I’ve been hearing about some new ideas for language learning lately – namely shadowing and mimicry as language learning methods.  Not having a lot of experience with either, I was glad to connect with Idahose Ness of The Mimic Method.  He has kindly submitted a great guest post about mimicry which I present to you below.  When you’re done reading make sure and swing over to his site and check out his blog, the Flow Series courses and the Flow Forum where you can listen to and share great audio samples for mimicry practice.  Enjoy the post!

A spoken language is nothing more than a set of conventions for communicating meaning through sound. Therefore, there are really only two steps to acquiring a language:
1. Learning how to perceive and produce the sounds
2. Associating the proper meanings to those sounds

The main reason adults struggle so much at foreign languages is because they don’t pay enough attention to how things sound. Instead, they focus almost exclusively on learning what things mean. Since the meanings are ultimately based on the sounds, however, you’re not really learning anything if the sounds are too far off. In a two step process, you can’t afford to skip step 1.

This lack of attention to sound is what inspired my development of a methodology for learning/teaching Mimicry. Training the ability to mimic in a specific language (i.e. perceive and re-produce the sounds of that language) is the best way to master its sound system. Once you can hear an utterance of normal speech and repeat it back EXACTLY without having to think about it, you know your unconscious command of the sounds is solid enough for your to move on to step 2.

So how does one train mimicry? There’s a general misconception that mimicry is an innate skill; you either got it or you don’t. This is NOT the case. Though some people do indeed have a knack for it, anyone can learn to mimic.

In this post, I will describe in detail the techniques I use to teach myself and other adults mimicry in a foreign language.

What is Foreign Language Mimicry?

General “Foreign-Language Mimicry” isn’t actually a real thing; the mimicry ability is language-specific. In other words, the ability to mimic in one language doesn’t necessarily carry over to other languages.

To demonstrate this, I’ve included two audio clips below. In the first one, I say something in complete gibberish. In the second one, I say something in my mother’s native language of Edo (from southern Nigeria). Listen closely to both phrases and try your best to mimic what I say exactly how I say it.

If you are a native speaker of English, you should have had no trouble mimicking the first phrase, even though it was completely nonsensical. This is because these sounds conform to the English sound system, so they theoretically could have been real English words. In contrast, the Edo phrase is made up of sounds and combinations that are completely foreign to you, so mimicry is impossible.

You can mimic English, but you cannot mimic Edo, nor any other language with which you are inexperienced. To understand why this is, you will need to understand how humans process speech sound.

Flow, Sound Infrastructure, and the Challenge of Foreign Language Mimicry

Every language has its own set of acoustic patterns, or as we call it in The Mimic Method – Flow. Because normal human speech is so fast, your brain relies on these patterns to process what would otherwise be an unwieldy amount of acoustic information.

On the speech perception side, your brain only pays attention to the most important acoustic signals, then it fills in the blanks based on the context. On the speech production side, your speech organ relies on motor memory to articulate the sounds without having to consciously think about it. In The Mimic Method, we refer to this auditory perception and speech organ motor memory as Sound Infrastructure.

Your native language Sound Infrastructure will interfere with your perception and production of foreign speech. When you hear foreign speech, your brain picks up on the acoustic cues that it recognizes and fills in the blanks like normal, except now its filling in the wrong sounds. The result is “accented” speaking and hearing habits that most learners fail to shake completely.

It is possible to sidestep this native language interference, however, if you step back and take a closer look at the Flow.

The Anatomy of Flow

As mentioned before, foreign speech at normal speed is too much acoustic information for our brains to process at once. If you slow the speech down and separate it into its separate elements, however, the task of mimicry becomes infinitely more manageable.

So what are the elements of speech? Speech has three salient acoustic features:

• Rhythm
• Phonemes
• Pitch

By “salient acoustic features”, I mean the features of speech sound that determine the meaning. Vary the rhythm, pitch, or phonemes of a phrase and the meaning can change completely. The following examples demonstrate this point simply and effectively:

Phonemes – “Let me be” vs. “Let me pee”.

There’s only a slight acoustic difference between the /b/ sound and the /p/ sound, but our ears our sensitive to this difference due to the existence of very important distinctions like this one in the English language.

Rhythm – “Fifteen” vs. “Fifty”

The phonemic difference between the words “fifty” and “fifteen” is so slight that our brains rely more on rhythm to differentiate them. “Fifty” has a stress on the first syllable (FIF-ty), and “fifteen” has a stress on the second (fif-TEEN). Actually, in the audio file I am saying “fif-TEEN” and “FIF-teen”, but you probably perceived the second one as “fifty” (FIF-ty) due to the stress pattern.

Pitch – “It’s you?” vs. “It’s you!”

English isn’t thought of as a “tonal” language, but it actually is (as are most all languages). The only acoustic difference between these two phrases is the pitch movement. So pitch does indeed play a major role.

