Double time

I'm not entirely certain how that 'kay' ended up in the wrong line, but as I was consistently saying it in the wrong place, trying to fix it, and spending half the practice saying those lines just behind when I'm supposed to. Timing is everything. Therefore, to check and be certain I had the rhythm down, especially that 'kay', I practiced saying it with the right intonation and pauses in various contexts, at all speeds. Here's a better example of one of my sped up attempts. You can hear that I kept the rhythm of the language constant despite the varying speeds.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

One of the most interesting things to remember in this project is that I'm not just learning a passage,  I'm doing an impression. I wasn't sure what was different about it, but I could tell that I wasn't quite where I wanted to be. To my own ears, I sounded much more native, but I didn't sound like Barbie. Therefore, I spent this bit working on matching her exact voice quality. To do this, I recorded my best attempts with and without listening to her as I recorded. While my rhythm and voice quality were definitely improved by speaking with the recording, I can definitely note for both attempts that my voice quality improved by the second verse. The first verse always sounded off until I got into my stride.

Solving the Multitask Problem

I am a consummate multitasker. My father often expresses his disbelief; he can't understand how I can read, watch TV, play a game, bike, whatever all at more or less the same time. What does this have to do with learning? The problem is that I'm so used to multitasking I have immense trouble settling my brain down enough to engage in deliberate practice. My body and at least half of my brain scream in protest at being asked to sit quietly while the rest of my brain is engaged in concentration. Further, while I consider myself a visual learner- I remember most of what I read- that only applies to content retention NOT to word for word recitation. Between years of vocal performance, marching band, and drama, I connect memorization to movement. As Dr. Oshita put it, I need to dance when I remember things. Previous encounters with deliberate practice have only reinforced the need for movement: I've used it for martial arts, percussion practice, and plays. Beyond the recitation-movement connection, part of my brain needs to be engaged in some background activity for me to concentrate fully. I study with music or television that I've seen before. Contrary to most study advice about minimizing distractions, if I don't have something going on in the background, my brain distracts itself. As pursuant to this project, I'd find myself halfway through a line and wondering if the word was the same in Javanese or looking up an article on comparative lullaby topics or thinking about something else entirely. Surprisingly, I found an answer. I found myself, without any real decision to so, practicing in my car. I spend a lot of time driving, and for whatever reason, while most of my brain and body were engaged in driving, I found it considerably easier to do my practicing. Also, it was isolated, giving me an environment free of people, unlike my office or home. Of course that led to a different problem. While I can manage to practice while driving, I am not so stupid as to try recording while driving, and my brain usually skipped subjects by the time I got back to somewhere I could open my computer. In the future, when I work on something like this, or have a student experiencing problems with concentration: I can suggest taking the exercise for a walk, or giving a presentation while doing it (pointing out things on the screen, making good use of gesture). After this, I have considerably more sympathy and ideas for kinesthetic learning. After this attempt, I sounded more like a native speaker to my own ears, but not so much like Babs. I sounded more like myself. I need to work on reducing the intensity and audible effort it takes me to produce those sounds at those speeds with the reduced aspiration. I also need to go lighter and a bit higher. Honestly, I feel like I'm back at choir practice with my teacher telling me to stand a foot further back from the microphone.

Come back, don't go home.

So I've spent the last week or so working on stress, prominence, and intonation. Binisaya, like most Philippine languages is syllable-timed, not stress timed, which takes some getting used to. What's more, stress does act to distinguish words in Binisaya, Uli means 'return', but uli means 'go home'. Similar, but noticeably different meanings. 
Most longer words have stress on the second to last syllable, e.g. hikalimtan, but words ending in open syllables with an 'a?' or an 'o?' put stress on the stopped vowel, though it isn't always primary stress.
Here's my analysis of the stress in my archetype below. Primary stress for a word is underlined, secondary is in italics, and the most prominent words in the line are in red. Despite being a function word 'sa', which can translate to 'in', 'on', 'at', 'of', or 'the' often carries the primary stress in a sentence because of the nature of the grammar of Philippine languages. Philippine languages belong in a group called either Philippine or Austronesian type voice system languages. When 'sa' receives prominence it's acting almost as a topic marker, indicating an actor or the equivalent of a direct object.



Buhi sa kanunay
Ug di ko hikalimtan
Sa hilom gibati ko.
Ang kamingaw ning dughan

II
Bisag giyam-iran, bisan pa’g gitamay
Molambo ug molipang 
kay_ang gugmang matuod di mamatay

Refrain:
Tuhoi intawn ako
Salig sa gisaad ko
Gugma kining way pagkalaya
Bisa’g ibanlas sa luha

III
Kon ang kasing-kasing ko
Sa palad sakiton
Didto sa kalangitan
Ako kang paabuton



Note to self: paabuton keeps coming out as paabutaen, complete with an utterly American [ae] in there. Really need to work on it. Also, when I get the stress right, I tend to over aspirate. I really need to work on (still) aspiration, or rather, non-aspiration, but I'm finally starting to get the speed and sound of it right, if over-exaggerated. I'll probably spend this week working on aspiration more, because I really need to work on it.

