Idahosa Ness: Pronunciation Mastery

This is the actual fluency podcast, helping you become a better language learner by providing motivating weekly inspiration, as well as top tips and tricks from expert guests. And now, your host, Kris Broholm.

So, I'm really happy that so many of you guys tuned in again. And I'm sorry for the delay once again. But now we're back and in full swing, and I've already recorded a few interesting interviews. And I've already listed a long list of amazing guests for this season. So, I'm looking forward to that. But before that, I just want to introduce today's guest, which is Idahosa Ness from Mimic Method. And he joins us now. And Idahosa, why don't you give the listeners a little introduction as to how you got started in language learning?

Um, so yeah, I spoke I spoke Spanish by the time I graduated high school. And when I got to university, uh, I decided, well, you know, since I'm already kind of good at Spanish, I might as well do a new language. So I decided on uh Mandarin Chinese and uh, yeah, and then now I speak and then now I speak uh Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and uh German.

One of the core things I noticed at the very beginning with Spanish is that if you actually make the effort to try to sound like the people, um, not only do, you know, not only do people kind of relate to you a bit more when you when you do the accent better, but the actual acquisition of the language became faster because you're able to kind of connect and hear the words easy easier and stuff. So that's what happened. Then when I got the Chinese, the whole accent, the whole idea of accent and pronunciation became even more clear since you have is a tonal language. And I invested a lot of energy and time at the very beginning getting the uh tones correct, whereas my classmates um, either didn't care that much or didn't quite get it at first. And then that once again carried over and I was able to learn Mandarin much faster as a result.

And then um, yeah, and then soon after that I after I graduated I went to Brazil and then learned Portuguese on my own, just kind of in the streets and applied my own kind of philosophy again. And then that it was in Brazil that I came up with uh, with my own like concrete philosophy about how one should go about learning a language.

But uh first I just wanted to uh to talk about the uh, I would say the famous video on the internet called the Skype Me Maybe, which is where I first saw you. Um, can you uh describe, you know, the the process of uh of being part of that and if has that done anything for you in in terms of, you know, people getting to know you or reaching out?

So yeah, and as far as as far as my input into it, it wasn't it wasn't that much. But uh Benny did all Benny and whoever's team was did all the work.

So so getting into the actual the learning process, um, well, let's just jump into pronunciation because that's um, that's obviously your main focus and something that I personally didn't think was that important until very recently because when you start learning a language, my first logical instinct was, well, why is it why don't I why do I need, you know, a better than good enough pronunciation?

Um, and maybe you'd like to answer that question, you know, because in in my mind, I would be like, okay, as long as I can be understood, then that would be okay. But I mean recently I changed my mind. But maybe you want to answer that question first. Why is it important to to really focus on the pronunciation and why you know, why not just stop at I'm good enough, you know, you sound like a foreigner, but it's okay.

So that's where I start where it's um, pronunciation is of is uh, it's it's not so much it's not so much about perfecting your accent, though that's kind of the ideal. Uh, it's it's about getting the core sounds. And the reason why I've I've found that affects the way that someone learns the speed or the the degree to which someone learns a language is because if you've had the problem of no knowing how to read a bunch of words, but when you hear someone speaking very fast and you can't understand them or recognize those words, that's fundamentally a problem of pronunciation because once again, he's hearing those words differently than you are.

Secondly, uh, if you're um, if you're kind of doing all these kind of grammar calculations in your head and you're kind of doing this kind of Frankenstein approach to learning it, instead of having it naturally flow out of you the way it does in your first language, once again, it's because the core foundation of the sound might not be in order. So that's what we start for. That's what I strive for. It's not so much uh, though I like to strive for it being able to be like indiscernible in my accent. That's really hard to achieve. But if you get to when you said what is that good enough? Uh, there certainly is a good enough where you can lock in every sound, get it like 90% of the way there. And you can actually achieve that very quickly if you do the right approach. And I think the reason why most people don't take it take pronunciation seriously at first is because it seems too kind of convoluted of a subject and too difficult to get into. So, that's was my goal when I started my company was how do I make this more accessible to people?

