The Principles of Language-Study

by Harold E. Palmer

The exercises we use in order to sharpen our ear-perceptions and to make them serve us may be termed ‘ear-training exercises.’ This term may not satisfy those who delight in hair-splitting definitions; they may say, “We cannot train our ears, but we can train our capacities for using them”; but the term is sufficiently accurate to designate what we mean it to designate.

How are ear-training exercises performed? There are several varieties. The simplest of all is this: the teacher articulates various sounds, either singly or in combination with others; we listen to these sounds and make unconscious efforts to reproduce them by saying them to ourselves. This is the most passive and most natural form of ear-training; we did it years ago when lying in our cradles listening to the sounds made by the people around us. If the teacher systematizes his work, so much the easier will it be for us who are training our ears.

We must then seek to recognize or identify certain sounds and to distinguish them from others. The teacher may write (in conventional phonetic symbols) a series of sounds on the blackboard and append to each a conventional number. He will articulate a sound and ask us to give him the number pertaining to it, or we may go up to the blackboard and point to the sound we think we have heard, or he may give us ‘phonetic dictation,’ in which case he will articulate sounds which we must write down by means of these conventional phonetic symbols. This latter process has the advantage that it can subsequently be extended to the dictation of syllables or words.[1]

Other forms of ear-training exercises may be devised by those who are engaged in carrying out such work, care being taken that such exercises do really train the ears and not our capacities for successful guessing.

If you wish to know to what extent such exercises do have the desired effect, go through a short course of ear-training on these lines and you will yourself be a witness to their efficacy.

Ear-training is not confined to isolated sounds and simple combinations of sounds; it also includes the exercise of our capacities for perceiving or retaining long strings of syllables such as sentences. We are able to do this in the case of our mother-tongue, and there is no reason why we should not soon become fairly proficient in doing it in the case of a foreign language.

The next thing in importance is to learn how to articulate foreign sounds, singly, in simple combinations, or in long strings of syllables. We must train our mouth and our vocal organs generally; in some cases we must develop certain muscles in order that they may do easily and rapidly what is required of them. We have learnt to do this in the case of our mother-tongue, and we can learn to do the same for sounds which are so far unknown to us. It is never too late in life to develop a muscle in order that it may perform the small amount of work which will be required of it. We must go through a course of mouth-gymnastics; if we are disinclined to do so it means that we are disinclined to take the trouble to tap our natural language-learning resources.

What are articulation exercises? Like ear-training exercises, they exist in many varieties. We begin by practising on known sounds. We take simple sounds and learn to prolong them for a few seconds or to utter them rapidly, and we practise them in new and unfamiliar combinations. We are shown how to convert voiced into voiceless sounds and vice versa; we are taught how to produce sounds which are intermediate between two known sounds; we are shown how to convert known sounds into their nasal, lip-rounded, or palatalized forms, etc. We are trained to imitate strange noises of all sorts, and the phonetician is ready to show us how to make them. Our ear-training exercises will be of assistance to us, for it is easier to articulate sounds that we recognize than sounds which have so far been unfamiliar to our ears.

At a more advanced stage, articulation exercises gradually become merged into ‘fluency exercises.’ When we are asked to articulate a given string of syllables so many times in so many seconds we are learning to become fluent, to connect sound with sound and syllable with syllable without ugly gaps and awkward hesitations.