Discovering English

You'll recall we were doing Total Recall. It led me to some interesting reflections on English. Chinese is supposed to be the language with tones, but as I scrutinized the students' deliveries of their Total Recall lines (this is a couple of weeks ago, am catching up), I came to appreciate how very much we depend on tones in English as well.

For example, when Quaid tells McClane:

What is it that is exactly the same about every vacation you've ever taken?

You. You're the same. (pauses for effect)

... we depend on a high tone on "You" and "You're." "the same" is uttered in a low, dying out tone.

Similarly, in:

To be perfectly honest with you, Doug, if outer space is your thing, I think you'd be much happier with one of our Saturn cruises. Everybody raves about 'em.

... "space" is high; "is your thing" is low / dying out; "raves" is high; "about 'em" low.

In the following:

Let's see...the basic Mars package will run you just eight hundred and ninety-nine credits. That's for two full weeks of memories, complete in every detail. --A longer trip'll run you a little more, cause you need a deeper implant.

... "longer," "more," and "deeper" are high; the words that follow are low / dying out.

Spoken English is full of tonal signals to indicate where the information is.

Also, queries: "How real does it seem?"

"seem" is rising. But the rise isn't always on the ending word:

"What's in the two week package?"

"in" is high; subsequent words are low / dying out.

In the line,

"What about the guy you lobotomized...Did he get a refund?",

the ending word is high-pitched -- but the point of the question is "he". So we have the same high tone for all the words, "he get a refund." (Optionally you can have a yet-higher tone on the final syllable, "fund".)

Then there's "I'll" -- pronounced like "all" -- versus "I'm", where the "I" is pronounced as the aa -- ee sound.

Anyhow, my students were clueless about all this stuff. (And please, in case one of you has a doctorate in this stuff, I realize I'm an amateur.)

I ended up pairing students and working with successive pairs individually. The students quite enjoyed getting my individual accent/tone training, but there's really too many of them to do it this way -- and of course there must be better ways, with equipment and labs and so on. Plus frankly it was sort of painful and boring for me. So we didn't spend more than a couple of classes on this.

My freshmen have been getting movies too. With one of my groups of freshmen we got through the full script of The Matrix, while with the other we did excerpts from the Terminator I script. I told them that if they produced the VCDs we could watch them in class, and they rose to the occasion, so this past Thursday each group saw the movie it'd been studying.

These students don't volunteer much -- it's sad -- but I asked several in both groups what they thought, and everyone I spoke to in both groups said they loved these "great" movies.

Incidentally, let me note that I do think the excessive level of violence in media entertainment is unhealthy. But for us to forgo these movies here would do nothing to help, and I just thought these are indeed great movies, and highly suitable to our purpose.

Oh yes, it's Christmas, isn't it? We're a little less beaten over the head about it over here, but the school's gotten the trees -- students were decorating them today in the Shooting Hotel lobby -- and we're having a party (our first) a bit later tonight.

A happy holiday to you all.