Um, but then yeah, once you're at that good enough and, you know, you hear someone with a slight accent in language, but they can really connect with it, then, you know, that's that's fine. I'm not like an accent Nazi and I'm like, you don't sound exactly like an American. That's because at the end of the day, even me as an American, I'm one of a thousand different accents of English, right? So who's to say that mine is better than anyone else's or why you should why yours should be the same. But uh, you know, you have a you have uh, you you have a different pronunciation than me, but I understand you 100%. You can if I said a new word, you'd be able to pick it up very easily because you can lock in and you don't have to see it written down. But um, but yeah, you know, and like uh, you have your own shade of accent and that's and that's good. We don't you don't I don't need you to sound just like me, you know.

If you go to Italy, you know, there are tons of different accents all around the the country. So, even the idea of a correct accent seems a little bit like a fairy tale in a way.

And for English, we all that's the thing we get so caught up in these names like this is the English language. But, you know, what people are speaking in Northern England, it's called the same thing that I speak, but I can't understand them. Therefore, like, uh, what's uh, what's the point? I can go up there and be like, no, you're not speaking proper and like I'll get out of here mate, you know, you know, But if I went there and I focused on learning the people of Northern England and then trying to mimic their pronunciation, then they'll bring me in like, oh, he's one of us and then like, you know, and then I can come in there and, you know, and then once again fulfill my ultimate goal, which is to make more friends, connect with people deeper, uh, through these random sounds we're making by smacking our lips together.

And uh, so I always get kind of uh, I always get kind of uh defensive whenever someone's like, oh that's not proper English or anyone kind of gets really, you know, bougie about accents and stuff. It's like, man, at the end of the day you're gonna tell me that we need to get rid of this. That's like the funnest thing of my life. In the end of the day, it's all about fun. Stop forget stop being so rigid and uptight. It's about having fun and that's what pronunciation is for me is like, you know, if I if I'm in a room full of Nigerians and they're and they're having this conversation, Uh, I want to I want to connect with them. I want to join in and that means I got to sound like them, you know, so it's the same experience when I'm in Brazil or in Germany or whatever you just got to sound like people and they'll and you can you can connect with them more.

And uh, so one day I just sat down and I just grinded out and I just analyzed every single aspect of all these uh, of all these uh percussion beats I was doing in this group I was part of. And then through that process I came up with like a technique for myself to learn these rhythms. And then uh, I was able to learn like very quickly once I got super analytical about it.

And then uh yeah, so I did that. I played with this drum band and would did like shows and stuff. And then one day I just kind of like coming home from a practice on the bus, kind of drum some out and I just had this kind of epiphany like, oh my God, I could apply that exact same technique to learning how to pronounce phrases because at the end of the day, the same way I'm hitting this drum with a stick is the same way I'm hitting like the top of my mouth with my tongue. It's just about coordination and coordinating it with sound.

So I I went home and like basically adapted that same kind of method I did for the percussion to like a Portuguese song and to a English song. And then I kind of rushed out onto the street and started grabbing random Brazilians and random foreigners and like started testing it out on them. And I and I was testing out this technique and it worked and basically, uh within like a few minutes, I was able to like, you know, teach Brazilians with no English experience how to pronounce a phrase with like a near perfect English accent and then likewise random foreigners to like say these Portuguese sounds and Portuguese phrases with a near perfect accent. And so yeah, I I realized that you can control the variables and break it down and then soon after that I figured out a way to kind of put the experience online. And then uh, yeah and that's that's how it went from there.

