of unnatural effort at first, but when you get the hang of it, you create a new ultra-flow that is so magnetic that the other person won't be able to resist the urge to speak that way too.

More on my language-mixing experiments to come. In the meantime, be sure to check out Dead Obies at deadobies.bandcamp.com, and of course check out my courses too if you're interested in honing your own flow.

Keep on Flowin!

Why Rhythm Perception is the Most Valuable Skill for both Language and Music

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 23:02:47 GMT

The Mimic Method philosophy was conceived from my experience studying Afro-Brazilian Percussion in Rio de Janeiro

In my last post - "Words are Imaginary, Syllables are Real - Learn Syllables!", I explained how words have no physical reality to them and are actually mental abstractions. This is problematic for anyone approaching foreign language exclusively through words, since oral communication is fundamentally a physical activity.

As an alternative, I presented a more "physical" approach to language-learning - the syllables approach. In contrast to words, syllables can be transcribed in a way that accurately represents the acoustic reality of speech. This is extremely useful, since all human speech can be broken down into strings of rhythmic syllables.

At first, most people will struggle to hear speech in syllables, since literacy training has caused us to hear speech in terms of imagined words. Nevertheless, Syllables Perception CAN be trained.

I've trained syllable perception extensively through both my rap-training in multiple languages and my Cloud-Tutoring of hundreds of other people’s accents (currently I have over 4,000 Soundcloud comments, 700 of which are publicly viewable here).

Training this ability has dramatically improved my ability to mimic and learn any human language. As I will write about soon, one of my goals for 2013 is to develop a free and open curriculum for "Flow-Training,' and syllable perception will be a core competency of this program.

In this post, I will discuss in detail the most important element of syllable perception - rhythm perception.

The Importance of "Sub-Division"

My idea for The Mimic Method Language-Learning philosophy was conceived during my musical experiences in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I was studying percussion intensely for the first time and was having several epiphanies regarding the fundamental role that rhythm played in music.

The main epiphany I had was in regards to a concept called “sub-division.” Sub-division is when you count a musical meter in it’s smallest units. For example, instead doing a normal beat count of:

"one - - - two - - - three - - - four - - -"

A sub-divided count would be:

"one - ee - and - uh - two - ee - and - uh - three - ee - and - uh - four - ee - and - uh"

Actually, since my percussion training in Brazil I've been counting in Portuguese, and the Brazilian convention is easier to write so we'll stick with this:

1 - i - e - a- 2 - i - e - a - 3 - i - a - 4 - i - e - a

In the audio file below, I start by counting a normal 4-beat count, then I subdivide in both the English and Portuguese conventions.

I grew up playing classical violin, and my teachers and orchestra conductors would often encourage me and my peers to sub-divide in our heads, but most of us would just count the beat (e.g 1…2…3…4). In comparison to other genres, classical music has little rhythmic complexity, so the normal beat-count got the job done most of the time.

In afro-brazilian percussive styles, however, the musical aesthetic lies precisely within its rhythmic complexity. Moreover, these rhythm patterns are completely different from the ones that dominate all the American musical traditions, which means I had to train new mental processes for hearing music (more on this in a later post).

The result is that I had a very difficult time learning to play these rhythms on the instruments I was studying at the time (repinique, pandeiro and cavaquinho). I always found myself "funk-ifying" the beats, i.e. manipulating the brazilian rhythms to fit the funk, soul and hip hop rhythms I was entrained in.

Sub-division was my solution to this challenge. No matter how complex or syncopated a beat is, I realized that any given “hit” will always occur either on the beat (1, 2, 3 or 4) or on one of the sub-beats in between the beats (ignoring tuplets for now).

Therefore to learn a new beat, I just had to figure out what those sub-beats were and practice them in subdivision.

Here’s an example of the standard syncopated rhythm you hear all the time in Brazil. Try to clap along.

If you were raised in North America or Europe where syncopated rhythms are not commonly heard in daily life, there’s a good chance you’ll have a hard time clapping along to this rhythm. In the western musical traditions, people are used to clapping or syncing up just with the "down beats" (1....2....3....4).

In African, Afro-Latino, and Afro-Caribbean cultures, however, there's a lot more syncopation (NOT on the down beat) in all the musical genres, so people are used to this stuff (i.e. they got the Flow down). Here's a scene I recently recorded of a samba da mesa performance. When the singer yells “palma da mão!” (palm of the hand=clap your hands) at the end of the video, everyone starts to clap the syncopated rhythm from above.

The best way to stay in sync with this beat is to count or feel the "ghost notes" in your head. The “ghost notes” are those sub-beats that aren’t actually sounded. For example, counting ghost notes in your head for a standard four count would be like this:

1 (i) (e) (a) 2 (i) (e) (a) 3 (i) (e) (a) 4 (i) (e) (a)

The beats in parentheses are “ghost notes” that you hear in your head but not making with your voice, or hands, or whatever things is bringing these sounds to physical reality.

This “palma da mão” rhythm would be transcribed as follows:

1 (i) (e) a (2) (i) e (a) 3 (i) (e) a (4) (i) e (a)

In the track below, I start by counting every sub-beat, then I loudly emphasize the sounded beats while whispering the ghost notes (the ones in parentheses), then I drop the ghost notes completey. Finally, I return to clapping the rhythm and end with the faster Samba tempo.

