Step together now

As the semester moves towards the end, I need to move towards wrapping up. To that end I started working on combining two aspects of concentration for each recording. This one for example: combines my voice quality practice and my aspiration practice. Interestingly, I found that concentrating on both at once solved the distraction problem, albeit with the addition of a rather ridiculous looking mnemonic gesture where I closed my spread fingers into the shape of a talking hand continuously as I spoke. This gesture reminded me to produce less breath, to round my lips a bit more and to draw my vowels out more fluidly rather than kind of spittting or snapping them out as I do in English. Thankfully, in later attempts I was able to drop the ridiculous looking gesture, but it really helped during the earlier combination practices.

Full of hot air.

The most serious difficulty I've had with this language and this passage throughout the semester has been aspiration. Binisaya does not aspirate initial consonants. This was a difficult thing to catch and the single most salient difference between the accent of a Visayan speaker and an English accent. In English, our unaspirated consonants are limited to stops in consonant clusters. When my father came to visit, I even had to point this out to him, a native Visayan speaker. He'd never noticed the addition of breath when speaking English. After working on this for so long, I think I can safely claim that my cousins could rightly say that Americans are full of hot air. To work on aspiration for this recording, I put my hand in front of my mouth, and if I pronounced a stop with aspiration, I repeated it until I couldn't feel anything during the consonants. This was especially difficult when the stop was in front of a breath heavy lax vowel like 'a'.

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.