Secondly and most importantly, pronunciation is a physical skill. It's a motor movement. If you imagine trying to learn like salsa for the first time or trying to learn how to, you know, ride a bike or something. You don't do it right the first time, right? You can only do it through lots of repetition of the right movement. And in in in most scenarios repeating something over and over again is super boring. But music is by definition repetition and it's the only context for us humans where repetition is not just not boring, but like extremely fun and engaging. So if I wanted to just pronounce that phrase, when's our Skype interview, uh, and I just said, say this over and over again, you'd fall asleep. But if I put like some dubstep music to it and then I like that beat you're like, when's the Skype interview tonight and then you can do it like a thousand times and never get bored and then the muscles in your tongue, lips and throat are going to strengthen and then get that muscle memory needed to speak those sounds in normal conversation without thinking about it.

So when we use songs, we almost always use rap uh, and then only the type of rap songs where the artist is staying more or less true to the tonal pronunciation. But uh, yeah, it's incorrect. You won't learn tones from learning uh Mandarin melodic songs.

And he said one of the really good things about when you're in a beginner stage would be to exaggerate the pronunciation of the native speaker. So you mimic them but in a sort of exaggerated way. And as you start to to get better at it, you of course tone it down. But you can't really under underperform it and then tone it up. I don't know what you think about something like exaggeration if that's.

And once again, if you've if you anyone who's ever learned like a new physical skill in adulthood, uh a dance, a martial art. You notice that the when you first learn it, you exaggerate all the all the parts of the of the of the movement. And then through after a while, you start to tone it down as he said, where uh, you you figure out what the core kind of movements are and how to do it with the minimal amount of energy.

So if I'm speaking like English, I'm trying to learn an r sound. I'd be like, car, and then, you know, uh, I do that enough times for my muscle for my tongue get comfortable. Eventually I can say car and then I can do just the minimal amount needed for the person to hear the r sound and then move on. So, but yeah, you can't do the opposite way. You can't do bad and then tone it up. It has to be over, you know, hyper clock it as they call it and then kind of gracefully fall back down.

And I thought about that. Well, why is it such a big deal for someone to just say, you know, quiero mas tacos and not and then drop their American way of speaking or whatever their native thing is. And I realized if you think about it, uh, after your appearance, um, the way you sound is the number one way people would judge instantly who you are and be like, oh, he's he sounds he's uneducated or he sounds like he's manly or not manly. All that kind of stuff. So, we have a certain identity we associate to the way we sound. And then, uh, we build that up our whole lives and then we're adults and then we want to learn a new language and then all of a sudden we have to sound like a Chinese person. Like we have to just all of a sudden imagine ourselves as a Chinese person. And a lot of people are like really resistant to do that. So instead of being like, "nihau, ni shuo duoyang?" They'll they'll be like, "nihau, wo shi meiguoren."

And and they and the thing is, you have to two things. You have to realize that hey, like, you might feel like you sound stupid to your classmates, but to the one billion Chinese people, if you if you sound that way, you just sound normal. And whatever your normal is is different from other people's normal, you know? Like I was teaching somebody the other day in Portuguese. They have a sound "uh" and they say, "there's a there's a there's a museum of modern of uh, of art, uh, there that would be, uh " and like and to an American, that sounds like, you know, like someone with uh with mental issues or whatever like, uh, "uh". But like to them, it just sounds normal sound. And people giggle when they do it, but it's like, man, to them it's just like, why are you laughing? This is the name of our museum. So everyone has their own thing. You just got to get people laugh at English sounds all the time like the th and the r, they think it's stupid. But, you know, it's normal to us.

And um, one thing I wanted to get a little back to is one of the first things you said was that improving your pronunciation or I guess focusing on it and not just like not caring like you say most people do. Focusing on it brings a lot of benefits. And one of them you said was that you actually start to understand more as well, which I think was an interesting point because I think a lot of people assume pronunciation to be based purely on your output and it doesn't really change your input. But can you talk a little bit about how you developing your own pronunciation helps you to identify others as well?

