SDLC 110 Teaching Someone Else

For this assignment, I chose to teach a friend that helps me study Arabic vocabulary though she has no relation to Arabic whatsoever. I tell her how to pronounce the words and she quizzes me on its definition. Helping me study, she would learn some words as well. Thus, I figured she would have a propensity for picking up language. 

Bengali is difficult to follow if one does not hear the sounds correctly since there are unique sounds that are nonexistent to English. For that reason, I wanted to teach her some of the Bengali alphabet letters. 

We began with me pronouncing the sounds the letters make. We did all the vowels (the first 11) and then the next two rows of letters. I wasn't concentrating on recognizing the letters because that would have taken more time and practice, but more than anything I wanted her to be aware of the sounds. For her amusement, however, she wrote the letters on a white board as she pronounced them. 

I predicted the difficulty she would face when trying to pronounce the vowels ও (o) ঔ (au) because of how similar they sound. The second is more stressed while the first is an abrupt "o" sound. 

She also had difficulties with words that had aspirations after them, such as the following: ঘ (gh)  খ (kh)  ছ (ch)   ঝ (jh). She had done the preceding letters well because they exist in English. She also had trouble with other letters that came after for the same reason. What I did in these cases was teach her where to place her tongue and how to position her mouth when pronouncing it. Fortunately, these methods worked. For instance, for ত (Ṭô) I told her to move her tongue forward behind her front teeth and then make a hard "t" sound without moving her tongue back to the roof of her mouth.   

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After teaching her how to pronounce the letters, I had her learn a few words in Bengali that had the sounds we just learned in them. Some of the words were "bhalo" (good) "kharap" (bad) "bhoi" (scary/fear). It was a good lesson, but of course I would need to spend more time on teaching her and having her study it in order for her to retain it. However, I learned a very helpful tactic to help people pronounce Bengali sounds. 

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