跟读练习: Why is English so confusing? - Arika Okrent - 通过YouTube学习英语口语
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It was June 2010.
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It was June 2010.
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Inside the Scripps National Spelling Bee, contestants between 8- and 15-years-old wrestled words like brachydactylous and leguleian.
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Outside, a crowd protested the complexity of English spelling conventions.
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Indeed, spelling reformers have been around for centuries, advocating for overarching changes to make English spelling more intuitive.
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The English language is chock-full of irregularities.
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One commonly used example of this: take the “g-h” sound from “enough,” the “o” sound from “women,” and the “t-i” sound from “action,” and you could argue that “g-h-o-t-i” spells “fish.” So, how did English get like this?
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English arose from old Germanic tribes that invaded the British Isles more than 1,500 years ago.
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Their languages coalesced and evolved into Old English.
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When Roman missionaries arrived around 600 CE, they devised ways to write it down using the Latin alphabet, supplementing it with some Germanic runes for sounds they didn’t have letters for.
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Then came the Norman invasion of 1066 when French speakers conquered England.
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French became the language of authority and high society.
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But English remained the dominant spoken language.
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Over time, those descended from French speakers also became English speakers, but some French words snuck into the language.
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Some English speakers were also familiar with Latin through the church and formal education.
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By the mid-1400s, people were writing in English again— but it was unstandardized.
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They used a mix of influences to determine word choice and spelling, including the French they knew, the Latin they studied, and the English they spoke.
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So, things were already pretty messy.
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Then, in 1476, the printing press arrived in England.
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Some of the people working the presses may have mainly spoken Flemish— not English.
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And they were given manuscripts that varied widely in their spelling.
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Without standardization, different writers went with various spellings based in part on what they happened to encounter while reading.
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Many words had a multitude of spellings.
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The word “dough,” for instance, used to be spelled in all these ways and was originally pronounced “dach.” The guttural Germanic sound it ended with was one the Latin alphabet didn’t cover.
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It eventually came to be represented with “g-h.” But, for some “g-h” words, English speakers eventually dropped the guttural sound altogether; for others, they ended up pronouncing it as “f” instead, as exemplified in “dough” versus “tough.” Printing presses memorialized the spelling even though the pronunciation eventually changed.
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And this wasn’t just the case with “g-h.” Some letters in other words also fell silent: words like knife, gnat, and wrong all contain the vestiges of past pronunciations.
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But while the printing press was solidifying spellings, the English language was also undergoing what scholars call the Great Vowel Shift.
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Between the 14th and 18th centuries, the way English speakers pronounced many vowels changed significantly.
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For instance, “bawt” became “boat.” This displaced the word for “boot,” which had up until then been pronounced “boat,” and pushed it into the high “u” vowel position it maintains today.
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Words that already had this high “u” often became diphthongs, with two vowels in a single syllable.
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So, “hus” became “house.” As with so many linguistic matters, there's no clear reason why this happened.
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But it did.
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And how the vowel shift affected a word depended on various things, including the other sounds in the word.
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The word “tough” was once “tōh,” among other variations.
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“Through” was once “thruch” and “dough” “dah.” These words all started with different vowel sounds that were then affected differently by the vowel shift.
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The “o-u” spelling they all adopted was a haphazardly applied French influence.
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So, eventually they wound up with still distinct vowel sounds, but similar spellings that don’t really make much sense.
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All this means English can be a difficult language for non-native speakers to learn.
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And it reveals the many ways history, in all its messiness, acted upon English, making it especially tough.
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关于本课
在这一课中，您将深入了解英语语言的复杂性，尤其是拼写和发音的独特性。通过分析历史背景和拼写演变，学习者将能够更好地理解英语中不规则拼写的原因，并在此基础上进行英语口语练习。该视频不仅介绍了英语的演变过程，还强调了英语中发音和拼写的不一致性，这对学习者来说是提升英语口语能力的绝佳机会。
关键词汇与短语
- 拼写（spelling）
- 复杂性（complexity）
- 演变（evolution）
- 方言（dialect）
- 浑浊的发音（guttural sounds）
- 元音变化（vowel shift）
- 法语借词（French loanwords）
- 书写标准化（standardization）
练习技巧
为了提高您的英语口语练习水平，建议您使用shadowspeaks的方式进行跟读。观看视频时，请注意讲者的语速和语气，以便更好地模仿。由于这个视频的语速适中，非常适合进行英语影子跟读练习。您可以暂停视频，重复讲者的一句话，然后继续播放，这样有助于提高您的发音和流利度。
使用看YouTube学英语的方法时，尝试在重复的过程中记录您的声音，回放对比讲者的发音。这样，您不仅能增强听力理解，还能纠正自己的发音错误。每次练习时，专注一种特定的发音或拼写规则，例如“g-h”发音时，请先练习“tough”和“dough”的区分，帮助您更好地掌握这些不规则的发音。
总之，通过这样的练习，您的英语口语能力将逐渐得以提升，您将会发现学习英语的乐趣与成就感。
什么是跟读法？
跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。