Does anyone have a good grasp of the ins and outs of KK? I’m by no means a trained phonologist, but I’ve come across an inconsistency lately that really gets my goat: i (eee sound) vs. ɪ (ih sound). Take the word “material” for example (here’s a Yahoo!Dict page with the KK transliteration “məˋtɪrɪəl]”–same as you will find in most dictionaries here that use the KK system. Clearly, this is wrong (it’s not pronounced matihrihəl), but when I asked my coworkers how they pronounced it, they still used a long e for the second ɪ–did they just memorize this? The question is why does KK use i to represent long e in words like “eel”, “reel”, “peel”, but the “ɪ” to represent the same sound (or is it?) at the end of words as in “very” and the aforementioned example.
Indeed. I realise Taiwan’s academics are completely in love with it and want to have its babies, but avoid it if you possibly can. They did an experiment with phonics in the UK back in the 70’s, which was swiftly terminated when it produced droves of confused illiterates. Phonetic spelling is for linguists, not language learners.
Well, I think there’s more to it than that… the system was created in the U.S. by some ‘University Professors’ after all. The Wikipediapage is pretty thin though, and contains no references to i and ɪ. It mentions that the pronunciations are somewhat antiquated… not that they’re inconsistent.
The only thing I can think of is that KK is trying to make people talk like suthuhnuhs… as in, “I’m verih pleeased te meet ya.”
it does help ESL kids, because what we think makes sense, often doesn’t…like bicycle…why is the first sound not ‘ck’. Language is weird…there are rules, and then there are the 'it’s like that because I’m your teacher and I say so ’ parts. haha. Not really, but you know what I mean.
I had to change my accent when I came here because I taught KK and there is no awww sound for ‘baaawthroom’
We used to learn D.J. system: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Jones_(phonetician
then when the 9 year public schooling started 40+ years ago, they said we need to learn American English now, so here is K.K. system.
It doesn’t really matter if it makes sense or not. Chinese characters have no phonetic hints (well, some of them do, but only with reference to other characters). You just have to learn what the sound is, which you will if you practice/use it often enough. English is really no different. Speaking is a motor skill; you learn it by doing.
Fundamentally, it’s pointless teaching kids how to write a symbol for a sound that they can’t pronounce in the first place. I have met maybe half-a-dozen Taiwanese speakers of English who can correctly enunciate the full range of English vowels and diphthongs, most of which don’t exist in spoken Mandarin. So phonics becomes a completely abstract exercise - just another piece of crap the poor student has to memorize.
In theory phonetic alphabets are a tool for writing any sound - there is no “correct” phonetic spelling. So Battery9’s bathroom would be bɔθrum. But yeah - KK’s prescriptive approach is a bit rigid, bearing in mind how many different accents there are even in the US. Another good reason for gently pointing out to students that it’s all a huge cartload of elephant bollocks.
The whole process is thoroughly complicated by the fact that there are certain theoretical phonic identifiers for sounds that are pretty much impossible for the non-native English speaking Taiwan person to reproduce.
IIRC, isn’t “ɪ” the (what I was learned up to call, way back in the 1960s) “short” i sound?
Like in “pin” and “in” and “thin”.
Since this is a non-existent sound in Mandarin or Taiwanese as they’re spoken here, the marker is invariably generated as (again, what I would call) the “long” e, as in “leap”, “knee” and “complete”.
I have never encountered a Taiwan person who could accurately produce this sound.
The result is, since kk is 99% taught by native Mandarin speakers, the symbol “ɪ” is taught as being pronounced “eeeee”, although those in the know will insist they’re pronouncing it correctly.
Teaching methods for pronunciation are pretty much rendered meaningless if the instructor can’t make the noises accurately with their mouth.
True story (I’m pretty sure it went like this):
Way back when me and zender used to work at what was then the leading Adult ESL school in Taiwan, Pronunciation courses were offered at the basic levels, to supplement the regular language curricula.
