Can tongue surgery improve English-speaking ability?
TV Tokyo’s “Ariehen Sekai” recently aired a segment about a form of tongue surgery that is being offered by some doctors in South Korea because some parents there are convinced that their children cannot properly pronounce English words because their tongues are too short:
Note: This video was removed from YouTube because users flagged it as “inappropriate.” As it didn’t contain anything more graphic that the other video linked in this post, I can only conclude that it was flagged because somebody out there either 1) can’t tell the difference between a tongue and human genitilia or 2) a few Koreans were offended that the existence of this surgery was being shown to the world on YouTube.
The procedure is known as a lingual frenectomy:
The removal of the lingual frenulum under the tongue can be accomplished with either frenectomy or frenuloplasty. This is used to treat a tongue tied patient. Immediately after this minor oral surgery, the tongue can often dramatically extend out of the mouth which it could not do before. This can help reduce breastfeeding complications, help improve speech and promote proper tooth arch development.
The Wikipedia article quoted above contained no source citations for that information. The Korean surgeon interviewed on the Japanese TV show did make a similar claim about the surgical procedure helping children with their pronunciation. An anonymous patient says he got the surgery because he heard it improves one’s kissing ability.
YouTuber ZionKhim has proudly uploaded a video of his child undergoing a lingual frenulum. (Warning: Don’t click the link if you don’t want to see a baby cry as his tongue is cut.)
The Los Angeles Times ran a story about Korean children getting this kind of tongue surgery back in 2002. It states the obvious, in case a few readers have never met some of the Koreans out there who can speak English without having their tongues mutilated [quote via Gusts of Popular Feeling]:
Linguists sneer at the idea that South Koreans’ tongues are too short to speak English properly, pointing to the unaccented speech of hundreds of thousands of Korean Americans.
“O.K., since Westerners are taller they might have longer tongues. But this operation lengthens the tongue by only a millimeter or two and that has nothing to do with it,” said Lee Ho Young, a linguist at Seoul National University.
The real problem for South Koreans, as for Japanese, is that their languages make no distinction between Ls and Rs, so they cannot detect the difference, Lee said.
Another strange quotation: An 2003 article on the Al-Jazeera English language site contains a quote from a South Korean psychiatrist who claims this surgery is bad because trying to teach young children to learn a second language can apparently cause autism.
Dr Shin Min-sup, a professor at Seoul National University who specialises in issues of adolescent psychiatry, is worried about the trend for surgery and also for pushing young children too hard to learn languages.
“There’s the potential for life-damaging after-effects,” Shin said. “Learning a foreign language too early, in some cases, may not only cause a speech impediment but, in the worst case, make an child autistic.”
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What is this guy talking about?
For the pronunciation for “R”, I always thought that one momentarily draws their tongue back. Since there’s no sound in the Japanese language that requires the speaker to make that motion, I assumed that’s why at least for Japanese people, learning to produce the correct pronunciation is hard even if they can discern the difference by ear.
As for the autism quote … I wish I had that back when I was taking Spanish classes in high school. “I can’t do my homework because it’ll make me autistic!”
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Yes, as I have understood it, during a child’s development the child learns how to differentiate and speak the different sounds spoken by the people around the child.
Coming in contact with a new language as an adult it will be can be difficult to differentiate sounds you have not learned nor do you have any clue how to speak them.
Similar sounds may sound just alike to the untrained ear while they really are not.
I was in a Chinese class in Japan and the Japanese classmates were shocked that they actually used 4 different sounds as they pronounced ん. Something obvious for a Chinese or even English speaking person to differentiate between m, n, ng, gn is utterly problematic for someone who has not grown up with it.
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What Nicklas said – and there are apparently child-development studies that bear out that if children are exposed to spoken sounds (even if they don’t actually learn the language, just have exposure to it) they are more easily able to form a permanent neural link that allows them to differentiate between similar sounds such as “l” and “r”. Supposedly the ideal age is before 5 or 6, although primary-school age kids can usually still develop the “link”. The older one gets, the more difficult it becomes to establish new “links” or pathways in the brain (although it is never impossible, or one could never recover from a stroke), which is why things like “l” and “r” pose problems for adults trying to learn English if their native tongue does not make a distinction, or why adults from English-speaking countries often hear the Japanese consonant romanized “r” as an “l”, even though it really isn’t an “l”. Or an “r”.