The Anatomy of Language Mimicry

Language mimicry is actually a combination of three distinct skills:

• Rhythmic mimicry
• Phonemic mimicry
• Pitch mimicry.

When someone is considered to be a good “mimic,” it usually means that that person has an above average general ability in pitch and/or rhythmic mimicry (phonemic mimicry is purely language-specific).

There is a lot of research supporting the existence of a positive correlation between musical-training and second language learning aptitude. The obvious explanation is that the general pitch and rhythmic perception skills learned in music can be used in speech perception as well. As someone who has studied music since the age of 5, I can definitely identify it has having a major influence on my mimicry abilities.

Not surprisingly, the technique I created – Rhythmic Phonetic Training – is adapted from techniques used to teach music.

The Process of Rhythmic Phonetic Training

As mentioned before, foreign speech in its normal state is too much acoustic information for your brain to process without the proper Sound Infrastructure. That is why, in Rhythmic Phonetic Training, we slow speech down and separate it into its three component parts.

To give you an example, we’ll use RPT to break down the English phrase “I can’t do it anymore”. If you were completely new to English, you would NOT be able to mimic this phrase accurately. So we start by slowing it down, using the free, open-source software Audacity (to learn how I slow it down, check out my post on “How I learned to rap in 4 languages I don’t Speak Using the Free Application ‘Audacity‘”)

Now even though the speed has been reduced, it will still be challenging for a newbie to mimic, which is why we need to isolate each feature. Let’s go through how you isolate each of the three features.

Rhythm

Rhythm refers to the alternation of stressed syllables, unstressed syllables, and silence. When it comes to mimicry, rhythm is the most important feature of speech. The brain relies on the rhythm to parse out the other two acoustic features of speech, so a solid command of the rhythm is absolutely essential.

To “isolate” rhythm is synonymous with saying “keeping pitch and phonemes constant.” For pitch control, you choose one pitch and stick with it, i.e. talk in a monotone:

For phonemic control, I reduce the phrase to something I call Universal Rhythmic Binary (URB). In URB, all stressed syllables are (arbitrarily) replaced by a loud “DA,” and all the unstressed syllables are replaced by a quiet “di”. So “I can’t do it anymore” would sound like:

Listen closely to the two and see if you can hear the relationship. Then practice mimicking it. Because there are only two options for syllables, the actual pronunciation part is easy, so your brain can focus on internalizing the rhythm.

Phonemes

Phonemes are the actual speech sounds that you articulate with your speech organ. Without a doubt, the phonemes are the most important feature of speech. So this is where most of the legwork is done when training foreign language mimicry.

Our brains process phonemes rhythmically in syllables. In the audio file below, I clearly enunciate each component syllable of “I can’t do it anymore”:

Before moving on, I need to point out something about orthography. In my article, “The Virtues of Illiteracy: Why Written Word is the Language Learner’s Worst Enemy“, I explain how learning a language through writing can be extremely problematic, since things are not always pronounced the way they are spelled. In this case, a foreigner learning English through writing may struggle to understand me when I say “I can’t do it anymore” due to the following spelling-pronunciation inconsistencies:

• I completely drop the /t/ in can’t
• The /t/ from “it” is actually realized as something different from a /t/ (it’s an alveolar flap /ɾ/)
• The ‘a’ from “anymore” is actually pronounced as an /ɛ/, which is typically written with the letter ”e’ in English (i.e. bed, check, met, etc.)

You may not see what the big deal is as a native English speaker, but the kind of mental friction this causes in an English-learner’s head could start a fire. To avoid these issues, I always rely exclusively on the International Phonetic Alphabet when transcribing speech sounds. So “I can’t do it anymore” would be written -

aɪ…kẽ…du…wɪ…ɾɛ…ni…mɔ˞

As strange as these symbols may seem to anyone unfamiliar with IPA, they’re really not that difficult to learn. Plus the amount of time it takes to really appreciate IPA symbols is nothing compared to the years it will take to unlearn all the bad pronunciation habits caused by foreign script interference.

Phonemic Menus and Speech Therapy

Every language has what’s called a “phonemic menu” of all the possible sounds in that language. A large percentage of the “Sound Infrastructure” I mentioned earlier is the simple expectation of phonemes and syllable combinations. In other words, no sound should be “new” to you, since any language will just be recycling the same syllable from the same list all the time.

Fortunately, most of the sounds of any language’s phonemic menu will also exist in English, so the real task is to simply master the sounds that do NOT exist in English.

Going from English to French, for example, the following phonemes are missing:{ø…œ…ɛ̃…ɔ̃…ɑ̃…ɥ…ʁ…χ}. Of course, these are also the sounds that English speakers struggle with the most.

