Entries Tagged 'Communication' ↓

Just for fun, I ran an experiment last month advertising this blog using Project Wondeful. I spent about $8 to place small graphics alongside popular web comics such as Buck Godet. There was one honest banner (Ideas for Free), and on less honest banner (Sex for Free). No surprise; sex sells.

• Budget: $10.00
• Actually Spent: $8.45
• Ad Impressions: 1,520,000 (Yikes!)
  
• Clicks to the Blog: 617, for a 0.04% click through rate.
• Readership Before Ads: About 2 or 3 per day
• Readership During “Free Ideas” Ad: About 15 per day
• Readership During “Free Sex” Ad: About 30 per day
• Readership After Advertising: About 2 or 3 per day
• Odd Controls: I only updated the blog once during the advertising period.

Well, this was fun! I got my $8.45 worth of entertainment.

Problem: The ear stops hearing some foreign language sounds unless trained young.

Solution: Train young people on all the foreign language sounds in a carefully constructed song.

One set of challenges in learning a language are the difficult sounds. A Russian speaker learning English agonizes over the ‘th’ and ‘w’ sounds. Learning German, everyone agonizes over the ‘ch’ in ‘Ich’. Learning most Asian languages triggers issues over recognizing tonal differences.

How about a song, reminiscent of “Frere Jacques” that carefully uses all these? Instead of telling the exact story, it could be one long multilingual story. For example imaging a story along these lines:

Harold was the happy boy,

He gave two sandwiches to a witch,

The witch said, “Thank you very much”,

And Harold’s world began to switch,

—

Harold flog nach Deutschland, (Harold flew to Germany)
….

And then to Russia, then to Israel, etc.

This allows the song to be song in round, to start in different countries, and allow for variations. The whole song would be pretty hard to sing, because of all the new words.   When the child decides to learn a language as an adult, his or her ear will still be able to distinguish the specific sounds of the new language.

Does anyone have a list of all the difficult sounds in human languages?