Konsonan at linking

Consonants

The first thing I had to remember when working on consonants is the at rest position. The 'at rest' position, when you aren't saying anything, is more rounded in Binisaya than in English. The result of this seemingly minor change is that the entire language is slightly more rounded, so instead of saying 'b' like I'm popping my lips after putting on lipstick, it's more like I'm blowing a kiss, though not that exaggerated

The second thing I had to work on was aspiration. Voiceless stops (k in particular) are unaspirated in Visaysan. Because of the short duration and, generally, the way most syllables (especially those centered around the vowel /a/) end in a glottal stop, the /k/ sound tends to disappear between /a?/ and /a?/ or /a?/ and /o?/, especially when it is in that environment in a word initial position. In the line /bu?hi? sa? ka?nunay/ for example, the /k/ is produced almost as a click, with the combination of the glottal stop and what should be a /k/ producing a double release effect which does not become a full /k/ sound. Because my archetype is careful speech, a set of song lyrics, this is the most significant instance of linking as well.

As a native English speaker, keeping my consonants unaspirated is incredibly difficult, and I still haven't managed it with the voiced stops, which are also unaspirated, though in careful speech, some minimal aspiration may occur in /b/ and /g/, but not /d/ in the archetype, which I suspect is actually back transfer from English. The word initial stops are especially hard to eliminate aspiration in, I can just about manage it intervocally and it's not terribly hard in the rarer coda positions, but it usually takes at least three tries before I can eliminate the aspiration in a word initial voiced stop.

Interestingly, the lack of aspiration is what produces one of the most characteristic features of a Visayan speaker's English. To native English speakers, a Visayan saying 'big backpack' generally sounds like they are saying 'pig packback' or 'pig packpag' or even 'pig pagpag'. In order to practice that lack of aspiration, despite my archetype being in Binisaya, I have been trying to apply that accent to English speech. If I can get it when I'm speaking English, it should be easier to do when I'm speaking Binisaya. 

I started this attempt with singing, also incorporating my vowel work. This is an old trick I've been using to learn accents for years- if I can sing in that accent, when it is easier to adjust things like duration, vowel placement, and airflow (or at least when I have been trained to do so and therefore find it easier), it's usually a short step to carry that over to my speech. When the variable in question is aspiration, this is much less simple than normal, but to me it seems as to be even more helpful as well- if it's harder when singing and I can do it, the speech should be no problem.

The song I usually use for this is Seven Wonders by Nickel Creek. Here are the lyrics for the first verse and chorus with the Visayan accented words approximated next to the English (I will fix this to IPA at some point):

When shadows fall/ wen shado?s faw

He'll close his eyes/ hil klos his ays

To hear the clocks unwind/ to hirr da klox unwin

Powerless to leash the hands of time/ pawerliss to lish da hans ?op daym

Seven wonders crowed the man/ seben wonders kro?t da man 

Knowing six are gone/ no?ing siks are gon

And how the great illusion lingers on/ an haw da gred iwlusho?n li?ngers awn

It's not the best choice for working on /b/ or /g/, but it is the song I'm most used to working on and is very useful for some of the other tricks- /v/ is /b/,  /f/ is /p/, /z/ is /s/ and coda position /l/ becomes /w/. Even when it isn't working directly on the problem, it helps my mind keep track of what sounds do and do not exist in Binisaya.

 I also practiced unaspirated consonants in English and Binisaya by the simple expedient of putting my hand in front of my mouth, and if I felt my breath strongly, I had to do it again. Luckily, while I can almost hear it when a native Visayan speaker says it, when I say 'big backpack' with no aspiration it sounds like 'pig bakpag' to me and I know what I'm saying. A lot of the time, I end up with popping sounds instead of the actual consonant, but it sounds closer, so I'm still working on it.

The next thing to work on is stress, because that becomes one of the ways to distinguish between word initial /ba/ and word initial /pa/, stressed is /ba/, unstressed is /pa/, and stress differences do create minimal pairs in Binisaya.

Vo'wel Tro-uble

           The first thing I did was identify the five orthographic monophthong vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/ and the two orthographic diphthongs,/ay/ and /aw/. The second thing I did was identify environments: cV cVc, Vc, nV, nVn, Vn, VV, V'c, cVV, VVc, VVn, nVV, based solely on the orthographic representation. Unlike in English, orthographic representation in Visayan is a fairly good representation of the language's sounds. I then identified the minimum lines I needed to cover all these environments (that occur in this script) for as many vowels as occur in them.