The most important thing to note here is that even when I am not clapping or counting the ghost notes out loud, I am ALWAYS hearing them in my head.

This is what all percussionists and most professional musicians do. Even if I'm not thinking of the numbers or "i,e,a's" in my head, I am always feeling that constant subdivision pulse whenever I do anything musical.

This is because in music, the silences are just as important as the sounds.

This is the general epiphany I had while trying to teach myself these new Brazilian instruments and rhyhtms. It wasn’t long after I had this epiphany about music that I had the same one about language.

Rhythm in Language

Before I get into that, I'd like to give you a short introduction to speech rhythm, or prosody as it's called in Phonetics. As I stated before, speech is merely a string of rhythmic syllables. A syllable is made up of either a consonant, vowel, or combination of the two.

Listen to the track below as an example. In it, I say “What are you doing tonight”, but the syllables are broken up as follows.

wha…tar…you…do…ing….to…night

As we learned in the last post, normal writing conventions do a horrible job of capturing the acoustic reality of speech, so I created “Rhythmic Phonetic Notation” to transcribe speech more accurately. Here’s how this phrase would be transcribed in RPN.

wə...dɚ...juː...duː...ɪn...tɪ...naɪ

Remember, the underlined and emboldended syllables are the “Stressed” syllables. In speech, there are actually many levels of stress (or prominence as it’s called in phonetics), but the most basic heirarchy is “stressed” and “unstressed”, and that’s what we focus on in Flow-training.

Our brains rely on this alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables to process speech.

Speech can occur at a rate of 50 phonemes per second and still be comprehensible. The only way this is possible is because of Flow, and this rhythmic alternation between stressed and unstressed is the basis of Flow.

The Ghost Notes of Speech

Back to my epiphany that the silences are just as important as the notes in music; the same applies in language. Take this English phrase, “I can't drink tea anymore”

Slow it down and you can hear that in rhythmic phonetic notation is would be broken down as follows:

aɪ kẽ - dʒɹiŋ - ti ɛ ni mɔ˞

The hyphens represent the silences, or “ghost notes” of the phrase. These silences have as much weight as the sounded syllables. In fact, a more appropriate term for them would be “ghost syllables.”

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that in this particular phrase, the ghost notes occur whenever a consonant sound is dropped. Apply a deeper phonetic knowledge and you’ll realize that all these consonants are “plosive stops”, which is when you build up air behind an articulator and and release it in a burst.

The stops are some of the most energy-intensive sounds in human speech, so it makes sense why we drop these sound in so many accents of English. But we can’t just drop them without a paying some sort of phonetic homage to them, which is why we replace them with syllables and hear the “ghost notes” in our head without thinking about it.

Foreigners have a rough time understanding English because they take a words approach and expect to hear all the sounds suggested from the written word. This is a perfect example why we can never rely on writing to learn a new language - sounds from written words get dropped and altered all the time, so there nowhere near as reliable as syllables.

Languages will always evolve beyond their writing systems, so you're much better off learning skills that are more adaptive than literacy. What if instead of spending your time memorizing writing rules, you spent your time learning to hear stresses and silences?

Training Yourself to Hear Speech Rhythm

Remember, it can be very difficult to free your thinking processes from the bondage of written word. Everything you hear in your native language, or any other foreign language you studied extensively, will be tainted by your knowledge of the word and writing.

That’s why the best way to train yourself to hear stresses and silences is to practice with speech you are not familiar with at all. In previous posts, I wrote about how you can study speech in detail using the “reduced tempo” and “repeat’ effects on Audacity (Review my posts on "Flow-verlapping" here and my post on Using Audacity to Learn Song Lyrics here).

For some inexplicable reason, a friend of mine recently posted this youtube video of a K-pop song on my wall, so I’ll use the hook as an example of how I would break down the rhythm.

I have absolutely no experience with Korean, so I can’t trust my perception of the phonemes, and am not even going to waste my time trying to figure out what they are. I can, however, trust my perception of the stresses and silences since it’s a universal concept of music and speech.

Here’s the reduced tempo version of the hook.

When I learn and teach speech rhythm, I always start with the Universal Rhythmic Binary which simplifies the speech to stressed syllables (loud "DA"), unstressed syllables ("di") and ghost notes (silence).

Now just for your listening pleasure, I'll speed it back up, add in the melody with some random syllables, and put on my best cute-sy k-pop singing voice!

Get Started with Speech Rhythm Training Today

Instead of looking up text transcriptions or song lyrics, focus on training your ear sensitivity. It's always best to use music because the speech rhythm is more obvious due to it's alignment with the musical beat.

Take some random song on the internet, preferrably one you like and in a language you are not familiar with, then use my audacity tricks to break it down. Experiment and see if you can figure out where the stresses and silences are.

I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t get it 100% accurate on your first try. It took me quite a while to develop this ability, and I only did so because people were paying me to do it in the development of my Flow Series courses.

I can tell you, however, that I am very glad I did develop this ability, because now my universal mimicry ability in both language and music is better than anyone else I’ve ever met. I can pick up, memorize and attach meaning to phrases many times faster than I could before developing The Flow Series, which means I can learn new languages many times faster now.