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wow, this is total and utter BS–like fresh out of the intestines stuff. Like the article says, look at all the America born Koreans. They can speak perfect English. Heck, I can’t even tell apart my asian friends from my non-asian friends on the phone! That autism article is more BS…perhaps from another cow, but definitely from the same dairy farm. Scientific studies have shown that the learning of two languages, especially at a young age, is very much beneficial for a person, and again especially for a child’s developing mind. You can look up the benefits of bilingualism yourself. Pushing a child too hard to learn something is an entirely different matter and a topic of which I don’t think has an effect on autism, but that’s just my opinion. From current research, autism has a strong genetic basis, y’know. So from current understanding of autism, the way a child is taught and handled by parents has little to do with the development of autism. Go ahead and correct me if I’m wrong. Certainly a strange way of thinking by this so-called doctor.
*in case you don’t know what humor is, that cow stuff in my paragraph above is for comic relief…aka, some humor
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Korea has different and misleading perceptions of autism because autism is not a visible issue.
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As long as Far East Asians (i.e., Japanese, Koreans and Chinese) do not try to pronounce English with American pronunciations, they shouldn’t have to do this. British English is a much easier on the tongue (haha) for these Asian countries, because the R is not so strong.
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This is nonsensical, since it’s the syllable-initial /r/ sound that is usually the biggest problem, not the ending sound. Whether they’re learning a non-rhotic dialect or not won’t make a difference.
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That depends entirely on the individual. I have also heard quite the opposite.
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The greatest danger to a child is their parents.
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I’m sensing a huge future growth in the number of Asian KISS cover bands.
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Thanks, I just spit tea onto my keyboard.
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The attempt at a connection between early-age language learning and autism is completely without merit. I sense that it is yet another emotion-fueled nationalistic argument aimed at the preservation of the Korean language and culture, which many have become quite obsessed about over this past decade.
Though I could find no specific study targeting the incidence of second language acquisition and rates of autism, all large-scale epidemiological studies have failed to find any correlation between multi-lingual households and the incidence of autism. Also, all studies which have attempted to correlate autism with psychological disorders, such has childhood traumatic experiences (which may or may not be the implicit given the quotation stated above) have also failed to demonstrate any degree of plausibility as a causal factor and all attempts to treat ASD as a psychological condition have failed to show any significant merit as a basis for treatment.
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Like I said before. Korea has different and misleading perceptions of autism because autism is not a visible issue.
Assuming that you’re based in Japan. Go talk to Koreans about autism and they’ll have three very different definitions. This isn’t nationalism. This is about having wrongful ideas and opinions on autism.
Yeah. From a gaijin or Japanese perspective, everything about Korea is deeply nationalist. What a brilliant (and very misleading) judgment.
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In truth, I am leaning towards this being a mangling of a quotation for the purposes of perhaps sensationalizing what, from all sources I could find, is a fairly rare surgery that a small minority of mislead parents are forcing upon their children rather than the actual advice of Dr Shin Min-sup holding such views, though one could, of course, not discount that possibility.
I find this scenario to be more feasible than a neuro-psychologist, who specializes in childhood neurological disorders (albeit concentrating primarily on adolescent attention deficit disorder and OCD) at a major university and publishes in the English literature (and presumably follows the literature to some extent) would honestly hold a view that early childhood language acquisition correlates to increased rates of autism.
Autism is largely not a visible issue in most countries and is misunderstood in every country, especially by parents stricken with autistic children and feel the need to find some sort of solace or understanding where none is available. Though these mistaken causal correlations are manifestly different in my societies. In North America this would be epitomized in the anti-vaccination movement. This mistaken causal link, however, is not an idea which operates in a vacuum and is fueled largely by a general mistrust of science and the medical establishment. While one would be correct in saying that this is a mistaken perception of autism in North American society, it does not discount the fueling force behind such misconceptions themselves. Now, not all persons supporting this misconception may be aware of the underlying motivations behind its propagation, but that does not discount the misconception itself from having those motivations.
Though establishing underlying thought structures behind a belief such as this is insufficient given the very small snippet available to us (I can find no other examples of this specific belief in the English literature, both academic and popular), my suspicions for the cause of this misunderstanding cannot be completely dismissed, though you are free to disagree and find them highly unlikely and my suspicions do not equate my passing a definitive judgment, either.
Go talk to any random “person on the street” about autism and not many will have bloody clue.
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sorry, I am getting a little tired over here and did not properly give that last entry a good read-through before posting. I apologize for the mistakes found within.
