Have you ever heard your own voice in a recording and thought “Oh my God…that’s ME?!”
Don’t worry, this is a common reaction. Due to the fact that your ears and speech organ are attached to the same physical body, your perception of your own voice will always be distorted. Therefore, whatever you think you sound like, isn’t really what you sound like.
Personally, I used to think I had a sexy voice, that is until I heard a recording of it one day a few years ago. Turned out that all that time I thought I sounded like Don Juan, I actually sounded like Don Doofus. I still can’t forget out how I was ever able to get a girlfriend.
Fortunately, self-recording on a regular basis has helped me improve my speaking habits a lot. Hearing my voice from an external source (the way everyone else hears it) has drawn my attention to the more doofish elements of my voice, and with this awareness, I have been able to consciously self-correct.
What’s the moral of this story? Self-recording develops Self-Awareness, which in turn lends itself to Self-Correction.
Same principles apply to second-language acquisition. Though committing gramamar, diction and pronunciation errors in a second language is an inevitable and necessary part of the learning curve, the ultimate goal is to commit as few errors as possible. Because these errors can be so numerous and complex, self-recording is the best approach for reviewing, analyzing and ultimately eliminating these errors from your speech.
In this post, I will describe 3 clever self-recording strategies to develop your personal error-awareness and accelerate your language growth.
Self-Recording Tip #1: Flow-verlapping
In The Mimic Method Language-Learning Philosophy, I identify a lack of physical comfort with foreign sounds the main reason why most people struggle to learn foreign languages. The term I use to describe this physical system of sound is “Flow,” so the main reason people struggle so much at foreign languages is because they never learn the Flow.
In my Flow Series Courses, I personally instruct students in the “Flow” of his or her target language by teaching them to sing song lyrics with a perfect accent. The idea is that each time you sing these songs for fun while you go about your daily activities, you actively train the acoustic perception and speech organ motor coordination to process the target language’s sounds and get into the Flow with little exertion.
That being said, Flow-verlapping is a technique anyone can use to self-teach flow. It involves mimicking native speech of your target language and listening to both your recording and the native recording at the same time to identify discrepancies. First you memorize the native speech, then you record yourself speaking with it in sync. Finally, you play back both audio files at the same time.
Listen to this example of me Flow-verlapping over a random audio file of native Mandarin speech. First I play the native speech, then I play my mimicry attempt, then I play both at the same time in “unison”.
Notice how the sound becomes fuller when the tracks are flow-verlapped in unison. When two sounds of the same pitch and color are played at the same time in unison, they resonate with one another and result in a louder and fuller sound. So when you hear this fullness, you know that your sounds are matching up with those of the native speaker (i.e. your pronunciation is correct.)
In stark contrast, two different sounds played at the same time will lose this fullness and even clash. In the track below, I take the same Mandarin phrase but then purposely mess up a phoneme on one syllable and a tone on another.
Even if you have no Chinese background, you can still hear which syllables are “off” due to the sudden loss in fullness and appearance of clash. In Flow-verlapping, you rely on this dynamic between fullness and clash to give yourself feedback on your pronunciation.
Typically, I practice Flow-verlapping with song lyrics, as it is much easier to synchronize my recording to a steady beat. Also, as a huge music-lover, I am much more likely to put in the focus and repetitions required to perfectly mimic with song lyrics than I would with random utterances of speech. Here’s some examples of me Flow-verlapping rap lyrics in the five languages I speak – English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Mandarin – plus the language I am planning to learn next – Japanese.
Flow-verlapping is a very powerful technique for closing the sound gap between you and the native speakers with whom you wish to communicate. Keep working to minimize your “clash” and maximize your “unison”, and I promise you that your perception and pronunciation abilities will improve dramatically.
If you want to try it out yourself, I describe the technical aspects in detail in this post, “Screw Idahosa – I can Learn Flow and Pronunciation on MY OWN with ‘Flow-verlapping;”
Self-Recording Tip #2: Cloud-Tutoring
Self-recording isn’t just for improving your pronunciation, it’s extremely useful in improving your grammar and diction as well. Have you ever asked a native speaker to correct you when you speak, and then immediately regretted the decision when he started interrupting you every 3 seconds?
Trying to express yourself through constant interruption is hard enough in your native language, so why invite interruptions into our second language learning?
Most of the time when people correct us in a second language, we just nod our heads like “Yeah yeah. Cool. Got it” and then immediately forget the correction as we continue with what we were trying to say. This is why we find ourselves making the same errors all the time – we don’t really dedicate the mental energy needed to remember the error when people correct us in real time. For these reasons, real-time error correction is simply ineffective.
A better way to fix errors is to review them after the conversation, but this isn’t really feasible in real life. The person correcting you would have to have a super-human memory to keep a mental log of each error you made, or he would have to do go through all the hassle of writing everything down – something no one is going to be willing to do on a consistent basis for free.
Moreover, for the correction to stick, you yourself would have to recall the context in which you made the error. This can be extremely difficult, especially if its a long or engaging conversation.
