Discussion Post #4

[Tianhui Qiu]

The article mainly talks about the detailed explanation and classifications of phones. Last time I was confused about the difference between phones and phenetics but after reading this, I have a deeper understanding of phones and make it pretty clear, so Phone is mainly about production and perception of speech sounds in any language, while Phonetic is about the sound pattern that occurred in one language. In the article, the author mentioned Nasals, such as [m] or [n] in English, which reminded me of my Cantonese studying process in Hong Kong. In Cantonese, there are lots of words ending in Nasals while Mandarin words are not, and the nasals in Cantonese are very unique and really hard to pronounce exactly correct. For example, the word “Hong Kong” in Cantonese pronounces [hoeng gong], so two words all end in Nasals and I could not pronounce these sounds at the beginning. Lots of people think Cantonese is very similar to Mandarin, but the truth is the pronunciations differ a lot. However, my Cantonese professor said that young people in HK loved to ignored those Nasal stops and made the Cantonese pronunciations nowadays became closer to Mandarin, which is much more simplified. Also, the article mentioned vowels, which is a tough problem I met recently in Turkish studying. There are 9 forms of each word because of the 9 combinations of vowels in Turkish, and it is very easy to be confused since I have never seen these many changes in a word in any languages because of vowels. I might need lots of practices of it to find the pattern.

[Global Studio]

Excellent post, Bonnie! There are useful phonetic drills to help you derive the mechanisms required to produce the sounds of Turkish. Be sure to ask Hazal for examples and tongue twisters!