What is the difference between sound and spelling? Why is this distinction significant for your language-learning efforts? Describe the phonetic inventory of your target language. Are there sounds in your language that don’t exist in American English? If so, provide several words and their phonetic transcriptions of words as examples to support your argument. What do you need to know about the sound system of your target language? How will you acquire the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in your listening, and to produce these sounds in your speech?
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Word is formed through letters which differ depending on the language and sounds are formed through minimum phonetic units, consonant with vowels. Another essential difference is their presentation. Word by definition is written and visual. Its representation ranges from ancient tablets to printed books. On the other hand, sound is the vibration of frequency transmitted through air perceived by eardrum.
According to Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_phonology, phonetic inventory of my target language includes
One sound i perceive that is very different is r sound. In Italian, r can be pronounced as /l/ or the liquid /r/. In English, it is not pronounced as such. Ragazza and restaurante are pronounced differently in English and Italian in the sound of r.
One way to practice is through repetitive listening of native speakers articulating both words and made clear distinction.
There is an important difference between sound and spelling when learning a language. The sound is what travels through the air; it is the result of the way the individual manipulates the air and their body. Spelling, however, differs wildly between languages because different cultures and languages use and perceive characters and alphabets in different ways to make different sounds. For example, English and Dutch have almost identical sounds. Both Germanic languages, their are not many sounds in Dutch that would be foreign to an English speaker, and vice versa. However, the way letters and spelling sound are different. A Dutch E sounds like and English A, and the Dutch I sounds like an English E.
There are some exceptions. The Dutch verb gaan - /ˈχɑːn/ is a sound we don't have in English. One site describes it as sounding like the Ch in Loch except voiced. For the most part, I will not have trouble discriminating sounds except for ones like this, so I will mostly focus on the sounds that don't exist in English, and learning the rules of how spelling differs in relation to sounds.
Spelling is the way we represent what we say phonetically in writing. Sound is the production of those words or characters by manipulating various parts of the upper body from the diaphragm to the tongue. Growing up in an English-speaking country, I default to saying foreign words using my English language background, which emphasizes the point that spelling of words does not accurately represent the sound of the words. In Korean, there are numerous English words embedded into the language that sounds like English. For an example, “ice cream” in Korean is “아이스크림” (ae-seu-keu-lim). With Korean, Mandarin, or even Japanese, there is the phonetic way of speaking the words in English, but it does not represent the accurate way of speaking the word in another language.
There are numerous examples of how spelling of words does not always represent the sounds they are meant to produce. From my early studies of Korean, the vowel “으” does not a have direct translation in English, and the textbook I use made that clear in the beginning. While it was difficult at first to associate a sound with the vowel, I tried to find something that was relatable in my other languages that replicates the same sound in Korean. The textbook says the sound of “으” is like the “oo” in “good” but it’s more like “ugh”. The way how I remember this is when people say “ugh” when they have a bad day. I would argue that the phonetic inventory of the Hangeul alphabet contains many English sounds, but there are a handful of Hangeul vowels/consonants that don’t fully replicate any letters in the English alphabet such as diphongs. Diphongs are complex vowels that are made up of two vowels to create one produced sound. For an example, “의” is pronounced “ eh yee” by joining together “으” (ugh) and “이” (ee).
There is no inherent relation between sound and spelling. Spelling consists of letters in a language which we correspond with certain sounds. However, the sounds we connect to letters are not based in reality but, rather, must be learned. As a result, to learn languages, we cannot assume the sounds which letters will be associated with. We must practice both making and hearing the sounds when we write and read the letters to establish a mental connection between the sounds and their equivalent letters. Moroccan Arabic has the same basic vocabulary as MSA with the addition of some sounds (“v,” “g,” and “p”) taken from English. Therefore, the most difficult sounds in Moroccan Arabic are also the 9 sounds in MSA with no English equivalent: ض، ص، ق، غ، ع، خ، ط، ظ، ح. Here are some words as examples:
The tricky aspect of these words and Moroccan Arabic in general is not just the sounds themselves but the patterning of the sounds, i.e. the phonology. Unlike MSA, Moroccan Arabic uses few vowels because it derives from the Amazigh language. Therefore, most words in Moroccan Arabic have clusters of two or three consonants in a row, making the language very difficult to pronounce for non-native speakers. Therefore, I will spend the first couple of weeks next semester practicing the pronunciation of these consonant clusters by listening to Moroccan YouTube videos and mimicking how the people in these videos pronounce the words. Over time, just like how I learned the pronunciation of MSA, I will become better at both pronouncing and discerning the consonant clusters if I continue hearing and mimicking the correct pronunciation.
The sound is the vibrations that travel through the air or another medium and can be heard through the ear, while spelling is the ability to properly name the letters of a word. It is important since to be able to spell a word we have to know the different sounds in a language, so that the spelling can be understood.
The Portuguese follows the IPA (International Phonetics Alfabet). The Portuguese alphabet consists of 23 letters (lacking the K, W and Y of the English alphabet), plus 11 letters with diacritics such as the ‘Ç.’ Punctuation corresponds largely to that in English. The Portuguese language phonology is composed of seven vowels sound and twenty consonant sounds (Schütz, 2004).
I have not find how many exact sounds can vary with respect to English, but I hope that with these examples it can be understood the differences between both languages.There are sounds in Portuguese not used in English language and here are some examples.
Firstly, ‘Exceção’ (exception) , with the sound ‘xc’,since the letter “x” can be pronounced in 5 different ways, [(ɐj)ʃ.sɛ.ˈsɐ̃w̃], [ʃɛ.ˈsɐ̃w̃], [iʃ.sɛ.ˈsɐ̃w̃], also with the sound ‘ç’ , which is called ‘cedilla’ and it modifies the way the “c” is pronounced in languages like Portuguese, French and Catalan. ‘ão’ , in which the symbol on top of the “a” is a ‘tilde’ , and indicates that the vowel is pronounced nasally.
Another word could be Amanhã (tomorrow) whose phonetic transcription is this one: /a.mɐ.ˈɲɐ̃/ And there are the following sounds that are not similar to English. The sound ‘nh’, it is pronounced in a similar way as “ny”. ‘ã’, is pronounced nasally, this is somewhat similar to “an.”
The last example would be Otorrinolaringologista (otolaryngologist) (/o.to.ˌʁĩ.no.la.ɾĩ.ɡo.lo.ˈʒis.tɐ/,). The sound ‘rr’, Pronounced the same way as the “h” in “house,” this rule also applies to a single “r” if it’s placed at the beginning of a word. ‘go’ When placed before the vowels “o,” “a” and “u,” the “g”. The sound ‘gi’, when it comes before the vowels “e” and “i,” the ‘g’ has a sound that can be described as something between the “g” in “gigolo” and the “sh” in “she. To acquire the ability to differentiate and be able to pronounce these sounds I have to expose my ear to Portuguese speaking, with songs, films, and other listening ways. However, I think that having Spanish as my native language will help the pronunciation of these sounds since it is more similar than the English.
REFERENCES:
Babbel.com, & GmbH, L. N. (n.d.). 7 Portuguese words you'll struggle to PRONOUNCE (if you're Not brazilian). Babbel Magazine. Retrieved September 25, 2021, from https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/portuguese-language-pronunciatio....
Speech accent archive: Browse. (n.d.). Retrieved September 25, 2021, from http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_native.php?function=detail&languag....