As I wrote before, one of my goals this year is to start developing a curriculum for general Flow-Training so you guys can follow the same path and accelerate your core music/language learning competencies.

More on that to come. In the meantime, keep on flowin!

Feelin' the flow yet? If so, try out one of my Flow Series Courses risk free, or sign up for The Flow Newsletter and get a free assessment of your accent. Otherwise, spread the gospel of flow by sharing this post on your favorite social networks!

Words are Imaginary. Syllables Are Real. Learn Foreign Languages through Syllables!

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 20:32:14 GMT

This photo has nothing to do with the post. I just wanted to rub it in certain people's faces that I'm on the beach now! : p

Almost everyone considers words to be the fundamental building blocks of language. This being the case, almost everyone approaches the learning of a second language through words.

It seems to make perfect sense - just keep memorizing words and the grammar rules that govern them, and eventually you’ll learn the language, right?

WRONG- Language is NOT made up of words, it’s made up of sounds.

When you hear speech, you first process the sounds, then you reconstruct these sounds into mental abstractions called “words.” In other words (no pun intended), words are merely figments of our imaginations.

Because words have no physical reality to them, this creates several complications for anyone who centers their foreign language studies exclusively around words. In fact, the main reason why most people struggle at foreign languages is because they focus too much on words and not enough on sounds.

Allow me to explain...

Words are Imaginary

This statement always draws skepticism from people, because our education system really hammers in the idea that words are the fundamental building blocks of language.

It all has to do with the writing system and its favoring of semantics (meaning) over acoustics (sound). In most writing systems, items are divided semantically using visual spaces. So we are trained to think of everything between spaces (i.e. the words) as cohesive entities.

Take the phrase in the track below for example.

If you were to transcribe this, you would write the following:

“Mimicry’s my doctrine"

Notice where the spacing is in the writing. Now listen to the phrase at 50% reduced speed and see if you can hear where the actual acoustic breaks of silence occur:

If you were able to separate your mind from the words and focus exclusively on the sound, you should have noticed that the phrase was physically divided as follows:

Mimi - cry'smydoc - trine

If you can't hear it, just look at the visual waveform and notice where the breaks are.

The divergence between word and the reality doesn’t end there; the sounds themselves are different as well. The spellings of these three words ("Mimicry's my doctrine") suggest the existence of sounds which, upon closer listening, were either different or completely non-existent.

The ’s’ after the apostrophe suggests the /s/ sound “ssssss”, but if you listen to the reduced speed track again you'll hear that I’m actually making a /z/ sound (zzzz).
The ‘c’ in “doctrine” suggests the existence of a /k/ sound, but listen close and you’ll notice that instead of a /k/, there’s just a gap of silence between the “do” and the “trine”.

Now here's the freaky part - if before all this analysis I had asked you whether or not I made the /k/ and /s/ sound, you would have said "yes".

This is what I mean when I say "words are imaginary". You are taking a physical reality of sounds and syllables and distorting it to fit "words" that never really existed.

Why do we do this?

Literacy and It's Drawbacks

Our distortion of speech sound has to do with our literacy education. Any “phonetic” writing system like English is only going to be loosely based on how things really sound. So when we learn to process language only within these systems, we are left with only a loose understanding of what speech sound really is.

And we really ingrain this loose understanding. From a very early age, we are submerged into a world of written words. Every time we see a word in a book, computer screen or street sign, we reinforce this loose system of sound and script. By the time we are adults, the system will have been reinforced trillions of times!

The end result is that no one knows what the hell they are talking about when they are talking about speech sound.

As literate adults, we have developed a very strong conceptualization of sound that is fundamentally flawed. It should be no surprise then that learning a completely new system of sounds in a foreign language is so challenging.

Syllables are Real

What if instead of thinking about speech in terms of imagined words, we thought about it in concrete physical terms? Each unique sound would have it’s own unique symbol, and the grouping of these symbols would reflect the real-world acoustic groupings.

This is what phonetic transcriptions attempt to do. There are quite a few phonetic transcription systems out there, but I find most of them inadequate for language-learning, so I invented my own - “Rhythmic Phonetic Notation.” You'll learn a lot about RPN in future blog posts, or if you take one of my Flow Series courses.

Here's how RPN would transcribe the earlier phrase of “Mimicry is my Doctrine”:

mɪ mɪ - kɹi zmaɪ dɑ - tɹɪn

You probably are not familiar with the symbols, but with the spacing you should be able to hear how it aligns with the original audio.

Rhythmically, the spaces are denoted by dashes, and the stressed syllables are denoted by emboldening and underlining. Phonemically, I use mostly IPA to represent the sounds, but sometimes I use my own symbols when I think the IPA symbol will confuse the learner based on his native language.

What's important to note here is that, unlike the English writing system, each script corresponds to a specific sound and muscular movement in the speech organ.

Because each sound has one unique symbol, and each symbol has one unique sound, there is no ambiguity. The idea is for a person familiar with the symbols and the muscular movements they represent to be able to repeat the speech out loud near-perfectly without having to hear it, the same way a musician can pick up a piece of sheet music and re-create the sounds exactly.

This is extremely important for language-learners, because there's no room for acoustic ambiguity when the entire language is based on sound.

