Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Shadowing!

こんにちは。

After doing a number of shadowing exercises, I feel that both my pronunciation and listening have slightly improved.

My biggest problems are with long moras: when the recording is at a pace that challenges my ability to keep up, I sometimes fail to prolong long moras as necessary; sometimes I prolong regular moras unnecessarily.

In terms of pitch and intonation, I've found numbers to be tricky and have yet to grasp a reliable pattern depending on the situation. In general, though, I think my intonation is acceptable, but could certainly use improvement to sound more natural.

じゃあ、ね。

2 comments:

  1. こんばんは、

    How exactly do you shadow now? In a previous post you say you shadow animes - I attempted to do something similar but ultimately failed as the random speech was just too much for me to do at any one time! Do you shadow episodes you've already watched?

    Something I'm trying to do right now is pick out words that I hear a lot (e.g だいじょぶ) and be sure to say those out loud again and again so I can walk away from the shadowing session feeling like I've at least opened up my vocabulary a bit.

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  2. こんばんは、

    Trying to shadow animes is pretty difficult, I agree. Something that has worked out a little better for me is trying some films or animes targeting younger audiences. Miyazaki Hayao-san's films come to mind, though I suspect the speech patterns used in them will most likely be appropriate for younger kids, correspondingly. I plan on covering each of his films in coming posts, so you can read my take on them and maybe check out some yourself (if you haven't already) !

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