German EFL learner homophones

[mothwing]

One of the learners in my tutoring centre has the most interesting pronunciation. She was reading a text the other day and it took a while for me to figure out what she was talking about.





Oh. And "sought", forgot about that one. I think she was talking about a sword, about which she had thoughts. But I can't be certain.

Comments

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

I'd say exaggerating to the extreme rather than faking, but yeah, I find it hard to believe that she really can't tell the difference - I get it when it's hard for her to produce the respective sounds, but that doesn't really explain her indifference to vowel lengths - and we do have those in German. Teehaitches are a different matter, obviously.

Also, it might be the context, but she seems to be able to deal with these words just fine when used in a sentence, so something does seem to get processed there, but I'm guessing she's not aware enough of that to reproduce those sounds she processes, because she might hear and understand them, but something's getting lost in the process.

[crocky-wock.livejournal.com]

Ah, interesting. Her use of context knowledge must be better than mine then.
What I was thinking of when using the Swedish example was my perceiving "y" and "u" as two different kinds of our "ü", really, without actually being able to perceive them as distinctive phonemes. That is, I heard that they were different, but they were allophones to me, so it took me a while to find out which quality I was looking for in order to distinguish the two sounds.
It's quite an interesting process, really.
With "s" and "th", I think, German learners are basically taught to associate the more foreign-sounding of the two phonemes with the grapheme "th". And if you practice that over and over again, at some point, you can hear it.
This referring to the act of learning, of course, where instinctive language acquisition fails for some reason.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Context as well as the fact that she can understand people, so she must be able to process the difference on some level - she seems to know that people don't "have swords about the war on Iraq", for instance. And I get your Swedish example, but ð, θ, s and z are hardly allophones in German, are they? o.O Unless you're speech is impaired, and I'm pretty certain that people can tell the difference between those.

That kind of direct instruction you mention isn't foolproof, though, either, because it trains you to expect to hear certain things even if they're not there instead of training you to copy sounds the natives are making.
Fun fact: for the first two years I thought that "laugh" was pronounced with a kind of super-special θ rather than an f. I pronounced it by placing the tip of my tongue on my lower lip and my upper teeth between the two and got a mangled-sounding θʰ. Even though I must have heard my teacher and other learners pronounce a completely different sound countless times, that's how I had understood her instruction as to how to form that weird and alien sound, so I stuck with it. I could tell that there was a difference between how I and she pronounced that sound, and I knew I wasn't getting it right, but it took a while for me to figure out that it was just an "f", plain and simple.
So, while different approaches work for different students, I'm not sure this one'd do her so much good for her production. I think trying to make a meaningful difference is what really drove that point home for her here.

[crocky-wock.livejournal.com]

Yeah, all the better. Whatever works for her, of course.

I know that "th" and "s" _can_ be used interchangeably without changing the meaning of the word in German, can they not? Because we don't have the sound, I'd expect there exist no minimal pairs like "sieben" and "thieben" or "Bus" and "Buth". I am not sure about my terminology here, though.