Prosody - The Missing Link to Master a Foreign Language - Part 1

Have you ever found yourself using a foreign language, which you had been learning for years, and being totally misunderstood by its native speakers? Have you ever travelled to a country whose language you have studied at home and realized that you don't understand what's going on around you, even though you had been pretty confident in your language class back home? Is there one reason behind all that confusion and trouble? I believe so, its name is 'prosody'.

This magic word comprises many aspects of language: intonation, tone, stress and rhythm. Prosody doesn't deal with individual phonemes or sounds, but with larger chunks of language, such as sequences of words, or phrases. In other words, prosody might be characterized as a natural flow of language, its natural melody and rhythm. When do you know your prosody is right? It is probably the moment when native speakers of your L2 will stop complimenting you on how good your foreign language is, cause they will no longer hear it as foreign at at all!

Consequently, poor prosody might lead to a lot confusion. In his extraordinary podcast, Stuart Jay Raj dwells deeper into this concept and gives a great example of how limited you might be when your prosody is out. If you are a Thai language learner living or travelling in Thailand you must have heard the phrase 'arai wa' (อะไรวะ) used on a regular basis by Thais. It's not a particularly polite way of saying 'what?' and can be translated into English as "what the hell?'. Even though it is commonly used by Thais, even by school kids, as a foreigner speaking Thai you don't have the freedom to use this expressions without being scolded by your Thai friends! However, once your prosody is right and you surround this phrase by appropriate language, you will be treated as an equally privileged Thai speaker and other speakers won't even notice or pay much attention to you using this phrase. Listen to the master himself, the polyglot and linguist Stuart Jay Raj, talking about prosody in Thai in this mind-boggling podcast:

It is said that the age of a language speaker determines his/her abilities to acquire a foreign language. However, Dr Angelos Lengeris from University of Kent in his work Prosody and Second Language Teaching: Lessons from L2 Speech Perception and Production Research from 2012 claims that this is not entirely the case. Even though it is true that neural plasticity changes with age, it is not the reason why many adults have issues mastering a foreign language. The real culprit here is the exposure to L1, or native language of foreign language learners. Humans subconsciously copy not only grammatical structures and phonetic patterns from their L1, but also prosody when speaking a foreign language. This is clearly noticeable in tonal languages pronounced by non-tonal language speakers. You might even go further and say that foreigners rape even basic phrases in tonal languages, such as Thai and Mandarin, especially saying everyday expressions, such as 'good morning' or 'see you later' with their Western mannerism.

Obviously, it works the other way round too. Thai English speakers, for that matter, tend to stress the last syllable of English words: instead of saying the word 'number' /ˈnʌmbə/ with the stress on the first syllable, many of them will pronounce it as /nʌm'bər/ with the stress falling on the last syllable, and an off-sounding falling tone. It boils down to borrowings from English in Thai language and the way these words have been pronounced in Thai for decades, for instance: เคาน์เตอร์ (pronounced as khao-têr, meaning 'counter') or คอมพิวเตอร์ (pronounced as khom-phiw-têr, meaning 'computer'). It is definitely difficult to reprogram oneself to stop pronouncing those original English words incorrectly, having heard their Thai versions over and over again.

Now that we established what prosody is, can you actually do anything about it and make your foreign language sound more native-like or natural? The answer is - definitely, yes! Find out more in my next post.

Earworm

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