{"id":1582,"date":"2012-11-26T21:52:45","date_gmt":"2012-11-26T21:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paytonandgrace.com\/?p=1582"},"modified":"2012-11-26T21:52:45","modified_gmt":"2012-11-26T21:52:45","slug":"strange-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/2012\/11\/26\/strange-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Strange Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, there is a perfectly good reason why I have paper taped to my nose, and you get a gold star if you can tell me why…<\/p>\n

Yep, I’m making sure that my [p], [t], and [k] aren’t aspirated–no puffs of air! Not everyone in Phonetics tapes paper to their face, mostly, I just thought it was easier to practice without having to hold the paper up to my mouth the whole time. In Spanish and Indonesian, they never add puffs of air to those sounds. English speakers aspirate all of the time and can barely hear the difference. Now, a few weeks later, it seems silly that we’d have to practice those as we’ve moved along to harder sounds.\u00a0But, not everything is a breeze…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is Payton after we practiced tone for over an hour…tone makes both of our brains hurt. Neither of us are great at transcribing tone, but we have gotten better with practice. Oh, and we’ve learned some interesting facts about “tone-deafness,” also known as “amusia.” Only about 4% of the population suffers from this\u00a0and it has more to do with small pitch changes\u00a0(like in music)\u00a0rather than pitches\/tones used in a tonal language (Chinese, Vietnamese, etc). I guess that\u00a0tonal languages usually\u00a0have changes that are expressed in intervals of half an octave or more, which are easier to hear and reproduce.\u00a0 Here’s one more nerdy fact about tone. Tone is not just a note on the musical scale that you add to a word, but instead is unique to your vocal range (register). So, if someone says a word that has a low-high tone, they may be hitting C then G, but you may have a higher register and may need to produce E then B for it to sound right! Your normal voice pitch\/tone–that’s your “middle C,” if you will. I’m not sure if that made any sense at all, but I thought it was fascinating! We’ve also been watching a series called, “The Hearing Ear and the Seeing Eye” from Answers in Genesis<\/a>, which goes in depth about how amazing our ears are. It’s well worth the hour!<\/p>\n

Today, we took the long-awaited Word Craft Test, which will determine whether or not we have the hard-wiring to do the analysis part of language-learning, also known as Linguistics! If either of us tests high and does well in Grammar next semester, we will have to decide whether or not to stay for the extra two training segments before heading overseas. It’s hard to explain the wonderful world of Phonetics and contrast it with Linguistics or language-learning abilities. God made each of us with differing capacities and skills. Really, much of our ability to succeed at learning two more languages down the road\u00a0will have to do with diligence <\/strong> and teamwork<\/strong>. But we are hoping that the linguistics test will give us\u00a0a little more direction as we choose a country in the next few months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, there is a perfectly good reason why I have paper taped to my nose, and you get a gold star if you can tell me why… Yep, I’m making sure that my [p], [t], and [k] aren’t aspirated–no puffs of air! Not everyone in Phonetics tapes paper to their face, mostly, I just thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1068,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[76011,77568,1037],"class_list":{"0":"post-1582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-mtc","7":"tag-exploring","8":"tag-phonetics","9":"tag-thoughts","10":"entry"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1068"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ethnos360.org\/payton-downing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}