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The Al Jazeera’s article introduces Dr Shin Min-sup as a professor specialized in issues of adolescent psychiatry. Dr Shin perhaps made a careless comment on the issue she/he is unfamiliar with but I personally sense no emotion-fueled nationalistic motive as a whole. The following is the remaining part of Dr Shin’s comment:
“What’s wrong with speaking English with an accent anyway? Many parents tend to discount the importance of a well-rounded education,”
The article mentions that
From toddlers to students to office workers, learning English has become a national obsession.
However, it also quote a comment made by Cha Kyoung-ae, a professor who teaches English at a local university:
“The surgery may be an extreme case but it reflects a social phenomenon,” said Cha.
I don’t have enough knowledge on autism, but in my understanding, associating autism with rearing environment and/or mental weakness is old prejudice against autism and other related disorders, and such prejudice is now considered harmful. Maybe, it rather reflects ignorance of Al Jazeera writer?
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The article is actually from Reuters, so the writer is not Al Jazeera staff.
Yes, as I stated above, the stated opinions of this doctor do not belie such an objective, but this certain myth, if it holds any weight among Korean perceptions regarding autism, would, at the very least, be championed among those opposed to teaching our kids a foreign language.
A plethora of environmental factors have been proposed as potential risk factors over the years and there is, as of yet, a lack of any substantiation of such claims. To the contrary, increased risk of developing autism has been correlated to some specific embryonic developmental abnormalities, known as teratogens.
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Pronounciation is the least of a Japanese person’s worries,when trying to speak English. Now,I must going eating dinner with fork and Knife…
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ハングルのみで構成された現代韓国語では高度な学問を学
ぶ事は出来ません。高校程度の水準の学問がせいぜいでしょう。
/韓国語を日本語で例えるならば、ひらがなのみで構成され
た日本語です。日本語を理解出来る人ならば、ひらがなのみ
の日本語で、高度な論理的思考が不可能である事が理解出来
るでしょう。
従って韓国人が大学水準の高度な学問を学ぶには、漢字または
英語を学ぶ必要があります。
海外、主に英語圏の国へ留学するならば英語になり、韓国内で
は海外の名門大学に入学する方が、国内の大学よりずっと価値
があるのです。彼らの舌を手術するまでの過剰な英語教育には
この様な事情があるのです。
/私の貧弱な英語力では、この文章を翻訳する事が出来ません。
どなたか翻訳して下さるとありがたいです。
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Translated:
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暇なので私が翻訳しましょう。
Modern Korean composed solely of Hangul alone is not enough to attain a high level of education. High school is probably the limit. If one were to give a Japanese example of Korean, it would be Japanese composed entirely of hiragana. Any person who can understand Japanese can probably understand that hiragana alone is not enough to attain a high level of education. Therefore, when Koreans want to attain higher levels of education, they must learn either Kanji or English. If one were to study abroad in an English speaking country, they would learn English. Within Korea, prestigious universities abroad are valued much higher than domestic ones. This is why they resort to such extreme measures such as tongue surgery.
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What’s the difference between hiragana and Kanji?
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Hiragana is phonetic while Kanji have different readings and meanings, overall more complicated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
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“ひらがなのみの日本語で、高度な論理的思考が不可能である事が理解出来
るでしょう。”
意義有り！
これが本当だとすれば、漢字がない言語（すなわちこの青い惑星にあるほとんどの言語）では高度な論理的思考が不可能になります。ピタゴラス、プラトン、トマス・アクィナス、デカルト、フランシス・ベーコン、ジョン・ロック、カント、ヘーゲル、アルベルト・アインシュタイン。。。皆高卒のレベルですか？
別の言い方とすれば、日本人が字を書かないと高度な論理的思考できないですか？話すだけで無理ってこと？
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おそらく、韓国の場合、歴史的に見て西洋の専門用語や技術用語をハングルに翻訳できなかった経緯があるのではないですかね。
日本の場合は、特に明治期に各分野で西洋哲学、医学、技術関連の専門用語を漢字を組み合わせることによって造語した歴史があります。
ですから、言語の問題というよりも歴史の発達過程の違いだと思います。現代を生きる韓国人にとっては勉学のために英語を覚えてアメリカ留学する方が手っ取り早く、合理的だということでしょう。
あくまでも持論ですが、言語の歴史的継続性は長期的に見ると国力にも関係してくるのではないでしょうか。
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LB, your examples are all of western origin, and in western languages, which are all completely phonetic. There would be no loss of information if everything were spoken since the information was all phonetic in the first place. However, some languages which use chinese characters such as Japanese derive meaning not only from sound but from the writing itself. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible as ASAGIRI claimed, but I’d say that it would make conveying ideas much harder due to the nature of Japanese and how many homonyms it has, especially at higher levels of thinking. Anyone with any experience in philosophy knows how important semantics is in that field.
