Week Two: Practice Session

 Key Words: Transcription and Intonation

In this week (Jan 28th-Feb. 3rd), I started my first "research" week for the self-tutorial project. Having listened to the prototype several times, I started to imitate the archetype several times a day to catch the general features of it.  

Day One:
By comparing my trials and the archetype, I found the following problems with my pronunciation (): First, I found it difficult to memorize all the tonal changes in the flow of speech, which is different from both standard Mandarin Chinese and my hometongue. If I kept all the tones in mind, I had to slow down and lost the rythm of the poem. Second, the archetype has a quite low and flat intonation in general, which made it less obvious to follow.  Third, even for the same Chinese character, the archetype shows some variations. 


Here are the methods I used to deal with the difficulties:
Day Two:

To help myself take records of the changes in syllables and tones, I tried to transcribe the poetry with IPA and then mark the tones on the paper. By comparing the general consonant and vowel difference I mentioned in Week One, I found a more person-specific characteristics of my archetype.  My archetype seemed to use more centralized vowels for "a/A" sound and used "o" sound to replace "ou". As for the consonant, this archetype has obvious features of using aveolar nasal "n" for the glotal nasal "ng". She also use the flap"ɾ" to replace syllable-initial "t".
 

Transcriptions


Day Three
To catch the intonnation changes, I marked the flow by comparing my own trials with the archetype. 

Here is the photo showing the intonnation of the archetype. In this photo, I noticed that the archetype used many dropping pauses after each meaning unit, even though for reciting poem, we normally use various intonation changes even within the same line. In addition, the general flow is very flat, compared with mine (the blue markness part.)







 Here is a record of my intonation changes: When I read the poem, I tended to use more pauses and intonnation changes in the same line. For most ending section, I used dropping inntonation, instead of flat/raising tone.



Day Four& Five
 To first stand in a "comfort zone", I listen and follow the archetype at the same time before I do the independent recording. Then I read with the red-marked sheet to practice the general intonnation pattern, which gave me a better idea of catching the overall feature. Then I practiced without refering to any written text/transcription. Here is what I got:

Week Two-Take Two

Having listened to my recording, I think the transcription and intonation marking did help me to catch a general idea of this archetype. I became more fluent and confident when reading the poem with Wu han dialect. 
 
Day Six
Apart from daily recordin practice, I also tried some online Wuhan dialect to get more autentic samples （See the references）.

To-do List in Week Three:

• Do more research on the vowel features of Wuhan Dialect;
• Try to use Praat to analyze some vowel features in distinctive  syllables;
• Independent Practice everyday.  
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  Refereneces
  
  • A comparison sheet between the Chinese Pinyin and IPA: http://www.zdic.net/appendix/f10.htm
  • A Regional, Traditional  Wuhan Dialect for the same poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3eRoGSkTdc  
  • A modernized Wuhan Dialect Rap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_HsM8wekNc