Working with two of my newcomers today, I was reminded of how hard it is for many of my students to hear English sounds. This is something many people are unaware of, and I sometimes forget. In the first 9 months of your life, your brain is capable of hearing every spoken sound. Have you ever seen a change/coin sorter?
Sounds enter the ears, just as change enters the sorter.
The brain sorts and classifies the sounds, just as the sorter sorts and classifies the coins.
Think of your brain as that sorter, but with a lot more slots. One slot for each sound in every single language. Keep in mind there are nearly 7,000 languages in the world, so this is a really big sorter. Now, each of those languages doesn't have their own set of sounds. Many sounds are shared among languages. However, there are still a lot of sounds. The brain hears every sound and sorts it. At around 9 months, the brain takes inventory of the sounds. The sounds heard most often are permanently identified by the brain as language. The other sounds? The empty slots? Those are deleted. The brain will never hear those sounds again. If the ears hear one of those sounds later in life, the brain will do it's best to match it to one of the sounds it has identified as language, but it won't truly hear it unless it is one of that brain's language sounds. Isn't that fascinating?
Now, this doesn't pose too much of a problem when learning a language close to our own. English is an Indo-European language. It is specifically a Germanic language. Therefore, English speakers can hear the vast majority of sounds spoken in other Germanic languages, and many spoken in other Indo-European languages such as the Romance languages. That doesn't mean what you think it means. Romance, in this case, means the language is derived from Latin, which was spoken in Rome. Rome=Romance. So, my students who first learned Spanish or Portuguese (Romance languages) can hear most English sounds because both are Indo-European. There are still some sounds they won't hear because Romance languages are a different branch than Germanic, but for the most part it's a pretty good match. In turn, that means I can attempt to say some words in Spanish and Portuguese and get fairly close to the correct pronunciation. There are some sounds I mess up every time, which leaves my students and I in a fit of giggles. It's good for them to see me struggle with language. Learning a language is difficult and stressful, so being able to laugh about it is important.
We experience greater challenges when one of my students first learned a language other than one from the Indo-European family. For example, Thai or Chinese are of the Sino-Tibetan family. This family is not connected to the English family, so many sounds are very different. Also, the alphabets are different, and Thai and Chinese are tonal languages, so the meaning of the word depends upon the tone in which it is spoken. Can you imagine leaning a language so different? I get a tiny taste of the experience when I try to learn some Thai or Chinese words. My students will tell me a word, and I repeat what I think I hear. I usually get a funny look before my teacher repeats the word, more slowly and loudly, of course. I hear the same thing, so I say the same word. I get another funny look, followed by a "no, you said (whatever I said). It's (what I'm supposed to say)." No matter how many times my teacher repeats the sound, I cannot truly hear it. I hear a substitution my brain is trying to fit in that coin sorter. Some of my students lose patience with me at this point, but we all usually laugh and keep working. I use the experience to make myself a better teacher. I try not to lose patience or interest, even if it seems futile. Today I drew a diagram of a mouth to show a student the difference between sh and ch tongue location. I'm excited to announce that the student was able to make the ch sound, even though it does not exist in the native language. That's pretty exciting. This student may not really hear the sound, but can make it. If I hadn't experienced the struggle myself, I may have just moved on, but I thought about what would help me, and was able to help my student. I love my job.
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