Hello everyone, welcome back to my class, Today we are going to talk about pronunciation and intonation. it is about pronunciation and intonation. I have to admit, in the beginning, I’m not an expert in linguistics, I’m not a linguist. However，my MBA education tells me that we need to maximize the time and effort you spend on everything, So I’m not going to give you a complete professional training in how you may improve your pronunciation and intonation. But I’m going to share with you, what I have learned, and I believe those are very useful skills, so that you can improve your pronunciation and intonation dramatically, within a short period of time. OK? So where do we start? A quiz. Do you recognize him? Bill Clinton, everybody knows. And how about this guy? Normally you don’t really recognize him. Because Japan swift their prime minister very often, so he was a former prime minister of Japan, Well, we just use a pseudo name, Jack. Jack learned English very hard, as most Japanese and certainly most Chinese students. And one day, he was expected to receive Bill Clinton for a national visit, so Jack decided to rehearse his English a little bit, When you greet people, you will say how are you, I fine, me too, whatever. And so what happened that day? He reached his hand to Clinton, and said who are you? You know, who and how, well, he missed and messed up with that part So Clinton answered wisely, well, certainly, he was thinking to himself, “This guy must be very humorous. He definitely know who I am”, so he came up with a very humorous answer, and he said, “I’m the husband of Hillary.” And then Jack, according to his jewish pattern, he said “Me too.” This is what we called an international joke, we do not have any proven short, but it tells something. The key point is that pronunciation is super important. And especially for some special words. If you mispronounce a word, it may have totally another meaning. Yes? but, well, that’s also for this reason. There’re many Chinese students when they are closely in an international team If they are working with Japanese and Koreans, most Chinese will feel they are very comfortable when they are talking in English, because their English would not be the worst. But for me, I have a new perspective to look at this issue again. I mean, for Japanese, English is much harder than English is to Chinese. This is what I want to tell you. The Japanese guys, they only have these fifty very simple phonetics, they have 5 vowels here, and then you have ten consonants, five vowels and ten consonants. and then you have fifty. And you know it pronounces very simple. But, you know, studying from this point, they are learning English with a lot of consonants, vowels that they don’t even have, and not like most Chinese students. So in this sense, I would say that Japanese, when they are learning English, they must try harder or they must have a more pragmatic way. OK？ they will work very hard, or adopt some more practical methods. This morning I was reading this piece of news, and it shocked me a lot. I saw a piece of astounding news this morning. This piece of news, in other words, in fact, can be regarded as a reflection of the way we learned English. You know some linguistics they did a kind of research, and they say, well, in Japan, at the freshman year, the most students, especially in those top universities, they will take a course which was called English for Academic Purposes(EAP) In their freshman year, many students of top universities, will take a course, which is called English for Academic Purposes. And basically the content will be how you write a short article, and you do a presentation in English and how you can debate academically. Those kind of things. And that was never talked in Chinese classes. This is not the rare case, and they also found that in Europe, like in France, in Germany, and in Italy, like 83% of universities They have this kind of course, which we just talked about EAP or ESP (English for Specific Purposes), which targeted to non-English majors to train them with those practical English skills, so they may speak academically and internationally. So I believe here we got something to learn. We China need to pick up with that. And then I would like to remind you guys that we really got a good basis in terms of pronunciation, I mean, here are the Chinese Pinyin over here, a lot of them, we have a lot of vowels, especially those vowels, but for a foreigner, if you simply think that if you learn all of these, you will have no difficulty in pronouncing Chinese, then he or she would be wrong. Because in Chinese Pinyin, we got a very difficult part we so called four tones, four tones. That is, in our language, due to the existence of four tones, you will discoever that, this problem will no longer be such a simple Pinyin table. For Chinese, the change of a tone means a new phonetic. So it would be like this way. Wow, it is quite complicated, you know, this reminds me of one of my best respected foreign teacher Lyn Condron, from Texas, the United States. She was once my foreign teacher, and I clearly remember that days when she was learning Chinese One day she came to class, and she was practicing her Chinese, French Chinese. I clearly remembered, she said that I'm really happy today, and then we were wondering why. I have made great progress in Chinese today. And then we were listening. four tones yesterday I learnt "mamamama" from my teacher mamamama We all have gone through that stage, and then she said ”jintian zaoshang wo tingdao ling, ta tingqilai xiang bibibibi”. We said " You've upgraded it”, It had been upgraded. so we say Four tones are very difficult for foreigners to pick up. And I believed that for most Chinese English learners, especially those who have very simple, simple phonetics, or they don’t even get four tones, I believe when they first see this picture, this would be something they would do.