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More translations.
LB said:
fg replied:
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@weirdo – all languages are phonetic first, written second. Also, there are any number of homophones in any language. When writing Japanese it is true that the usage of kanji allows greater compactness while maintaining clarity of meaning than, say, a writing system relying purely on an alphabet. However, it is still possible to carry on a very high level of intellectual discourse without kanji. Western examples aside, are we to believe that, for example, a Japanese professor could never give a doctoral-level spoken dissertation in his/her native language? Of course not.
Kanji is a tool to make understanding the written word easier (at least as used in Japan and Korea, we’ll leave Chinese out of the equation). But it is not a tool to enable thought – thoughts come first, then the spoken word, then the written word. To say that Koreans could not carry on a high-level of discourse if they were using only Hangul, or that Japanese could not do it using only Hiragana, is mistaken.
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Learning Chinese characters is encouraged towards Korean university students because it’ll help them acquire written words without hassles.
There is a serious misconception among Japanese that all Koreans don’t use Chinese characters at all. That’s not true.
http://www.hanja114.org/main/index.php
The South Korean government has the official educational license for people who know over 2000 Chinese characters. This is mostly if you want to become a public worker in a Korean city.
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Spoken discussions are probably not affected by the writing system that records it, but the efficiency in which meaning is picked up from writing definitely suffers when kanji is taken out of the Japanese writing system. So the issue isn’t whether it’s possible or not, but how easy it is to do so with less mistakes in interpretation … which still would significantly impact the studying efficiency of the user.
As kanji is a logographic writing systems where each character carries a meaning, people used to reading it can form a partial mental image of the intended meaning by just looking at the individual characters, even before the combination of them in a word invokes a form of visual recognition for the written term (which is the case in any language for fluent speakers anyways)
In normal usage, the combination of kanji and hiragana lets readers easily recognize discrete chunks of ideas in the writing, much in the same way that writing in alphabet systems have words representing discrete ideas separated by spaces.
So, taking out kanji from Japanese is removing the element which lets people identify the units of ideas in the sentence, soitcanbecomparedtowritingoutsentencesinEnglishwithoutusingspaces. Reading it is not impossible, but annoyingly hard.
To back this notion up, textbooks for young kids in 1st or 2nd grade who haven’t learned a lot of kanji tend to have their hiragana-only writing interspersed with spaces to make it easier to identify the words.
Also in the case of English and many western languages, knowledge of Greek/Latin roots lets people easily discern the meaning of unfamiliar terms, much in the same way that knowledge of kanji can let people accurately guess the meaning of unfamiliar Japanese words in kanji.
What fuels the perception that Koreans are handicapped with their writing is in fact the similarity of the Korean language to Japanese. Hangul does not have the luxury of composing elements like Greek/Latin roots, but Koreans are said to be increasingly neglecting and forgetting the use of hanja(kanji), so the closest analogy would become Japanese sans kanji.
Although hanja falling into disuse is apparently false according to lacrimosa, whenever I come across Korean writing, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of hanja with Korean writing being uniformly hangul. So I’m still doubtful as to whether hanja usage is widespread enough to be acting as the convenient tool that kanji is in Japanese.
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@LB
Written Japanese and spoken Japanese are not always the same thing, also as ASAGIRI pointed out, you had to resort to referring to exceptional cases as Stephen Hawking to find an example of a person capable of complex mathematics without writing. As I said earlier, I won’t say that it’s impossible, but it would complicate things much more, Japanese has much more homonyms than a lot of other languages. Also, you probably have experienced yourself, people must sometimes reference which kanji they are talking about, even within spoken Japanese to clarify what they mean.
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[Although hanja falling into disuse is apparently false according to lacrimosa, whenever I come across Korean writing, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of hanja with Korean writing being uniformly hangul.]
When there is a difficult word to understand, Koreans usually resort to see the Chinese characters.
Koreans use Chinese characters indirectly. They still 100% acknowledge them. You have to actually live in South Korea to see Koreans using Chinese characters non-ostensibly.
How a famous American professor of Korean studies put this. “Koreans still respect and utilize the Chinese characters, contrary to the fact that they don’t directly use them every day.”
It’s the similar idea how Vietnamese uses Roman alphabets 100% and yet a huge chuck of their vocabularies are Chinese in origin.