Think in Syllables

Part of my mimicry ability derives from my ability to mentally deconstruct speech into rhythmic phonetic notation. When I am familiar with the Flow of a language, I am familiar with all its sound possibilities. So when I’m presented with a phrase and have no idea what it means, I can still break it down and mimic it.

This is an indispensable skill dealing with every day "connected speech," in which "words" are often chopped, screwed, and fused with one another, making them unrecognizable to anyone who takes the "words-approach" to second language learning.

Learning to think in syllables, however, takes time and specific training. This is the training I give people in my Flow Series Courses. In the courses, students learn songs syllable by syllable without any clue as to the word boundaries or meanings. At first they're a bit surprised by the difficulty and uniqueness of the training, but once they get over the hump they immediately recognize the value of the training.

Halfway through the course, students always send me a message similar to the following:

“I’m not sure what, but something has changed. [The target language] just feels and sounds different now.”

The change the students is referring to is in his newly-developed ability to process the physical reality of the target language. The language changes from incomprehensible babble to something that can be chopped up into little bite-size pieces and processed.

Now they have a foundation on which to build sound-meaning relationships. Remember, language is just a system for attaching meaning to sound, but without a strong grasp of the sound you will be lost forever.

Before you can imagine words, you must be able to hear syllables. In my next post, I’ll explain exactly how to train yourself to do that.

Till then, keep on Flowin'!

I make a crazy mad sense right? If you like what I'm saying, be sure to subscribe to my blog or sign up for the Flow Newsletter. Better yet, try out one of my Flow Series courses 100% risk-free so you can discover the true power of Mimicry and Flow-Training.

Screw Idahosa - I Can Learn Pronunciation and Flow on MY OWN with "Flow-verlapping"!

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 21:09:48 GMT

Wait...screw me???

As adult second language learners, our ears and speech organs need a bit of time to develop the sensitivity and motor coordination to process foreign sounds correctly. So when you first try to mimic speech in your target language, you will inevitably hear and pronounce sounds incorrectly.

To make things even worse, you're probably not going to know when you're hearing/pronouncing things incorrectly. As I write in my post on "How to Tune Your Foreign Language Vowel Pronunciation", foreign speech sounds often get magnetized to familiar ones in our perception, so two different sounds will initially sound the exact same to you unless you pay really close attention.

This is why feedback is so important. The very first step to error-elimination is error-awareness, so we need some sort of feedback system to make us aware of the sounds that we are getting wrong.

This was the idea behind Cloud-Tutoring. In my Flow Series Courses, I use Cloud-Tutoring to help my students identify their specific pronunciation weaknesses and provide them with detailed instructions on how to fix them. Had I not pointed these errors out to them, they would have never known they were making them, and once again, without awareness we can't fix our errors.

But you can develop awareness on your own without paying me or anyone else for Cloud-Tutoring.

Maybe I'm shooting myself in the foot for doing this, but Spreading the Flow always takes precedence over money for me, so I'm going to let you in on the technique I personally use to give myself feedback on my own foreign language pronunciation - Flow-verlapping.

Sound is NOT a Mystery - It's Physical and Measurable

I always get a bit impatient when people try to explain linguistic concepts to me in vague emotional terms.

"No you see Spanish sort of has like a more choppy feel, and Portuguese...you know... has more like a swingy, sing-songy feel!"

Great, now how the hell is this gonna help me learn Spanish or Portuguese?

"I know it's vague, but you really can't explain these type of things. It's just how it is."

This is the part that makes me impatient. It's great that we have such strong emotional reactions to sound, but we shouldn't romanticize it as something mysterious and inexplicable when sound is in fact a physical phenomenon that can be measured and precisely explained.

If your language teachers shrugs his shoulders and says there's "no way" to explain how he's pronouncing a certain sound and how what you're doing is different, then what he's really saying is that he personally doesn't know how to explain it.

We're not talking about magic powers here, we're talking about specific muscle movements in the speech organ. Sure, these movements are complex and take time to learn, but so is doing a backflip - would you consider that magical and un-teachable?

Once you understand a bit about the physiology of speech and science of sound, you will be in a much better position to self-correct and figure out your own solutions to your language problems the way I do. In future posts, I will explain more concepts in detail, but for now I want to focus on just two concepts - Assonance and Dissonance.

Assonance vs. Dissonance

In poetry, assonance refers to the repetition of similar vowel sounds (e.g. "Hey Jack, that cat's hat is black"). Assonance is a major part of my teaching pedagogy, as the best way to learn to appreciate and distinguish new sounds is to listen to them repeated in different words, as is often the case in song lyrics.

When two assonant sounds are played in unison (i.e. at the same time), they resonate with one another to create a louder and fuller sound. (Fullness may sound like a vague term, but it's not. It refers to the quantity and amplitudinal strength all of different frequency bands present in a given acoustic event.)
Dissonance is when two sounds clash with one another. This clash or tension is most apparent when the two dissonant sounds occur in unison.

Assonance and dissonance are more apparent in tonal music than in speech, but the same principles still apply. Our goal is to figure out how to use this assonance/dissonance dynamic to give ourselves feedback on our pronunciation.

How to Use the Assonance/Dissonance Dynamic as a Feedback Tool

When you pronounce something incorrectly on your own, the error might not be that obvious to you. If you listen to your pronunciation in unison with the native speech you're trying to mimic, however, the dynamic of assonance and dissonance will bring your errors to the forefront.