On one occasion, the (local) teacher was observed to write, on the whiteboard (I’m not making this up):
Leader
Ladder
Later
And then choral rep with the class, pointing to each individual word:
I don’t consider phonetic rules to be a particularly effective use of class time. However, I also don’t think they are massively damaging to the student. The exception to this is if a non native speaker tries to teach them. Then it’s a complete disaster. The point is that when we produce sounds we don’t know if we are getting them wrong, so unless you’ve acquired them naturally you really must not try to teach them. Blaming the KK system is missing the point (although it is a very old system). The same problems would occur if people tried to teach IPA who simply didn’t know that they were getting it wrong.
A similar problem can be heard with words ending in unvoiced consonants. OK that is partly down to L1 interference, but IMO most of the pronunciation problems are the result of the misguided teaching of phonics. Having said all this, pronunciation in Taiwan isn’t all that bad. It’s certainly very rarely the major problem I encounter with adult students.
It doesn’t really matter if it makes sense or not. Chinese characters have no phonetic hints (well, some of them do, but only with reference to other characters). You just have to learn what the sound is, which you will if you practice/use it often enough. English is really no different. Speaking is a motor skill; you learn it by doing.
Fundamentally, it’s pointless teaching kids how to write a symbol for a sound that they can’t pronounce in the first place. I have met maybe half-a-dozen Taiwanese speakers of English who can correctly enunciate the full range of English vowels and diphthongs, most of which don’t exist in spoken Mandarin. So phonics becomes a completely abstract exercise - just another piece of crap the poor student has to memorize.
In theory phonetic alphabets are a tool for writing any sound - there is no “correct” phonetic spelling. So Battery9’s bathroom would be bɔθrum. But yeah - KK’s prescriptive approach is a bit rigid, bearing in mind how many different accents there are even in the US. Another good reason for gently pointing out to students that it’s all a huge cartload of elephant bollocks.[/quote]
Actually, finner pretty much states most of my points well ahead of my post, sorry bub, I don’t know how I missed that.
I remember when I first got here, someone asking me to clarify the difference between “sneck” and “sneck”. I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about. When we got back to the office he got a pen and paper and wrote “snake” and “snack”. My wife does similar things and gets irate when I can’t understand what she’s saying, or if I can’t make her hear the difference - because, so I’m told, I didn’t study phonics.
[quote=“Tiger Mountaineer”]Does anyone have a good grasp of the ins and outs of KK? I’m by no means a trained phonologist, but I’ve come across an inconsistency lately that really gets my goat: i (eee sound) vs. ɪ (ih sound). Take the word “material” for example (here’s a Yahoo!Dict page with the KK transliteration “məˋtɪrɪəl]”–same as you will find in most dictionaries here that use the KK system. Clearly, this is wrong (it’s not pronounced matihrihəl), but when I asked my coworkers how they pronounced it, they still used a long e for the second ɪ–did they just memorize this? The question is why does KK use i to represent long e in words like “eel”, “reel”, “peel”, but the “ɪ” to represent the same sound (or is it?) at the end of words as in “very” and the aforementioned example.
[quote=“John Samuel Kenyon’s and Thomas Albert Knott’s A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English”]material mə
`
tɪrɪəl[/quote] archive.org/details/pronouncingdicti00unse
So Oxford’s, Cambridge’s, and Collins’s are different from KK’s in that they have /ə/ in the second syllable where KK has none, and Cambridge’s differs from Oxford’s, Collins’s, and KK’s by having /i/ vice /ɪ/ in the third syllable. But I don’t think your disagreement is about the British dictionaries’ /ə/ vs. KK’s lack of /ə/ in the second syllable or about Cambridge’s /i/ vs. the others’ /ɪ/ in the third syllable. Or have I misunderstood?
