Week Nine: Supral Segmental Practice and Wholistics Practice

This week, I tried to practice with the transcribed scripts twice a day and recorded my performance every time. Then I compared my pronunciation with the archetype and took notes on the differences and inaccurate sections in my audio files. As I kept giving corrective feedback to myself and kept track of the progress, I found the following problems in my practice:

1. Nasalized vowels:
    As I tried to practice reading the poem sample, one section that requires more practice is the nasalized vowels in the archetype. When I listened to my sample and the archetype, I found that I have "over-nasalized" many vowels which actually does not need nasalization, since they are not in nasal vowel cluster.

[To make it easy to exemplify, I hereby use Pinyin instead of IPA to compare the differences]

e.g
a.  kang qiao (I nasalized the diphthong in the second character which is not nasal in the archetype; however, for the first one, I did not nasalize it sufficiently )
b. le (in this particle "了"， I should have first changed the approximant into alveolar nasal /n/ and then nasalize it, but when I paid more attention to the change of vowel "schwa" to /au/, I forgot to nasalize it properly.)


2. Approximants and nasal stops in syllable initial position:
e.g. As I explained in the previous section, /l/ and /n/ are "mixed" used and the Wuhan dialect even uses a nasalized later approximants to replace the counterparts of /n/ and /l/ in Mandarin Chinese. The systematic changes are not easy to automatized for me, so I did more practice on this section:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5h1i7ux5j55pjhx/Practice%20Week%20Nine.wma

3. General tones:
I still cannot grasp the "whole" tonal system of Wuhan dialect now, which made me a little bit worried. I asked my archetype provider for help, she recommended that I should listen to more authentic examples, instead of just memorize the tones for each character. So I began to listen to her daily speech and imitate some online examples to achieve "tonal" automativity.

My practice sample based on the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sehGj07YLQM 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tfbyldvainbvgnc/initation%20of%20dialectual%20movie.wma 

Having practiced with the native speaker and the online video, I got less dependent on the scripts and notes for tonal changes. In the last week, I planned to practice with more authentic examples in addition to the normal archetype practice. I will also record and compare my progress in the past two weeks to sum up my project.