Uttal -the follow up

A couple of weeks back I wrote about a vocal assessment we had in my Swedish language class. By "we", I mean myself and my equally semi-articulate Irish companion. This week we had a follow up session with the vocal tutor, together with an interesting discussion on the topic involving the entire class. Ok, there were only 4 of us who made it to class, but it was a good session just the same.

My results were about what I thought they would be. The majority of flaws picked up on were ones that I already knew as a weakness. The curse of the English language, as spoken in NZ, at least, is that it's relatively melody-less. Which puts it in direct conflict with the Swedish spoken language. It's mainly due to English generally not accentuating vowels. Particularly at the end of words, where the English trend is to fade quietly away.. Swedish, on the other hand, likes to celebrate every letter.

A couple of examples of what I mean:

Swedish: Lärare (teacher), English: Lärar.....

Swedish: Undrade (wondered), English: Undrad.....

Putting the stress on the right place in a word is the key to being understood. Even if your pronounciation isn't great, you'll most likely be understood if you've stressed the correct part of the word. That's the trick, and there's no easy solution for a lazy speaking Kiwi. It's a matter of drumming it into your head, time after time. That's where school is great, because there's someone who's sole purpose in life is to pull you up when you sound like a blithering twat.

As I said, getting the stress right is the key to being understood. Get it wrong (like me) and you be on the receiving end of blank stares and endless mocking.

Kliva  på bussen.... Climb aboard the bus

Kliva PÅ bussen... Literally climb on top of the bus.

There's a few rules of thumb when it comes to stressing a word. The most common is in identifying a long or short vowel sound. As a pretty good guide, if a vowel sits in front of 2 consonants then the vowel has a short sound (vitt) and it's the 2 consonants which get stressed. If there is only one consonant after the vowel (vit), then it's the vowel which has a long sound and is stressed. That doesn't hold 100% of the time, but it's a pretty good guide.

Generally a word will have either one or 2 stresses in it. No more than 2. Most often the stress will lie with the first vowel, or with the first group of consonants immediately after the first vowel. Longer words may have a second stresser, or the stress may be moved to the second half of the word. The words which follow this rule are often words that have been borrowed from other languages. Telefon is an example, as it's obviously not an original Swedish word. Sadly it's not always easy to know if a word was came to Swedish from English, or to English from Swedish.

The trap for young players is when you come across a word that is a combination of 2 or more words. The key for pronounciation here is to break that word up into it's original words and stress them that way. Without having a pause between the words. Sounds simple, right ? If only. Of course you can only do that if your vocabulary is large enough so that you can recognise that this new word is actually a combination of several smaller words that you've met before. So a bit of a double hit there.

I know this stuff, but it's not so easy remembering to put it into practice. Not after 40+ years of speaking one way. Many English speakers, and I fall into this group, don't move their mouth much when speaking. Which makes it difficult to stress words and letters. So as well as a mental learning curve, there's also a physical learning curve for me. Not just changing the language I speak in, but changing the way that I speak. There was nothing like that in the brochure.