Learning a Foreign Language

Many language teachers feel they do not have sufficient time to give their students prolonged pronunciation training. Some, indeed, devote no time to it whatsoever. In Spanish, there is no clear separation of syllables across word boundaries. ‘All the words seem to run into each other’ is one of the commonest complaints of students attempting to acquire the language – and this feature is indeed one of the major listening comprehension problem areas for the non-native learner. Italian is spoken throughout Italy and is one of Switzerland’s official languages. Jassem provides an authoritative brief description of the Polish sound system. Japanese is spoken by about 120 million native speakers in Japan and by minorities in Hawaii and parts of South America. An appropriate model for foreigners is the educated Tokyo accent.