An addendum to my post on learning pronunciation.
Break it down
A good tip for dealing with long, complicated words is to break them down into syllables, and to start at the end of the word rather than the beginning.
Let's say you're trying to learn how to say 'hunangyflogedig', which means 'self-employed' in Welsh. Don't start from the 'hun-', start from the '-dig' and build it up from there:
-dig
-gedig
-flogedig
-gyflogedig
-nangyflogedig
hunangyflogedig
You can also split it into pieces, particularly where those pieces have meanings. In 'hunangyflogedig', 'hunan-' means 'self', 'cyflog' means 'salary, pay' ('cyflogi' means 'to employ'), and the '-edig' end means that the word is an adjective. So you can use these building blocks to help pronunciation too: hunan cyflog edig – hunangyflogedig.
(Note: The C -> G change in Welsh is called mutation and is a grammatical feature of the language.)
You can also use words from the same root to build up fluency in pronunciation, and increase your vocabulary at the same time. For example, 'llyfr' means 'book' in Welsh, and there are several words that use 'llyfr' as a root:
llyfr – book
llyfryn – booklet
llyfrgell – library
llyfrgellydd – librarian
By learning the simple 'llyfr' and working your way up to 'llyfrgellydd', you give yourself plenty of practice with the same/similar sounds which will increase your confidence as well as improve your pronunciation.
Don't get stressed
Every word is made up of syllables, and these syllables can be stressed or not stressed when pronounced, e.g. the stressed syllable in 'pedestrian' is the second syllable: pedESTrian. Try saying PEDestrian, or pedestriAN and you'll see how awkward they sound.
When you are learning pronunciation, you also need to learn where the stresses are. Compare the English pronunciation of narrator and the French narrateur: In English, we stress the second syllable, narRATor, whereas in French it's on the last syllable, giving us narraTEUR.
In English, the stress moves about quite a bit. For example:
hoMOGenate
homoGENeous
homogeNETic
diSEMble
DISsonant
In French, the stress is always on the last syllable:
mousquetAIRE
incroyABLE
connaisSEUR
restauRANT
pampleMOUSSE
In Welsh, it's always the syllable from last:
PWYSig
pwySIGrwydd
llawYSgrif
llawysGRIFen
hunanymwyBODol
Learning to get the stresses right will help you sound much more like a native speaker and will help your pronunciation too. It may feel uncomfortable to start with, particularly if the stresses are different to those you are used to, but you will get used to it.
My good friend Jeremy lost his laptop this week, after his two year old son poured water in it because it 'looked thirsty'. With it goes his HDD and all the data on it, including the latest chapters of the book he's been writing. Like me, Jeremy is self-employed and relies on his computer for work, so I feel his pain only too acutely. It would be a nightmare for me to lose my laptop – which will happen soon as it now has seven lines on the screen – but at least I have my desktop to fall back on. Jeremy is left borrowing other people's computers and wondering how he will get any work done.
If you happen to be in a position to help, either with a cheap computer to sell, parts to fix his old one, or a bit of unneeded cash you can donate to him, please do. If not, please go to his site and relentlessly click on his ads, and we'll see if we can't earn him an extra penny or two that way.
This is way too cool. A page on the Hebrew Wikipedia about Celtic languages, links to my blog here because I blog in Welsh and English. Thus do I find out that my name in Hebrew is סו צ'רמן.
My friend Itamar tells me that “written Hebrew in most cases omits vowels, so it actually says 'Soo tz'rmn' with the understanding that the N probably has no vowel, and it could be read as 'So' rather than 'Soo'. Typically 'ch' is written as the letter for the 'tz' with an apostrophe as Hebrew doesn't really have that sound.”
You know what I love about this? Without having any idea, whomever wrote this entry transliterated my first name perfectly. For years I suffered people pronouncing my name 'syew', to rhyme with 'view', which I have always loathed. 'Soo' is, however, perfect.
And indeed, I'd rather 'So' than 'Syew', and in fact had a Latin teacher – Mr Briggs – who used to use a long, drawn out 'Sooooooooo' as a sort of verbal punctuation which always make me look up from whatever doodle I was drawing at the time. Never figured out if he did it on purpose or not.
On a slightly different note, reading this make me want to siarad Cymraeg mwy yn aml.
Not an event. Not a product. But an entire city: Adidas Ababa.
Can't go wrong, really.
My head has turned to mush today. 12.35pm and I've done fuck all. Oh, wait, I printed out some stuff for my new bank manager, whom I have to educate regarding this whole blogging thing. The last one told me, and I quote, “I don't understand what you're doing, and I don't see how you can possibly be successful”. And he wondered why I complained about him. Tosswit.