Secondly, uh, speech is really fast. Like human speech is super fast and the only way we can understand each other is if our brains are able to process it uh super fast. And when you go to a new language, they have a whole different patterns of sounds. So the process of sitting down and like, you know, slowing that's what we do. We slow things down for you and then you you listen to each one, try to fix your mouth around it. The process of really engaging it in the pronunciation at the same time trains your ear. So when you speed it back up again, you can hear it without thinking. So that's basically the the the relationship between the two, um, you know, you you you pronounce things based on how you hear them.

And like back to Chinese tones, for example, they actually done studies, uh, a person who has no uh Chinese background, will actually not hear the sounds. They can they can kind of uh measure what you're hearing, your auditory cortex. They can measure that and they can see that if you're like an American with no Chinese background, you will not hear the tones. And if you can't hear the tones, how can you actually pronounce the tones, you know? So, uh, but if you train it, just like anything else, you can train your ear and then be, you know, just as good as a Chinese person at perceiving it, but then the way you train that is with your mouth, right? So the ear and the mouth are there's a there's a direct connection.

Um, and I guess my question regards to that is what is the role of listening when you're improving your pronunciation? Do you need to immediately start replicating or mimicking or do you do you think that listening and really sitting doing some active listening, trying to make out the sounds before you start actually trying to reproduce them will be uh beneficial?

And uh, yeah, I mean, like if if you just dive into it, definitely you need to hear. Like you definitely you definitely need to hear more than you speak at the very, especially at the very beginning because that you know, you have to hear it first before you can know how to actually pronounce it. But uh, if you um, if you uh, if you so when you first start off, if you start pronouncing right at the beginning, which is what I I I always encourage people to speak from day one and just get in there and start talking. Don't care about at the same time I say care about pronunciation, don't care about it while you're actually talking. Like if something you practice on when you go home, but in the field, just have fun and focus on communication and conversation.

Uh, so yeah, if you do that though and you keep your ear open and you do enough training, things start to autocorrect. The whole idea of the Mimic Method is that you're uh, you listen to how the the other person says it. And then you you you open your ear up to it and you can see the difference between how you would have said it and how he said it. And then slow and then gradually adjust it until you sound like them.

So yeah, so if you go to a place for 30 years, uh, you can open up your ear and really try to fine tune it or you can enforce, reinforce habits you've already had. And um, and that's what happens to people who've been in a place for a long time and they and they speak. They basically have not been able to hear the details and they enforce the habit.

Um, and then if they want to improve it, the first step is listening really, really close in detail and active practice with accent training. And then they're like, oh, now I hear the difference between how I say it and how they say it. But now unlike the person who just started the language, they have 30 years of habit that they have to undo. And that's not easy. It's possible but it's not easy at all. And uh, you know, I have older students and we we hear them they we we put them in the drill training and then they'll get it. They get it. They okay, now I get it and they they pronounce it right. But then like two lessons later, they fall back on that same habit. So it's really difficult like uh, people don't realize how much habit is involved in speaking. We're just uh, I said the word we're just a billion times in my life and I say the exact same way because it's a habit, you know.

Uh, I mean, let's say, you can go out there and speak and stuff, but like I don't know, I personally don't advocate a lot of like hardcore, you know, all that kind of memorization of things. I actually don't advocate uh premature literacy. Literacy is one of the number one things that gets in the way of people's pronunciation because now you're bringing in a new habit and that's a habit of seeing shapes and associating your native language sounds to it and then having to do new sounds. That's a huge issue that, you know, half the pronunciation mistakes I hear are just because people are seeing the word in their head and uh nothing else.

And uh, and uh yeah, and like people just they just you can see it they react to you differently than they react to the the next foreigner who who's kind of separated by that sound divide. And they can even though you look different completely different culture, they'll be like, oh, you get me. I can tell because you're saying my jokes and you're saying them with the same twang that I have, you know?

And now when I learned uh starting to learn Hungarian, the first thing I did was, you know, go to that first chapter in the books that's always like the sounds of the language. And I just listened to them a few times and, you know, it's not perfect. I I still have to uh, I I have I have work to do, but at least I've I've come a long way from not giving a damn about pronunciation and and and coming back to that.