Fortunately, self-recording solves both of these problems. Using a service called Soundcloud, you can upload recordings of yourself for others to point out your errors using “timed-comments.”
A timed comment is a text comment that you can assign to a specific moment in time on a track. In the track below, I use Soundcloud to correct the English errors of a French friend telling me a story on the phone. This is what it looks like (I encourage you to click here to check out this track on soundcloud.com, as the visual interface is much better than the widget below).
With this type of interface, you can easily review your mistakes while you listen to them. As simple a concept this is, it has proven to be quite an effective tactic for error reduction. The act of hearing your own voice committing the error (as opposed to someone just telling you that you did) works as an extremely powerful recall device.
Next time you make the mistake, your previous error echoes in your inner-ear, and you remember that something is wrong. The next time you are in the same context and you are about to repeat the mistake, the recollection occurs faster. Eventually, you are able to preventatively recollect the error and replace the bad habit with the good one.
I call this process of giving feedback through timed-comments on recordings “Cloud-Tutoring.” In my Flow Series Courses for Musical Accent Training, I use cloud-tutoring to give students precise feedback on their pronunciation. Student’s learn songs and then submit recordings to “The Cloud” for review. I then point out each mispronounced syllable and provide instructions on how to fix it. Here’s an example of a student submission from my Flow of Spanish course.
As you can see, you can use Cloud-Tutoring to give valuable feedback on many different aspects of language-learning. If you’re an educator interested in learning how you can use Cloud-Tutoring to help your students, I recommend checking out the blog and forum at www.CloudTutorLounge.com. If you’re interested in making some location-independent income and Building Your Own Virtual Language Business on The Cloud, check out my Udemy course on the subject.
First 20 readers to use the coupon code “Luca” will get 30% off!
Self-Recording Tip # 3: Social Journaling
Goal-setting and social accountability go a long way. I recommend setting up a tumblr blog stating your language mission, then publishing your self-recordings on that blog regularly. Get your friends to subscribe to your feed, or have your post automatically tweet and post to facebook for your friends to follow your progress and support you.
All you do is press the orange button and start speaking. The track is then saved to your soundcloud account and can be automatically posted to your facebook, twitter and tumblr, if you choose to enable those auto-share options.To streamline things, download the Soundcloud recorder widget for your smartphone and tablet (Available for iOS and Android) so you can submit recordings anytime your bored. Here’s what the record looks like:
To give you even more motivation, I recently created a series of “Flow Forums” for people to freely share their recordings and give positive feedback to others on their language abilities. These forums are setup around language pairs so that native speakers will be the ones giving you feedback. So for example, the Spanish<–>English forum is for native English speakers to share their Spanish learning sounds and give feedback to Native Spanish Speakers learning English. To try it out, go to this page and click the link most relevant to you below.
Language-Learning Nostalgia
Make a point to review your past self-recordings on a regular basis so you can see your progress. It’s really motivating to hear your own voice struggling with concepts that are no longer difficult to you.
Recently I was in a cafe in New York City with a friend, and as it happened to be, there were conversations around us going on in all of the languages I speak. I hadn’t noticed until my friend asked – “Yo so like, you can understand all these people?”
Yes…I guess I can. I hadn’t noticed it because understanding a language you’re fluent in is just something you do without thinking about it. At that moment, I realized that my multi-lingualism has become such an ingrained part of me, I really have no memory of what it’s like to NOT to be able to understand these languages the way my friend across the table was not able to.
How insightful it would be if I could listen to recordings of my older self struggling with these languages that all come so naturally to me now, but alas, I didn’t have the foresight at the time.
Don’t forget to share this post with your friends and Spread the Gospel of Flow!
Related links:
- Get started with self-recording today by learning more about Flow-verlapping
- Try out Cloud-Tutoring for free
- Submit sounds to The Flow Forum.
- Idahosa Ness’s website –> The mimic method
12 comments
Andreas Moser says:
Dec 9, 2012
I don’t have that problem at all. I find my own voice really sexy.
Vanya says:
Dec 11, 2012
An incredible post! The author does have a point. Being sound-oriented and attempting to resonate fully and deeply with one’s target language seems to be the key to getting over the issue of having a lousy pronunciation. I just gave this ‘Flow-overlapping’ method a pretty good shot practicing my French. What dawned on me was that after such a session was over I’d always end up daydreaming and thinking in French! It’s definitely unconscious and I have no idea how I could miss such an evident and natural language learning activity.
Thank you Luca for inviting Idahosa to write this great blogpost!=)
Juan Carlso says:
Dec 11, 2012
I know I’m going to sound really old, but I remember doing this with a tape recorder! It really is the best method (recording your voice and self-correcting, using songs). But back then it was tedious. I listened to Neil Diamond songs (clear, distinct pronunciation and average speed), record myself, replay, re-record, until I felt that I had nailed the pronunciation.
Today I speak and pronounce English at a native level (my mother tongue is Spanish). I am working on my french as I live in Paris now (but finding it a little more challenging). English must be a more difficult language to pronounce for someone with a romance language background, but I was 12 years old then! I’m 43 now.
