Shadowing Practice: Phonetics and Phonology: Introduction - Learn English Speaking with Video

Most Intro to Linguistics classes start with phonetics and phonology.

There are good reasons for that, it has everything we like.

Awkwardly trying to recreate sounds, silly recordings and vast charts of scary looking lettery things.

But probably the most important reason is that when we think about language, most of us probably first think about speaking.

That's just what we do naturally.

We produce a variety of sounds using our lips, tongue, mouth and some bits in our throat.

If you want to make a P sound for example, you close your lips and then release the air all at once.

If you want to make an M sound, you also close your lips and then you kind of hum, and so on.

This is what phonetics and phonology deal with.

Human speech sounds.

All the plops and hisses and trills we make to show other people what's going on in our heads.

It would be hard to get by without those.

Phonetics and phonology look at what sounds we make, how we make them and, at least phonology, looks at if there's a system behind that

or if we're just stringing random sounds together and in the end something comes out that makes a bit of sense.

But why do we need two disciplines to deal with that?

Well, because they approach the stuff really quite a bit differently.

Phonetics is very very precise.

It really matters if your A is a bit lower or higher, or if you push out lots of air with your P's and T's and D's or not,

and if you pronounce the T's in butter as T,

butter, D, butter, or just kind of tap your tongue against your gum ridge, butter.

Phonetics is interested in how we make sounds, how we hear those sounds, how we can describe them to deal with them empirically in a scholarly setting,

and how we can make those sounds visible in a way that's actually practical to write down in print.

on the other hand, doesn't sweat those little details very much.

It's not like a Londoner wouldn't understand butter, and vice versa.

Phonology says it's the same idea of a sound, they just say it a bit differently.

This may sound a bit silly, but think of the L sound for example.

English has two of those.

In words like law or light, where it's at the start, it sounds a bit different than in words like fall or ball.

Those sound much, much darker.

But you can't really mix them up because in English, light elves only come in the beginning of a syllable and dark ones at the end.

So phonologists say that because they can't come in the same spots, the difference doesn't matter.

They don't ever change the meaning of a word.

That is what phonology is interested in – systems.

Clearly the two L sounds don't make much of a difference.

Pan and can, though.

Those P and K sounds change whether you're frying something or drinking it.

A result is that in phonetics, what language you're investigating doesn't matter very much.

A B in Libyan Arabic is the same as a B in English.

But when you look at the systems, it's a different story.

In English, there's a p sound, and bin and pin are not quite the same thing really.

Arabic speakers mostly don't make a difference between those sounds, so their difference doesn't matter to a phonologist.

It's a bit like the elves in English.

You can see that it may be quite important to know whether someone is giving you a phonetic transcription of a word,

which is very precise, or a phonological one which only tells you what you need to know to figure out the rest.

That's why we use square brackets for phonetic transcriptions and slashers for phonological ones.

We also have different names for the sounds, depending on whether we are thinking about them phonetically or phonologically.

In phonetics we call them phones.

No, not that kind of phone.

In phonology we call them phonemes.

The difference between those is a story for another time though.

Let's have a quick recap of what we went over today.

Phonetics and phonology, those are both linguistic disciplines that are all about speech sounds.

Phonetics describes the sounds we actually make as precisely as possible, while phonology only looks at what really makes a difference in any one given language

and it tries to find the implications of that.

As a quick side note, there's also phonetics and phonology for sign languages, even though sign languages obviously don't have sounds in them.

For this series though we'll be dealing with oral languages only, but we may dive deeper into sign language linguistics at a later point.

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Vocabulario y notas de pronunciación para esta lección

Esta lección de conversación de nivel C1 se basa en el vídeo “Phonetics and Phonology: Introduction”. Las palabras que más se repiten: sound, phonetic, phonology, language, difference. Este vídeo tiene 56 frases y 802 palabras para practicar shadowing. La parte hablada dura 4:41. El hablante habla a un ritmo natural de unas 171 palabras por minuto, cercano a una conversación cotidiana. Solo el 80 % de las palabras está entre las 3.000 más comunes del inglés, por lo que el vocabulario es exigente.

Vocabulario clave de este vídeo

Las 15 palabras más avanzadas del vídeo, con su pronunciación y significado:

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
phonetics sustantivo	/fəˈnɛt.ɪks/	fonética
phonology sustantivo	/fəˈnɑləd͡ʒi/	fonología
linguistics sustantivo	/lɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks/	lingüística, glotología
phonetic adjetivo	/fəˈnɛt.ɪk/	fonético
phonological adjetivo	/ˌfɑnəˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/	fonológico
phonologist sustantivo	/fəˈnɑləd͡ʒɪst/	fonólogo
elf sustantivo	/ɛlf/	elfo, duende
awkwardly adverbio		torpemente
empirically adverbio		empíricamente
phoneme sustantivo	/ˈfoʊ.nim/	fonema
phonetically adverbio	/fəˈnɛtɪkli/	fonéticamente
phonologically adverbio		fonológicamente
slasher sustantivo		slasher
syllable sustantivo	/ˈsɪl.ə.bəl/	sílaba
recreate verbo	/ˈɹɛk.ɹi.eɪt/	recrearse

Phrasal verbs que vas a escuchar

Palabra	Pronunciación	Significado
come out verbo	/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/	revelarse, salir a la luz
figure out verbo		averiguar, captar
go over verbo		sentar, pasar

Pronunciación a tener en cuenta

El hablante usa 15 contracciones y formas reducidas, como doesn't, don't, can't. Dilas en su forma corta, tal como las oyes.

Los sonidos de “sh” y “zh”: transcription /tɹænˈskɹɪpʃən/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/
Palabras largas — cuida el acento: phonology /fəˈnɑləd͡ʒi/, phonological /ˌfɑnəˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/, phonologist /fəˈnɑləd͡ʒɪst/, phonetically /fəˈnɛtɪkli/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/

Sonidos difíciles para hispanohablantes:

/dʒ/ — no es la “y” ni la “ch”: phonology /fəˈnɑləd͡ʒi/, phonological /ˌfɑnəˈlɑd͡ʒɪkəl/, phonologist /fəˈnɑləd͡ʒɪst/

Cómo practicar con este vídeo

Escucha el vídeo entero una vez sin hablar y anota las palabras que no conoces.
Empieza a velocidad 0,75×, haz shadowing frase por frase y vuelve a la velocidad normal cuando te resulte fácil.
Grábate y compara con el original, prestando atención a palabras como phonetics, phonology, linguistics.

¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?

Shadowing es una técnica de aprendizaje de idiomas respaldada por la ciencia, desarrollada originalmente para la formación de intérpretes profesionales y popularizada por el políglota Dr. Alexander Arguelles. El método es simple pero poderoso: escuchas audio en inglés nativo y lo repites en voz alta de inmediato, como una sombra que sigue al hablante con solo 1-2 segundos de retraso. A diferencia de la escucha pasiva o los ejercicios de gramática, el shadowing obliga a tu cerebro y músculos de la boca a procesar y reproducir simultáneamente patrones de habla reales. Las investigaciones muestran que mejora significativamente la precisión de la pronunciación, la entonación, el ritmo, el habla conectada, la comprensión auditiva y la fluidez al hablar, convirtiéndola en una de las metodologías más efectivas para la preparación del IELTS Speaking y la comunicación en inglés en el mundo real.

Técnica de shadowing: lee la guía completa paso a paso →

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