The example I think of is like a keyboard like, you know, if there's there's 40 there's about 43 uh sounds in English, right? Depending on what accent. And like if there was a keyboard with 43 keys and you go there and like you've been missing five keys in your keyboard for like five years and like, man, just stop. Take it to the store, find out what those five keys are, put them in and then start typing, you know?

So, uh, so that's what uh, that's what I even if you don't get it right away, just knowing what sounds are going to trip you up and where they appear is makes you a lot more focused in the and the actual pronunciation problem gets reduced down to like 10% of the size you thought it was.

Um, I was thinking what kind of materials do you like to sort of um supplement something like Mimic Method for pronunciation. What kind of language learning materials do you like in general? Just uh in in short answers.

I uh, I recently uh been learning German and I started off doing uh Pimsleur, which is just audio. And uh, what I did, which I also recommend to people is if you're if you're sitting down and you're doing Pimsleur, it might not be as interesting. The comments the contexts are not like the most, you know, entrapturing. But if you're uh, what I was doing was I would just take walks. And I I've also read that like walking and stuff like that actually activates certain things in your brain for you to memorize things better, which definitely I definitely felt that. But uh, it just makes it more interesting and like I would just put in the headphones, take walks. I like taking walks anyways. And then you're just listening to people talking and you're repeating afterwards.

Uh, because I think people use script as a as a crutch, a lot of people are really uncomfortable with Pimsleur at the beginning because they're like, ah, I can't really hear what they're saying. But if you just if literally just takes a few days to get over the hump and uh, you'll thank yourself later. Um, and uh, I haven't really tried Michel Thomas, but he's also a similar um audio-based thing. So any kind of thing where you do with headphones and you don't you don't do any kind of visual stimuli except, you know, the the ocean or the forest or the people on the street as you walk. That's uh that's what I like to do.

It's just my theory is that uh, when you're doing when you're in the business of language learning, you you have to balance between what people need and like what people are going to want and use and pay money for. And if you give people cool images and like letters they can latch on to then they're going to be like, oh yes, but, you know, people people give up too easy on the other ones.

But uh, but but yeah, just like anything else it's hard if you if you if you don't challenge yourself, you won't learn it. So don't don't use crutches.

And then all of a sudden you learn Portuguese and then when you have that next to an I, it's not a t anymore, it's a ch, right? So, oh, okay. Switch tracks after a billion times for doing a new one. And low and behold, when you see someone, um, trying to say a word in Portuguese, uh, an American or something like that, they're going to say the t instead of the ch when they're reading it half the time because even if they already know.

So, but if I had heard that sound, I learned Portuguese illiterately, and then I learned to read afterwards, uh, in my head, if I had to spell that word, I would have spelled it with a ch, because that's how we spell that sound in uh, in English. And then when I see it on paper, I'm like, oh, that's how you spell that. That's a much better experience than knowing how you spell it first and then struggling with the pronunciation. I'm always delighted when I I find out that like a word is actually two words and I thought it was just one and like I'm delighted to have like, you know, illiterate people problems when I'm learning a language because that means that like I'm really feeling the way it sounds. And uh, but but yeah, unfortunately, um, there's not that many good resources out there that uh give the person the opportunity to learn that way.

Um so if if people are interested in an audio-based method, I would call it a supplement because I don't think you actually, yeah, you learn a little bit of grammar, you learn a little bit of vocabulary and you definitely learn how to pronounce things. But it's not a very comprehensive explaining all the details and, you know, really starting it out. It's I I like the method and and they have a a crazy crazy offer going uh which I wrote about on the blog uh where you can get you can download their entire library for every language and it's just $1 per language. So you can get like 3,000 audio files for $1.

And uh, but yeah, if you can just walk for an hour and do it our those lessons every day and um, that's really uh super helpful.