Let's look at a specific example. In the track below, I take a native Mandarin phrase and try to mimic it exactly. I then play both my recording and the original at the same time.

Notice how the sound gets bigger and fuller when both sounds are played at the same time. This tells me that the sounds are assonant, or at least close enough to each other to create that fullness effect.

When I hear this fullness, I know that I am making these sounds correctly; this is my positive feedback.

Now I take the same phrase and and intentionally make two errors. One error is a mispronounced syllable, the other error is an incorrect tone. Listen closely to how this sounds in unison.

Even if you are unfamiliar with Mandarin, you should be able to hear where the errors occurred by the sudden change from assonance to dissonance. In the brief moments that I make these errors, the fullness of assonance is lost and replaced by a very different clash. Notice once again how this clash was more apparent when the tracks were played in unison.

This loss of fullness and presence of tension is my negative feedback. When I hear it, I know that I am making these sounds incorrectly.

I call this auto-feedback technique of mimicking native speech and then listening to your recording in unison with the original Flow-verlapping, since you are essentially overlapping two Flows and seeing whether they match up or not.

Flow-verlapping is an extremely effective technique for developing an awareness of your pronunciation errors.

Here's how you can do it on your own.

How to Flow-verlap with Audacity

You can easily flowverlap with any audio editing software that allows for multi-layered tracks. In this tutorial, I show you how to flow-verlap using Audacity. Click here to download audacity for free, then follow the directions in the screencast below.

Below, I review the steps with some additional notes.

Choose a Track and Import it - Remember the goal here is not to memorize words but to mimic sounds exactly. So know that things don't always sound the way they are written, and speech sound isn't just phonemes, it's rhythm and intonation too. To flow-verlap correctly, you will need to focus on these elements.
Repeat the original audio track several times. Repetition helps us practice the sound to mimic exactly and more easily sync up our mimicry.
Record yourself mimicking in sync with the native speech - When you do this, make sure you use headphones so that you can better hear the nuances and get a cleaner recording.
Playback both your recording and the original at the same time to listen for discrepancies. Learn to appreciate the "fullness" of unison so that you can more easily identify its absence. Play around with the "gain" controls to help you compare better.

Additional Tips for Flow-verlapping

A few more tips to help you get the most out of Flow-verlapping.

Download native speech audio for free at www.rhinospike.com
Start with slower tempos so that you can really listen to the nuances of the sound
Really take the time to practice and memorize the pacing of the phrase as best you can before you start to flow-verlap - if you're timing is off the flow-verlap won't work.
Start with shorter phrases and build up to longer phrases as your mimicry skills increase
It's better mimicry practice when you do NOT know the meaning or word boundaries of a phrase, as this forces you focus more on the sounds and flow.

Actually, I do most of my flow-verlapping practice with song lyrics rather than regular speech. The musical meter of speech makes it a lot easier for me to synchronize my sounds with the native speakers.

Also, memorizing song lyrics is a lot more fun than memorizing random utterances of speech, so I'm more motivated to put in the necessary focus and attention needed to learn the lyrics, and I'm also more likely to practice my flow by singing these songs for fun while I go about my day to day business.

If you want more tips on how to teach yourself song lyrics, read my guest post on fluentin3months.com on "How I taught myself to rap in 4 languages I don't speak using Audacity."

To give you an idea of what flowverlapping sounds like in a musical context, here's some snippets of my flow-verlapping in all four of my second languages, plus the next language I plan on learning - Japanese.

The Limitations of Flow-verlapping

Flow-verlapping is a powerful technique for giving yourself feedback on your pronunciation and flow, but it has it's limitations. Firstly, Flow-verlapping is only good for building an awareness of your errors; it can't tell you how you should go about fixing them.

Knowing the nature of a pronunciation error requires a good deal of functional knowledge of articulatory phonetics and speech organ physiology. In future posts, I plan on providing you all with some resources to help you build this knowledge on your own. In the meantime, I suggest you start with this post on "How to Tune Your Foreign Language Vowel Pronunciation."

Furthermore, you can't 100% rely on your own ear to hear dissonance with foreign language sounds, even with the dissonance amplified though flow-verlapping. Ear sensitivity takes time to develop, so there's still a good chance you will be completely unaware of some errors.

This is why you're still better off with the the Cloud-Tutoring assistance of a Flow-coach like myself (I know I'm sneaky right? : p). As much as I have trained my ear, even I can't rely on myself to hear sounds properly in a new language, which is why after I hone my flow as much as I can through flowver-lapping, I send my Soundcloud tracks to native speaker friends to point out the sounds that sound "funny" to them.

They won't have the articulatory phonetic knowledge to give me precise instructions, but as long as I have the awareness, I can use my own theoretical knowledge to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

But really, you save yourself a lot of trouble by just trying my Flow Courses out risk-free (Hehe I gotcha with the "Screw Idahosa" bit didn't I!)

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Pronunciation is NOT a Bonus Skill - It's the MOST Important Element in Language Acquisition

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:36:09 GMT

If you're one of the minority of people who agree with me on this point, sign up for my newsletter and get a free assessment of your accent in your target language.

Fill out my online form.

If you're not quite convinced, ask yourself this: of all the people you've ever heard fluently speak a adulthood-acquired second-language, how many of them speak with really bad accents?