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例えば”あい”という単語を漢字に直せと言われたら、何が思い浮かび
ますか？愛、相、藍…色々あるでしょう。これだけでは決められま
せんよね。文章の内容から判断するしかないでしょう。脳が一時的に
記憶出来る情報は限られています。そうなるとひらがなまたはハング
ルのみの長い文章を頭の中で読み上げた時に、文章の中間が記憶から
抜け落ちて、主語と動詞のみが強く印象に残ります。彼ら韓国人が時
々素っ頓狂な事を言うのは、恐らくこれが原因では無いでしょうか？
漢字は極めて優秀な記憶装置です。例えば”炎”という単語を日本語で
記述するならば”ほのお”の3文字、英語で記述するならば”flame”の5
文字を必要とします。漢字ならば一文字で表現出来、火が2つ、さら
には炎の漢字の形状から炎の意味を初めて学ぶにしても、容易に理解
出来、なおかつ記憶として残りやすい。これが漢字のすごい所です。
表音文字のみで構成された言語、例えば英語やドイツ語は表音文字だ
けで高度な思考が可能な様に単語、文法などが決められているのです
。しかし日本語や韓国語の単語には漢字語由来のものが多くあります。
だから漢字が分からないと、単語の意味を厳密に思い浮かぶ事が出来
ず、理解の定着も弱い。
/ひょうおんもじのみでこうせいされたげんご、たとえばえいごやど
いつごはひょうおんもじだけでこうどなしこうがかのうなようにたん
ご、ぶんぽうなどがきめられているのです。しかしにほんごやかんこ
くごのたんどにはかんじごゆらいのものがおおくあります。だからか
んじがわからないと、たんごのいみをげんみつにおもいうかぶことが
できず、りかいのていちゃくもよわい。/
LBさん、例えばあなたが漢字が全く分からずひらがなのみ分かると仮
定して//内の文章を厳密に理解する事が出来ますか？文章では無く、
会話の中で言われて、厳密に理解できますか？大学の教科書が全て//
内の様なひらがなのみで書かれていたらどうですか？
翻訳して下さったhelicalさん、Weirdoさんありがとうございます。
fgさんも補足ありがとうございます。
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(´･ω｀･)ｴｯ?やっぱり漢字がないと訳わからん・・・
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@weirdo – マジですか？僕、全部読めたけど。。。
@asagiri – 漢字は考えていることを書く時の優秀な道具です。認めます。でも、人間は字を書こうとしたよりはるか先に問題なく高度なコミュニケーション出来ましたよ。お釈迦様の教えは最初書かれなかったとか。孔子は漢字で自分の考えていることを書き残したが、その時代ではほとんどの人は字を読むことが出来なかった。なのに、孔子または彼の弟子がその人たちに儒教を教えることが出来、中国社会が儒教中心になった。
だから漢字があってもなくっても、高度な論理でも意味を伝えられます。伝え方をちょっと考えなければならないかも知れませんが、伝えられます。
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＠LB
全く読めない事はありませんが、私にはかなり読みにくかったです。英語には単語を分けるのにスペースがありますが、ひらがなだけの日本語にはありません。従ってどこからどこまでが何なのかが訳わからなくなります。
例えば
Thedog(Canislupusfamiliaris,[2]pronounced/ˈkeɪ.nɪsˈluːpəsfʌˈmɪliɛərɪs/)isadomesticatedformoftheWolf,amemberoftheCanidaefamilyoftheorderCarnivora.Thetermisusedforbothferalandpetvarieties.Thedomesticdoghasbeenoneofthemostwidelykeptworkingandcompanionanimalsinhumanhistory.Amongstcanineenthusiasts,theword”dog”mayalsomeanthemaleofacaninespecies,asopposedtotheword”bitch”forthefemaleofthespecies.
これも読めない事はありませんが・・・長続きしません
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Weirdoさん(19:07:13)が指摘された様に、確かに高度な論理的思考
が不可能は言い過ぎましたね。漢字を使わないで、ひらがなのみの
日本語でも高度な論理的思考が可能な様に、語句や文法を作り直せ
ば良いですね。ひらがなと同じ表音文字であるアルファベットを使
用した言語でも、高度な論理的思考が可能なのですから。
>>LBさん(17:54:44 )日本人が字を書かないと高度な論理的思考でき
ないですか？話すだけで無理ってこと？
LBさんは字を書かずに大学水準の数学の問題を聞いて、頭の中だけ
で解く事が可能なのですか？文章に記録しないで、科学技術を蓄積
する事が可能と言うのですか？
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>LBさんは字を書かずに大学水準の数学の問題を聞いて、頭の中だけ
で解く事が可能なのですか？
いや。。。僕には無理けど。。。スティーヴン・ホーキング博士に聞いてみて。人によって全然可能ですよ。（笑）
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I have speech problems and I considered this surgery. Not asian of course.