I remember when I first got here, someone asking me to clarify the difference between “sneck” and “sneck”. I couldn’t figure out what on earth he was talking about. When we got back to the office he got a pen and paper and wrote “snake” and “snack”. My wife does similar things and gets irate when I can’t understand what she’s saying, or if I can’t make her hear the difference - because, so I’m told, I didn’t study phonics.[/quote]
[quote=“Tiger Mountaineer”]Does anyone have a good grasp of the ins and outs of KK? I’m by no means a trained phonologist, but I’ve come across an inconsistency lately that really gets my goat: i (eee sound) vs. ɪ (ih sound). Take the word “material” for example (here’s a Yahoo!Dict page with the KK transliteration “məˋtɪrɪəl]”–same as you will find in most dictionaries here that use the KK system. Clearly, this is wrong (it’s not pronounced matihrihəl), but when I asked my coworkers how they pronounced it, they still used a long e for the second ɪ–did they just memorize this? The question is why does KK use i to represent long e in words like “eel”, “reel”, “peel”, but the “ɪ” to represent the same sound (or is it?) at the end of words as in “very” and the aforementioned example.
Cheers! [/quote]
I think the [i] sound is used when it is in the stressed syllable (重音) but the KK system uses the [ɪ] symbol when the syllable is not stressed. I really don’t know how the student is supposed to know the difference. The sound at the end of most words ending in Y really doesn’t sound like either one of the two. It’s not an “ih” sound for sure but it’s it’s also not a stressed sound like you would find in “seen” [sin].
[quote=“John Samuel Kenyon’s and Thomas Albert Knott’s A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English”]material mə
`
tɪrɪəl[/quote] archive.org/details/pronouncingdicti00unse
So Oxford’s, Cambridge’s, and Collins’s are different from KK’s in that they have /ə/ in the second syllable where KK has none, and Cambridge’s differs from Oxford’s, Collins’s, and KK’s by having /i/ vice /ɪ/ in the third syllable. But I don’t think your disagreement is about the British dictionaries’ /ə/ vs. KK’s lack of /ə/ in the second syllable or about Cambridge’s /i/ vs. the others’ /ɪ/ in the third syllable. Or have I misunderstood?[/quote]
The confusing point is what I see as inconsistency between long-e (i) vs. short-e (ɪ) in KK. Since KK is American, you’d think it would follow standard American pronunciation. The above are all British dictionary’s (no?) so their pronunciations are not really relevant to the material I’m working on, which should have American pronunciation. If you look at some American dictionaries (MacMillan, Am Heritage, Merriam-Webster), you’ll see they all use a long-e (i) in the third syllable of the word “material”. They also use that same long-e character consistently to represent the long-e sound at the ends of words such as “very”.
ps: thanks for that link to the original KK dictionary… the most recent edition listed on Google Books / Amazon seems to be 1953!
Indeed… I find this quite strange as well–isn’t stress shown with “`” punctuation in most phonetic systems including KK? I would also argue that in American English the ‘ee’ in “peel” is exactly the same sound as the ‘y’ in very, though it might be drawn out longer.
From the 1949 edition of the original KK dictionary linked to by Charlie Jack (tks)… (latest edition seems to be 1953 har har):
[quote]NOTES ON THE SYMBOLS
§6. I. The symbol ɪ is used for accented or unaccented syllables. Though the accented
and unaccented vowels in pity ('pɪtɪ), sitting ('sɪtɪng), visit (vɪzɪt), etc., are sometimes different in
quality, the differences are here ignored, since they vary with different speakers and with the
different sounds that precede or follow. This accords with common practice in transcription. When final, the unaccented vowel in pity ('pɪtɪ) and similar words varies with different speakers
in America from a sound like the ɪ in bit bɪt, or like the first ɪ in 'pɪtɪ, to a sound that approaches
the i in bee (bi). See the ending -y in the vocabulary.[/quote]
So there it is. They freely admit it doesn’t represent one actual pronunciation and seem to side with the southern “ɪ” (ih) for the -y ending sound. Conclusion on KK? Kill it with fire :fume:
