Sound Study

Your native language likely has different sounds than your target one. While there may be some overlap, many sounds will be new to your ears. Studying your target language's phonology (even briefly) can greatly boost listening, awareness, and accent.

CategoryPriming

Parent Skills:

Study

Child Techniques: Ear training

Most effective during:

Phase 1Phase 3Phase 4

What & Why

Benefits:

Train your ears to hear new sounds
Positive impact on your listening and future accent
Effective in small amounts

Sound Study

There are many different ways to study a new language's sounds. Typically, you'll find the best resources from long-time teachers of those languages who have helped hundreds of students. They frequently make YouTube videos going over it. Some other good places to look are Fluent Forever videos or even checking out the language's Wikipedia article.

How this fits into a healthy learning routine

Doing a bit of sound study at the beginning of your learning goes a long way. But don't worry about pronunciation or getting everything exactly right. When you're working on your listening, it's a much better time to dive into the sounds and make sure you have everything right in your head. And remember, a little sound study goes a long way!

Common issues and questions

Our brains literally learn to ignore sounds that aren't important for our native language. This means that there may be sounds you cannot hear the difference between. Trust the resources over your own ears and with time, you'll learn to distinguish them.

Age plays a role in learning new sounds. It doesn't mean you're doomed to never being able to hear the sounds of your target language if you're over 40, but it does mean you'll need to pay special attention and do more practice than a teenager (damn kids).

Walkthrough

Doing 10–20 minutes of learning the sounds for a few days can really help your listening (and speaking) down the line!

Setup

The resource that you use isn't a critical decision point, you just need the basics, then lots of practice, which will come during your immersion.

Tips and Tricks

A few tips for sound study:

If you can't hear the difference between two sounds that are different, that's normal! Try your best to hear it, but it's going to take time to effectively hear the difference

Trainers that let you compare sounds side by side can be really useful

The way the language writes the sounds might be a little arbitrary! So don't trust the writing system

You might come across the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is a way to write down sounds exactly. You don't need to memorize it for it to be useful. But when you see a different symbol used for something, that means it's a different sound!

In the beginning, don't worry about being able to pronounce the sounds (unless you're in the Speaking stage). As long as you can hear it, you'll eventually be able to say it

Tools

Sound Study

CategoryPriming

Parent Skills:

Study

Child Techniques: Ear training