Dig into the history of all the best language-learners and you'll discover this, they all spoke with good pronunciation ever since the very beginning of their language-studies.

There's a reason for this, but it requires a bit of abstract thinking to understand...

Why "Accent' is Underrated

Often when I tell people that my Flow Series courses focus exclusively on personal-training people's perception and pronunciation in their target languages, they respond with something like this:

Oh okay, so it's something you do AFTER you already learned the language.

This comment reveals a very common misperception about the importance of pronunciation to language acquisition. Similar to a juggling or walking on one's hands, people view speaking with a "good accent" as a good trick to show off at parties, but not really necessary to the act of communicating fluently in the language.

This reasoning stems from the false understanding of what language actually is. Most people tend to think of language as being about words and the grammatical structures that contain them. But this is not the case.

A language is about sounds and the meanings attached to them

Therefore, there are really only two basic steps to learning a language

Master the perception and production of the sounds
Attach meanings to these sounds

Mispronouncing something is synonymous with getting the sound wrong, and mispronouncing things on a consistent basis (i.e. speaking with a bad accent) means you will never get past step 1 of the language learning process, no matter how many vocab and grammar rules you learn.

Nevertheless, people continue focusing on everything but step 1 of the language-acquisition process and end up hitting ceilings early on. Sure, you can understand people when they talk slowly, and you can get your message out, however slowly and oafishly, but was that really your goal when you set out to learn this language?

What an "Accent" Really is.

Language is about shared conventions for sound and meaning. When you are speaking with an accent, you are NOT partaking in the sound conventions of the group your speaking with. In a way, you are linguistically ostracizing yourself from the people whose language you are trying to learn, and this will stifle your development indefinitely.

This is why the best language learners all learn at least 85% of the accent within the very first stage of their studies. Mastering the sound is like getting in to the group, then once you're in you can more naturally pick up words, expressions and structures through mimicry. With proper pronunciation, these sound-meaning relationships are continually re-inforced every single time you hear someone speak (a concept I'll discuss in a later post).

To be clear, your pronunciation does not have to be perfect, and it may never be perfect, but you do have to be pretty damn close. Otherwise, you'll be left "out".

So all that being said...

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My Portuguese Man-Crush on Seu Jorge: An Essay on Finding Your Foreign Language Spirit Guide and Identity

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 21:00:53 GMT

Me mimicking my Brazilian Spirit Guide

Have you ever seen or heard something for the first time that deeply resounded within your being? It's as if you had a vague notion of something that ought to exist, and the moment you find out that it does, all you can think is:

Oh my God...yes...EXACTLY!

That was the feeling I had my second week ever in Brazil, when a girl I had just met shared the above video on my facebook wall with this note:

E aí Idahosa td blza?
Acho que cê vai curtir isso.
Hey Idahosa how is everything?
I think you'll like this

After a quick Google translate search of the word "curtir," I pressed the play button with low expectations. The thumbnail had some dude in a white suit playing guitar by himself, and at the time I wasn't a big fan of live one person, one-instrument shows (Oh how things have changed...)

By the end of the five minute video, I was completely blown away. But it only took 15 seconds for me to know one thing for certain - Seu Jorge was going to be my Brazilian Spirit Guide.

What Mimicry is Really About

Before I go into the details of my Portuguese man-crush on Seu Jorge, I want to put forward the following argument:

Our speech patterns are tightly linked to Our identities

It makes sense when you think about it - an individual's "identity" is essentially a message that he communicates, and after body language, speech is humanity's biggest medium for communication. Therefore:

Altering our speech patterns means altering our identities.

I grew up with a mom who would lull me to sleep with some intense African- Story telling, so I've come to be a very animated story-teller myself. My friends tease me a lot because my stories always dialogues, and I always switch to different absurd caricature voices without even realizing it.

Here's an example of how I might tell a story to someone:

My story-telling tendencies are an example of how a person might alter his speech patterns to change identity, though in this specific case, I'm not as much altering my identity as I am invoking a specific character for a specific purpose.

But what if I had to conjure up this voice and character all the time? How would that affect my identity?

What Language-Learning is Really About

You can probably see where I'm going with this:

Altering our speech patterns means altering our identities
Language-learning means altering our speech patterns;
Language learning means altering our identities.

Now to be clear - I'm not saying that learning a second language will completely transform the fabric of your being, but it WILL change you.

Anyone who speaks more than one language fluently will agree that you feel slightly "different" when you're speaking different languages. If you're monolingual yourself but have friends who are multi-lingual, watch them closely and see if you notice any differences in their mannerisms when they speak the other languages. I know personally that my body language is different for each language I speak.

The reason for this is because our personal identities are made up of fragments of other people's identities, and as mentioned before, identity is largely transmitted linguistically.

Our parents, older siblings, most admired friends and favorite TV personalities all say and do things that we mimic without even realizing it. You can think of these little elements as Lego pieces. We take little Lego pieces from their speech and personality and then add them to our own sets.

Any single personality trait, expression or twang we have, we got from somebody else. It's not the individual lego pieces that make us unique but rather the way we put them all together (sorry - I suck at analogies)

So the question you must ask yourself as an adult second languge learner is this:

Whose Lego Set are you gonna poach from?