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Yeah, this is a pretty old story in re. Korea, and every time it comes up it’s mentioned that there’s a small number of people for whom it’s actually a potential correction for a real problem (regardless of ethnicity and target language).
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幼児の第二カ国語としての英語教育と自閉症との関連性は根拠がないように思いますが、発育時期に無理に他言語教育を押し付けると、後々弊害が出る可能性はありそうですね。
英語教育のために舌を手術するなんて信じられないです。韓国では普通に受け入れられているのでしょうか？
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幼児の第二カ国語としての英語教育と自閉症との関連性は根拠がないように思いますが、発育時期に無理に他言語教育を押し付けると、後々弊害が出る可能性はありそうですね。
なら他の科目も避けんと
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何故避けんといかんのかね？
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博多弁（あるいはその近辺の方言）だと、
「なして避けんといかんと？」
になります。私は発育時期に標準語教育を強制されましたが、現在抱えている様々な問題と関連しているかは分かりません。
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なるほど、博多弁ですか。。。
母国語を満足に喋れない子供に外国語を教えるというのはどうも抵抗があるんですよね。なぜなんでしょうか？もちろん家庭環境によっては２カ国語以上話す必要性があるのでそれは例外ですが。
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文末が「と」で終わるのは博多弁（実際にはもっと広範囲の方言）によく見られる特徴であります。「これ、とっとっと？」「うん、とっとぉと。」
個人的には、外国語教育は早期に行ったほうがより効果的だと思います。抵抗があるのは言語を単なる道具だとみなすような傾向があるからではないでしょうか？言語は意思疎通や自己表現などの為の道具であって、知性や感性などを磨くことが最終的な目的であると考えていると、単純に外国語教育に熱をあげている人たちに違和感を覚えるのかなと思います。私は強制されるのならピアノとかにして欲しいと思いますが…
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Shouldn’t the more trying question be..
Why on EARTH where they playing the KISS song “I Was Made For Loving You” while they were showing the surgery? o_o;
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A tribute to Gene Simmons.
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At the end of the above clip:
“An anonymous patient says he got the surgery because he heard it improves one’s KISSing ability.”
Do you now understand something about Japanese TV production?
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Now, I am fully aware that this is silly, and the doctor that made the comment about how learning a second language can cause autism in young children is a fool, but please everyone, let’s not criticize all of Korea for the foolish words of ONE doctor….
Just because one doctor believes that learning a language can cause autism doesn’t mean all of Korea believes it too….
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Well this is pretty fucking embarrassing for South Korea.
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i swear i saw almost exactly the same program about two years ago, and I remember because of how ridiculous it was (such as comments above). Is it just an old news program uploaded recently or is this “new” news?
i hope some Japanese mothers do not see this and consider it a possibility and head on over, considering the cheap surgery prices oo;
cosmetic surgery is so odd…but ah… and welcome to Korea Probe ^^;
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This program aired last week. I don’t think it specified when the actual footage was filmed.
“Ariehen” is usually aired at midnight, but this time it was a special version aired from 8pm, which includes some old contents.
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Let’s cause an uproar: British tongues ftw!!! rofl. joke. But yeahhhh poor little baby. Was sad to watch. [on youtube]
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I believe in addition to learning to articulate English words more properly, it is also very important to be able to speak English with better grammatical accuracy. That is why, some focus should also be put into learning grammar. By interacting with English speakers and also by watching English TV Programs without subtitles, their English pronunciation should be able to improve over time.
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Tongue sursery – No, but perhaps brain surgery might help
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This is bullshit.
The reason many Asians have a difficult time pronouncing words in English is not physiological — as in, it can be remedied if say, a Japanese person learns to make the proper shapes with their mouth. According to many of my Japanese-American friends, learning English is also difficult because there are various pronunciations for each letter combination — things inexpressible through the “soft” and “hard” vowel characterisations that students are often taught in school.
I’ve met quite a few people here in Tokyo who can speak impeccable English — some of then learned it over time, others learned both Japanese and English simultaneously as young children.
Personally, this whole pronunciation issue is comparable — in my eyes — to the rolling of the “r” that many other languages use.
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