John Kim says:
Dec 27, 2012
The gospel seems practical, and I’ll start applying it tomorrow. I personally think that the Flow-verlapping method and the translation method go quite well together.
lingholic says:
Dec 30, 2012
Excellent post Idahosa. And your website looks awesome. Very professional.
I was wondering, though, about your opinion on the reason why some people speak with a strong foreign accent, while others manage to learn a foreign language and very closely reproduce a “native” accent, so to speak.
I read an interesting idea on this subject, in “Success with Foreign Languages,” by Earl Stevick. In the book, Stevick says that “A ‘foreign accent’ consists of many small differences of pronunciation. Some of these differences are of the first kind – the kind that serve to distinguish words of different meanings. Most of them, however, are of the second kind – the kind that indicate identification with one or another group. In this view, people’s ability or inability to acquire a ‘good accent’ may actually say something about their willingness or unwillingness to sound like someone outside their home group.”
Do you agree that people’s ability or inability to acquire a ‘good accent’ may actually say something about their willingness or unwillingness to sound like someone outside their home group? Do you think there is a psychological factor behind having a “good” or “poor” accent?
Once again, really enjoyed your post. The mimic method and cloud-tutoring sound fantastic for working on pronunciation. I’ll definitely have to record myself more often and follow some of the tips you’ve given.
Idahosa says:
Dec 30, 2012
Yes precisely. There are two things that determine a person’s ability to mimic and speak with a good accent: (1) Willingness and (2) Ability.
The way we sound is a very sensitive subject for most people. After the way we “look” it’s the number one thing people use to judge, make fun of or even discriminate others. So many people have to break through psychological barriers of “sounding different’. This is especially true when the second language has phonemes or intonation patterns that are considered “humorous” in our native language.
To give an example, I find that native english speakers learning Portuguese have a hard time of getting over the psychological barrier of nasal vowels. Why? Because in the English context we associate a lot of these nasal sounds with deaf or mentally handicapped people, so since the English speaker would feel “silly” trying to mimic them, he chooses instead to say it with an English accent. I dare you to ask a Brazilian to repeat the acronym “MAM” (museo de arte moderna) to you several times and try your hardest not to laugh.
A better example is a tonal languages like Vietnamese. Honestly, Vietnamese sounds comically strange to me, but if I ever decided to learn it you better believe I’d try my best to sound exactly like a Vietnamese person. And once I got into the flow of the language, I know i’d learn to appreciate it the same way I learned to appreciate Mandarin, which I always considered as “sounding strange” prior to speaking it.
Actually this question brings up more complex issues of “identity,” which I discuss in a bit more detail in this post – http://www.mimicmethod.com/2/post/2012/11/my-portuguese-man-crush-on-seu-jorge-an-essay-on-finding-your-foreign-language-spirit-guide-and-identity.html
That being said, people vary significantly in their ABILITY to perceive the nuances of speech. Due to the musical and linguistic experiences of my life, I have a very sharp ear and ability to reproduce sounds that I hear, as does Luca and anyone else with a facility to learn languages. But many people are WILLING to sound different but lack the ABILITY to mimic.
My realization of this fact is what inspired me to develop “Flow-Training” and “Cloud-Tutoring”. A lot of people start learning a new language and struggle with the sounds initially, and since they see people like me and Luca getting it so easily, they assume they just don’t have the “knack” and give up on pronunciation from the start.
But perception and pronunciation can be trained just like any other skill, you just have to take it seriously and pay close attention, just ask anyone who’se gone through my Flow Series courses. First step, however, is to record yourself so you know exactly what you need to work on.
Thanks for the question!
Hugh Grigg says:
Jan 8, 2013
Very insightful! It’s good to see something new and original in the language learning blogosphere as well. I think at the very least you’ve really got to copy and compare yourself to native speech if you want to approach a natural sound in your L2. What you recommend is a step further than that basic minimum, so I’m sure it’s very effective. Will try it today.
Sam @ Sprachcaffe Languages Plus says:
Feb 27, 2013
This is a fantastic post! Thanks so much! I am definitely going to use and recommend these resources. Very inspiring, thank you!
Sergi says:
Apr 9, 2013
Amazing post!
Zachary says:
Apr 30, 2013
This is pretty similar to the shadowing technique. I actually used to do something like this back when I was studying Japanese. I would record and compare my accent with the native, but I didn’t overlap the audio.
As for singing songs. That isn’t going to happen because I can’t sing. hahah ;)
Sound Rehab: A 5-Point Program for Kicking Your Visual-Addiction - Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips — Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips says:
May 28, 2013
[...] I write in this guest post on Luca Lamparello’s The Polyglot Dream, most people have a distorted perception of what they [...]
Zara Chiron says:
Jun 10, 2013
OMG! I absolutely love this article! I have an accent in Spanish that could make a bird fall down and die from a tree branch. Right now, I am still working on grammar and the general groundwork but soon I will start focusing more on improving my diction. These tips will be so useful to me! I definitely will record myself and compare the way I sound to the intonation of a native speaker…I can’t wait to do this! I think I love the sound cloud idea too! I am so looking forward to trying all this out! Wish me luck!