Getting into Character

On a quick side note: I strongly disagree with the claim that children are naturally better language learners than adults. They're not advantaged per se, it's just that adults have certain roadblocks which, if not circumvented, can seriously inhibit their acquisition.

One of these roadblocks is an unwillingness to stray far from one's identity, as you must do to truly mimic and master a foreign language.

But this is just a question of accepting and overcoming psychology Anyone can step out of their comfort zone if they just force themselves to, and the general consensus is that doing so can be a very liberating and rewarding experience.

So my advice to anyone who feels "strange" trying to mimic the sounds and accent of a foreign people it to "loosen up, Papi!" Forget about how silly you feel and really try to "get into character", the way an actor would.

In fact, we'll do a little acting exercise. Below is an interview clip of Seu Jorge. Even if you don't speak Portuguese, watch a few minutes of it and try your best to mimic his gestures, presence and voice inflections as closely as possible. Be sure to really let yourself go and give your best shot.

I'm sure only 1% of you actually took this exercise seriously, but if you did, you probably enjoyed it. It's fun to "act" and really step outside of your normal self, and that's part of the appeal for learning a new language.

To be truly fluent, however, you have to be comfortable "getting into character" in front of other people all the time. That's why it's important that you find your Foreign Language Spirit Guide.

Finding your Foreign Language Spirit Guide

Now back to my Portuguese man-crush on Seu Jorge. Whenever I learn a new language, I try to identify the smoothest, most swagged-out male personalities in that language's culture, then mimic them. If I'm gonna build a new identity from scratch, I might as well pick the sexiest Lego pieces I can find right?

You don't need to know a word of Portuguese to know that Seu Jorge got swag - you can tell in the first 5 seconds of the São Gonça video by the way he walks in with that all white suit. By the time he's through with the song, you're practically OD'ing on the guy's coolness.

After watching that video, I made a habit of watching interviews of his on Youtube and mimicking his gestures and vocal inflections. At the time, I couldn't understand that much of what he was saying, but that wasn't the point. I would learn "meaning" later; the single goal then was to master the sounds and personality encased within those sounds.

The Difference between Mimicry and Emulation

I am very fluent in Portuguese now but, alas, I can't really claim that I sound like Seu Jorge. As much as I try to emulate his swagger, his identity is too far from my own to mimic exactly. He's simply too cool for me.

I mean don't get me wrong - I can pull off "cool" when I need to. But when I'm most myself, I'm an enormous goofball (trust me, this video was nothing!) So having to put my Seu Jorge game on every time I speak Portuguese would be cumbersome.

During my first stay in Rio, I found some cool dudes that I could more closely identify with to interact with and mimic, and my Portuguese speech patterns and identity came to reflect more of what they did. After a while, I became so comfortable with my Brazilian identity and the language itself that I no longer had to "get into character," I was just "being" the Brazilian version of myself.

And as a hopeless mimic, my identity and speech patterns in any language are always subject to change. I am currently living in Sao Paulo, where both the accent and general culture are very different from those of Rio. Since being here, I've already found a certain character or accent that I can relate to, and now my Portuguese is taking on a new identity.

In general, I try to keep an open mind and ear wherever I travel. My identity is constantly re-shaping with each new language experience I have, and I like to think that with each change I'm becoming a better person...or at least one step closer to being as cool as Seu Jorge.

How to Tune Your Foreign Language Vowel Pronunciation

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:36:19 GMT

Without a doubt, most foreign language pronunciation errors are vowel pronunciation errors. There are two reasons for this:

Vowel relationships are the first thing you learn in your first language, so it's more deeply ingrained in your muscle memory and native Flow.
Vowels simply occur more often than consonants in any given language (that's why they cost more on "Wheel of Fortune!)

As any good Mimic Method student knows, an authentic foreign language accent isn't just a "bonus skill" - it's the most important step in achieving fluency.

That being the case, vowel tuning is one of the most important steps you should take when learning a foreign language. Personally, it's the very first thing I do. Let me show you how I do it...

The Great Lie of Your Childhood

If I asked you "what are the English vowels?" would some variation of this song pop into your head?

If so, then I regret to inform you that your childhood was a lie! This stupid song has corrupted and continues to corrupt hundreds of millions of small helpless children every day, and I'm not just talking about the traumatizingly corny melody.

The notion that there are only 5 vowels (or 6 if your version of the song had that little coda at the end - "and sometimes y!") is one of the number one things I attribute the difficulty adult's have in learning foreign languages.

Combine the different accents of English, and there are actually around 20 different vowels! It's just that we represent these vowel sounds using only 5 symbols. Reducing the number of vowel scripts makes the alphabet song a lot easier to remember, but the simplification also has a very devastating effect of distorting our vowel perception.

Here's what I mean. What's the vowel in the word "ate"? Have an answer? Now what's the vowel in the word "eight"? Same answer or different answer?

Say both words out loud and you should realize that they sound the exact same, yet they use different vowels to represent them. So which vowel is it in the end? - a, e, i, or "eigh"?

On the other side, "full" and "butt" both use the letter "u" to represent the vowel, but are they the same sound? What about "call" and "Cali"? Would you say that they both have an "a" vowel, even though they sound different?