As difficult as these sounds may seem at first, they amount to nothing more than coordinated movements in the mouth. People give up so easily in language when they can’t pronounce a sound, thinking that it’s impossible for them to learn as adults. But there’s no way you can tell me that it’s possible for an adult to learn the coordination for doing a backflip or juggling ten things at once and NOT possible for him to learn the coordination for flicking his tongue in a slightly different way than he’s used to.

You can learn to pronounce any human speech sound with the proper targeted speech therapy drill. Take the French /y/ sound for example. Most English speakers fail to distinguish this sound from the /u/ sound, but it is exactly this distinction that differentiates the word “nu” (meaning “naked”) from “nous” (meaning “we”). Try to listen for the distinction below:

As widespread as this error is, the sound is actually very easy to perform once you build the muscle awareness in your lips and tongue. I have my Flow of French students start by making the /i/ sound. Then, I have them purse (round) their lips as much as they can while focusing on NOT moving their tongue at all; this creates the /y/ sound. If you alternate between the two in the same breath, you will build an awareness of the muscular movements that differentiate the two sounds

Like learning to pat your head while rubbing your belly, it can be a bit of a mind-screw at first, but once you can separate the two motor movements it’s actually quite simple. All it takes is a little practice and more of a commitment to getting the sound right.

Pitch

For several reasons, pitch mimicry is the trickiest skill to teach and learn. Our intonation when we speak is such a fundamental aspect of our characters that it’s hard to switch to something completely new. You literally have to “act” like a completely different person when speaking with foreign intonation.

A lot of people have a psychological barrier to “acting”, and even if they get over it, it’s still a skill that takes some time and focus to develop. But once again, it can be developed just like any other skill. You just have to pay attention and practice.

Pitch isolation is fairly straightforward. Since pitch is meaningless without the rhythm, the only thing you have to keep constant is the phonemes. Here’s “I can’t do it anymore” with the syllables replaced with a nasally “dɛ̃” sound:

As silly as it may seem to spend time mimicking things this way, this sort of pitch mimicry training is indispensable to highly-tonal languages like Chinese. Most people learn tones the wrong way and focus on memorizing which words are which tones.

Tones don’t exist in isolation, but rather in patterns, and the only way to learn those patterns is to mimic.

In my Flow of Mandarin course, I add a “Tonal Infusion” to the normal Rhythmic Phonetic Training regimen. Take this line, for example. “Zhei.ge shi shen.me yi si?”(这个是什么意思？）. In the audio clip below, I include the original audio and a “Tonal Infusion” for the student to focus exclusively on mimicking the tonal flow of the phrase.

Now this is important – instead of having the student study tone markers for each syllable, I never include any sort of written indicator of the tone. Instead, the student is to listen closely over and over again and practice mimicking along until the pitch is perfectly lined up.

I’ve come to realize that tone markers can really screw a person up. It most cases, it just distracts the learner from focusing on the sound, and tonal mimicry can only be learned with a lot of focus on the acoustic nuances. Since removing tone markers from my courses, all of my students have improved their tonal mimicry skills substantially.

Musical Accent Training and Language Feedback through Soundcloud

To re-iterate – Mimicry is a language-specific skill that can be trained. I just outlined the basics of language-mimicry, so it’s up to you to apply this knowledge to your own teaching/learning programs. In my own Flow Series Courses, I focus a lot on music, as it makes the task of studying sound in gruesome detail much more interesting. Also, the repetitive nature of music is vital to getting the necessary reps in for shaping your perception and motor skills.

I also rely on the social sound-sharing service, Soundcloud to give feedback on my student’s pronunciation. After learning a song lyric, the student submits it to my Soundcloud Dropbox for feedback, and then I use the timed-comments feature to pinpoint the exact error.

Here’s an example of me giving feedback to my friend Meryem Saci, the lead singer of the Multi-Lingual Hip Hop group – Nomadic Massive. She was preparing to sing a Brazilian song for a show in Los Angeles, so I helped her clean up her Portuguese pronunciation.

If you wish to learn more about my techniques for breaking down songs for mimicry purposes, I recommend reading my guest post “How I Learned to Rap in 4 Languages I don’t speak in 1 Night Using the Free Application ‘Audacity’”. If you are teacher interested in using Soundcloud to give students quality feedback on their mimicry skills via Soundcloud, I recommend reading my post: “How to receive language feedback for free and provide it for profit using Soundcloud“.

If you have any other suggestions regarding technologies and/or techniques for teaching mimicry, please share in the comments board.

Until then, keep on Flowin’

• Check out my Flow Series Courses if you’re interested in developing your mimicry skills in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, French, or Portuguese.
• If you’re a teacher, join The New Sound Educators League to learn how to build a scalable language-teaching business using Soundcloud.
• For everyone else, I encourage you to submit your language-learning sounds to The Mimic Method Flow Forum on Soundcloud for feedback from others in the community, as well as subscribe to The Mimic Method Facebook Page to discover new music in different languages.