The last few weeks have been so intense what with one thing and another, much of it I feel i can't blog about because it's either work-related and I don't want to steal my own thunder by prematurely announcing cool shit, or because to blog about it would be to invade someone else's privacy.
I feel a bit like I've put up the blogging barriers recently. Strong self-censorship has meant I've ended up running through most potential blog posts in my head only to discard them as not suitable, but when I do find a topic that I could write about, I either don't find the time, or am too tired to write anything cogent at all. Today is a case in point. I opened up Ecto, started a blog post for Strange, only to sit there for half an hour staring at the screen as if somehow the words were going to magically write themselves. I just couldn't think of a single intelligent thing to say. It's not that I'm not having thoughts worth sharing, but somehow I can't get the fuckers out of my head.
I remember when I started this blog, it's very first incarnation over on BlogSpot, it was because I wanted to improve my writing skills. I think that, whilst one always has room for improvement, my writing skills have improved a lot over the last three years. Then it (accidentally) became an agent for change in my career. Blogging about stuff that interested me lead to me writing about that stuff for money. I hived off Strange, and that became my professional blog (oh, before you make assumptions, I don't earn a penny directly off Strange – all my earnings come tangentially).
So now what's ChocnVodka all about? Me expressing myself in a public space, but that expression has been hobbled by the fact that I've ended up trying to manage your perceptions of me by being so much more selective about what I write. Isn't that just bullshit? Isn't blogging supposed to be about honesty and transparency and authenticity? Warts and all?
Robert Scoble says on his blog somewhere (and I can't be arsed to find the link. Learn to live with it.) that if you're a company blogger and your life is not going too well, don't blog, because it will come through in your writing. I've been applying that advice to this blog, which is a bit daft seeings as this blog was supposed to be the place where I write about my personal life.
Oh, I don't even know where this rant is going. I'm back on the acupuncture at the moment, primarily treating stress and what I shall now call disbalance – a feeling akin to that felt by a ballerina, en point, doing a spin whilst attempting not to fall off a rollercoaster – and a really painful neck. Some days are great – some really positive stuff is happening for me at the moment, stuff I feel wary of blogging about in case I jinx it. Some days, like today, I want to crawl under a rock and stay there until someone comes to get me and tell me it's all ok. But it's not like I can say 'life is shit', because life is actually going ok, thank you kindly.
I think I just need a holiday, but I guess a pointless rant is going to have to suffice.
UPDATE: Tip for extracting oneself from vague and formless funk: go for a walk. I just walked up through the woods to the lake and and on my back I saw a heron sitting on someone's house, which made me think: how do you know there's not a heron on your roof right now? If you were inside, you'd never know it had come and gone, but yet there, merely feet away, was one of nature's most majestic birds. There are undoubtedly herons on my roof right now, and I mustn't let the fact that I can't see them make me forget they are there.
Real 'out of office' reply received today:
I will be out of the office starting 27/04/2005 and will not return until 01/01/2010.
Wow, that's some holiday. I am way jealous.
You may remember that last year I showed a little bit of interest in a British zombie flick called Shaun of the Dead, so it probably won't surprise you to hear that when my mates Ewan and Cameron asked me if I wanted to help them interview Nick Frost for The Podcast Network's Movie Show I had to think long and hard about whether to accept or not. Long. And hard. Oh, yes.
So, to cut a 1 hr 22 min story short, this morning I spent a very happy hour and a half talking to Nick and Ewan, (Cam had to bail for technical reasons), about everything from how pantwettingly scary it was for him to go from being a waiter to a real proper actor on Spaced, to how pantwettingly terrifying dying on your arse in front of 200 people when you're trying to be a stand-up comic is, to shaved bollocks. We did cover a few non-crotch related issues to, but I don't want to spoil the show for you.
Nick was a delight to talk to, and an absolute darling the whole way through, even when we were having a few problems getting the technology to behave – it was a telephone/Skype combination, and getting the levels right was a pig, if Ewan's muttering was anything to go by.
We have to do some jiggery-pokery with the audio before we broadcast, but the show should be up soon. (Well, I say 'we', I mean 'Cameron'. He who gets most turkey gets most string.) I'll post a link when it's up.
So, huge thanks to Nick! Sir, you are a star!
I love it when deadlines have been successfully met. Or at least, not too badly missed. That's the best bit about writing – sending stuff off into the wild where people will rip it into tiny little shreds and send it back to you in the mail with a ransom note.