Here's the moral of this rant - forget everything you know about vowels. Accept the fact that your first grade English teacher screwed you over and read on so you can learn how to fix the damage.

Vowel Basics

What exactly is a vowel then?

A vowel is the sound you make when you let "voiced" air pass freely through your vocal tract. Block the air with your tongue or lips or anything else, then you're making a consonant sound.

How do we distinguish between vowels?

There are actually three things that distinguish vowels, but in this post we're just going to focus on the most important one - tongue position.

To change the sound of a vowel, you move your tongue up, down, forward or back (side to side doesn't change anything). The best way to visualize this is with a side view of the head, as pictured below.

Laterial view of the head. Focus on the buck teet on the left for a reference point.

Notice the positions of the three circled letters. These are the tongue positions at which these vowels occur. We can use these as reference points to build an awareness of "tongue movement" in our mouths.

Tongue Movement Awareness for Vowel-Tuning

When you "tune" your foreign language vowels, you adjust the sound by moving your tongue either up or down or front and back. As simple as this sounds, it actually takes a good deal of practice to develop an awareness of tongue movement, since it's never anything we do consciously.

To make things simpler, we'll take that side-shot of the head and turn it into a geometric figure called a vowel chart (below).

Vowel chart showing the three vowel extremes

Now notice how the vowels /i/, /u/ and /ɑ/ are all located at the endpoints of the chart. You can think of these as "Cardinal Points" to help you navigate your tongue.

Let's start with developing an awareness of the "front-back" motion. Do as I do in the audio below and alternate between the /i/ and /u/ sounds.

When you go from /i/ to /u/, you are moving your tongue BACK.
When you go from /u/ to /i/, you are moving your tongue FRONT.

For the "up-down" movement. Do as I do in the audio and alternate between the /u/ and /ɑ/ sounds. When you first try, you will probably move your lower jaw up and down to assist the motion, but this movement is redundant. Keep your jaw still so that you can isolate the tongue movement.

When you go from /u/ to /ɑ/, you are moving your tongue DOWN
When you go from /ɑ/ to /u/, you are moving your tongue UP

Vowel Tuning Examples

Once you have developed a basic awareness of tongue movement, you can use vowel charts to guide your foreign language vowel pronunciation. Here's the process:

Identify the "new" vowel in your target language.
Identify the first-language vowel that is closest in proximity to this new vowel.
Start with the first language vowel and then move your tongue in the direction you know you have to go.

Let's take the example of an English speaker learning the /o/ vowel in Spanish. If you compare the vowel charts, you will realize that the tongue is in a slightly lower position for the Spanish /o/.

So we know then that we have to train our perception and muscle memory to hear and articulate this difference. Listen below for a comparison between the English "no"* and Spanish "no".

*To be precise, the English "no" is actually realized as a diphthong /noʊ/

Now what usually happens when we adjust is we "overshoot" to the next vowel in our own Sound system. In this case, an English speaker will over overshoot and hit the /ɔ/ vowel, which is the vowel in the word "dog" (General American pronunciation).

Another example is a Portuguese speaker learning the /æ/ vowel from the English word "cat" (General American Pronunciation). They'd start from the native vowel /ɛ/ (which also exists in English words like "bed" and "head"), then slightly lower the tongue while trying not to overshoot to their next vowel /a/.

Vowel Perception, Vowel Charts and IPA Symbols

In case you were wondering about the symbols I've been using, these are from the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. It is the main standard used in phonetics when writing about vowel sounds.

It evades the problem of people having different symbols representing different sounds across languages. It also gives each vowel sound its own unique symbol, as opposed to English writing which forces 20 vowels sounds to share 5 symbols.

IPA seems complex at first glance, but it's actually really simple if you learn it within a context. In a future post, I'm going to teach you IPA in the context of rap lyrics.

Once you understand IPA, it's easy to look up vowel charts on wikipedia and do the analysis we just did here on your own. Though in my Flow Series Courses, I save the trouble of analysis for you and present it to you all in a very simple way.

Finally, if you went through the "Vowel Tuning Examples" section and could not perceive the subtleties between the different sounds I cited, do not fret. There is a very good reason why you cannot hear these differences, and I will explain it in my next post - "Why Rappers Have Superior Vowel Awareness".

Till then, Keep on Flowin!

New Explanation Video for the Flow Series!

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 16:12:10 GMT

Whenever I meet people and they ask me what I do, I find it hard to explain in a sentence. That's because NO ONE ELSE does what I do (...yet). I can't simply say "I'm a Flow-Coach" and expect no follow-up questions. So I created this short video to explain the process as clearly and succinctly as possible.

I'm trying to create a new model for sound education. Language is all about sound, but everyone focuses on everything but the sound. The system I use enables everyone to bring their focus back to the most important step of the language-acquisition process - mastering the sound.

Fortunately, the technology is out there for us to do some serious virtual education for training people's sound perception and motor skills, whether its for music or language. At the same time, the technology allows educators to be more profitable and have a wider impact. I honestly think this will be the next big thing in Sound education.

Maybe some years down the line when someone asks me what I do, my answer of "I'm a Flow-Coach" will get me a simple nod of understanding and no follow-up questions.

Until then, keep on Flowin'

If you're a music or language educator, be sure to sign up for The New Sound Educators League newsletter to learn more about how to create a small virtual business like mine for yourself.