How do you get your students to say the ‘O’ sound as in boat, coat, loaf etc? They all seem to have a problem saying ‘O’ by itself and it usually comes out as a sort of ‘oh-oo’ sound, with the ‘oh’ being slightly harder and flatter than it should be. And even when they do get close when I try to get them to put the sound into a word is usually comes out sounding like some sort of mangled ‘or’ or ‘o’ as in ‘not’ sound. ie ‘loaf’ becomes ‘lorf’ and ‘note’ sounds almost the same as ‘not’.
Draw a small square on the board. That’s the Chinese character for “mouth”. The sound in that character is the long “o” sound.
That may help.
Concentrate on the long ou sound. In my experience they have no trouble with making a dipthong of long o and u.
I don’t know how old your students are. I use a lot of songs in my classes. B-I-N-G-O is a good one for the long o sound. I also like to write my own words for songs using familar tunes like, Shoo Fly and Famer in the Dell. After my students get the basics of the song I encourage them to come up with more target words and we sing the songs agian with new words.
yes this is always a tough one. i have good results emphasizing the lip motion, from fairly open, to small with pursed lips. i find I have to do this with many words with a consonant following an o, like the examples you mentioned, some others coming to mind past tense verbs like rode woke drove, won’t, etc. the king of difficulty in this department seems to be o with a final n, like “own”, “thrown” etc. interestingly a word like “go” or “know” never seems to be a problem. i don’t mind if i get a bit of an oh-oo effect at first as they will eventually get the hang of it and be able to do it more naturally.
This is what I do, too, to get the kids really emphasize the final ooooo sound. I not only have problems getting them to say the long o sound nicely, but also find it hard for kids to pronounce the long a sound nicely. It’s just like what the OP said about the o sound. But when I persistently get them to say Aeeeeee, they kind of get it eventually.
I find it’s the short ‘o’ they can’t handle. Mainly because they’ve been taught Americanese for so long before I get to them.
haha, easiest vowel for me! open wide, aaaaaahhhhhhhh just like that bopomo. my students will never get that wrong.
Thanks for the replies.
My students are mainly junior and senior high school students and older. They also include she who must be obeyed whose English is pretty good, but just can’t seem to get that sound. Maybe it is an ‘Americanese’ thing (I’m a brit) but I don’t notice the problem when I speak to North Americans. If that was the explanation I wouldn’t try to correct it. I only jokingly try to correct the ahhh sound into a British flat o as in not unless the students specifically ask for it. But the ‘oh’ thing seems to be a real problem.
Puiwaihin, I think that words like kou may be part of the problem as they have that kind of oh-oo sound (or at least that is what I hear when the wife speaks). I think I will have to go down the long haul route suggested by tempo gain. I thought about using some computer software to show voice patterns but I’m not sure what is available and I think it would take more time and resources than I have access to. I did manage to use that audacity software to show the oh-oo sound to my wife, so at least she can visualise the difference even if at the moment she can hear it.
Thanks again all.
Maybe you’re confusing /uo/ with /ou/ (and perhaps the kids are as well)? Or maybe I just don’t hear the problem.
Try listening to it at:
chinawestexchange.com/Mandar … th_f/k.htm
Click on the /kou/ sound. Do you still hear the oh-oo sound? I don’t hear any at all.
There’s a scene in Office Space where one of the characters tells you how to pronounce the “o” sound.
I don’t think it’s right to teach them the pinyin ‘ou’ sound from ‘kou’. That’s not really the same as an English long ‘o’. It’s not long enough or rounded enough.
Brian
[quote=“Bu Lai En”]I don’t think it’s right to teach them the pinyin ‘ou’ sound from ‘kou’. That’s not really the same as an English long ‘o’. It’s not long enough or rounded enough.
Brian[/quote]
The sources I have (Norman, Li and Thompson) list the two sounds as having the same IPA representation and I don’t detect any significant difference between them. Again, in the sound sample I have it sounds totally right to me.
Anyway, I’d only use that as a reference and after repeated failures to get them to say it right using other means.
I do NOT advocate teaching English by giving the Chinese phonetic equivalent. That will lead to a lot of errors. But there is a place for it as a reference.
Nah. There’s a huge difference between ‘co-’ and ‘kou’ or ‘zhou’ and ‘Joe’ or ‘rou’ and ‘row’.
Brian
The only difference I detect is tone. Nothing dealing with difference in place or manner of articulation. You do elongate the sound on a 3rd tone-- but then when teaching a sound you would generally exagerate it anyway.
Where are you getting the data saying that there’s a difference in how they are said? I’ve asked a few people (none linguists, though) and checked a few additional sources but haven’t seen anything to contradict what I am hearing myself.
At this point I suspect it’s my Chinese that is mistaken.
Maybe this should continue in the Learning Chinese fourm. 
But if you have any sources to quote I’d appreciate the pointer.
The “Standard” American English diphthong [ou] (IPA), as in “toe”, is for all practical purposes the same sound as in the “Standard” Mandarin word 歐 [ou] (IPA).