Buhi sa kanunay
Ug di ko hikalimtan

Bisag giyam-iran, bisan pa'g gitamay
Molambo ug molipang
Kay ang gumang matuod di mamatay
Tuhoi intawn ako

Bisa'g ibanlas sa luha

Didto sa kalangitan
Ako kang paabuton

I also highlighted the trouble spots I anticipated. It's worth noting that  - and ' both represent glottal stops in Visayan orthography.
What I found was that the vowels were all about environment. Listen to the clip above. That is every /a/ in the archetype laid end to end, cut as best I could to just the /a/ sounds. How many consonants can you still hear? Word final /a/ and /o/ all have glottal stops following them. The marked glottal stops in pa'g and bisa'g are only marked because they occur within a syllable instead of at the end of it. Vowels on either side of and especially between nasals all but disappear into said nasals. The /u/ in kanunay is all but indistinguishable.
In English, the sound of a word is dominated by the vowels. Get the vowels right, and most English speakers brains will fill in the consonants, regardless of which ones you actually say. In Visayan, there isn't a lot of bleed over, so you still have to say the right vowel, but the consonant's place of articulation is what dominates the rhythm.

The thing I had to practice most was cutting off the airflow to my vowels. English vowels tend to be prolonged, only cutting off when they hit an obstruent. Visayan vowels cut off, except for the diphthongs and coda /i/. English also tends to blend vowels. In Visayan, each vowel is distinct, no matter how many of them are in a row. I found that practicing this laying down helped me cut off the airflow, then I moved to doing it sitting up while I still had the correct sound and sensation in my head.
I practiced saying o-i-in, ho-i-in, ho-i-in-tawn, tu-ho-i-in-tawn for an hour before I could get it out at speed with each vowel distinct.
pa'g is still difficult, but that's more a matter of the consonants. I can get the vowel right; it's getting the /g/ in before the following gitamay.
Overall, the vowels in Visayan are fairly low energy as well. Highest energy goes to /s/ followed by the nasals, then either the vowels or initial voiced consonants. The vowels are strongest as diphthongs, followed by the multi-vowel sequences.
Another thing that helped me was using Praat to take a look at exactly what it was I was trying to say.

The final vowel trick I worked with was practicing the sung version. This is a set of song lyrics. Singing tends to disguise or erase accent markers, and I have a lot more control over what I'm doing, especially with the vowels. Also, the vowels are generally elongated and easier to work with individually. 

The next thing I need to work on is definitely consonants and linking.

Rhythm is gonna getcha.

This past week I've been working on rhythm and speech speed.
The first thing I did was create a beat-count, like a metronome for the archetype. It helps me to match the reading's speed and not instinctively go for the song's rhythm. I'm a percussionist, so I do tend to think in rhythms and beats. Once I had a tempo set, it really helped me stay on track.
The second thing I worked on was practicing reading along with the recording. The first dozen run-throughs showed me the trouble spots, the places where I always, always got off rhythm and the places where I had no trouble at all. Green is good to go, yellow is some trouble, red is where I keep messing up.

I
Buhi sa kanunay
Ug di ko hikalimtan
Sa hilom gibati ko
Ang kamingaw ning dughan

II
Bisag giyam-iran, bisan pa’g gitamay
Molambo ug molipang 
kay ang gugmang matuod di mamatay

Refrain:
Tuhoi intawn ako
Salig sa gisaad ko
Gugma kining way pagkalaya
Bisa’g ibanlas sa luha

III
Kon ang kasing-kasing ko
Sa palad sakiton
Didto sa kalangitan
Ako kang paabuton




https://soundcloud.com/murikakari/rhythmakp

Once I'd identified the trouble spots, I practiced listening to the recording and just chiming in on those spots. I spent a full session on the yellow. The next session worked on saying the yellow and green. Once I had the yellow mostly down and incorporated into the full text, I practiced on just the red. So far, I've managed to usually get the first and last syllables correct for the red lines, but find myself rushing or slowing mid-line time after time. Part of it is what I intend to spend the week after next working on, the change over between coda and initial consonants g-g folowed by g-m followed by ng-m then d-d. 
There's also this week's work- vowels. two or three sequential separately articulated vowels all of which are not quite where my mouth wants to place them. o-u o-i-in, u-o. It's easy enough when they are the same/similar vowel, as in gisaad in Line 9 or paabuton in Line 15, but the quick change between low and high causing problems. I'll be spending some time with those vowels in Praat this week, trying to analyze, exactly what's different about my vowels and Barbie's.