About

 

About me

Hi, I am Dr. Nanhee Byrnes, the author of the two books: English Pronunciation: the American Way and  English prosody: Rhythm and melody. English is a second language for me. I started to speak English when I came to the US to pursue a PhD degree. Learning how to speak another language fluently as an adult isn’t easy, to say the least. I tried everything English natives told me I should do: watch TV, speak only in English, and imitate and repeat natives’ speech. Frustratingly, none of these methods seemed to work. I felt that I could write 10 more dissertations, but that I would never be able to speak like an English native. This felt paradoxical, given that I learned to speak my mother tongue, Korean, effortlessly. I searched for a cure for my problem.  

Eventually, I learned about the critical period hypothesis in linguistics, which asserts that adult learners of another language would never acquire a native-level accent. This idea helped me realize that adult learners cannot learn to speak English “naturally,” the way natives do. Trying to learn English by watching a movie is like trying to study calculus without having the necessary knowledge of algebra and geometry.  I realized that, to take my spoken English to the next level, I need to approach it step-by-step building strong foundations. The two foundations are pronunciation and prosody. Pronunciation is about saying words correctly, and to do that we need to learn vowels and consonants of English. Prosody is about speaking in the rhythm and melody of English, and to do that we need to learn syllables, stress, focus words and intonation proper to the English language.  

Not surprisingly, there is no resource that teaches adult-learners of English the pronunciation and prosody of English systematically and comprehensively. Inspired by the spirit, 'Necessity is the mother of invention,' I worked on the afore-mentioned two books:  English Pronunciation: the American Way and  English prosody: Rhythm and melody. The two books need to be studied with the accompanying audio books which are narrated by Dr. John Byrnes. 

Methodology

What does it take to speak English fluently as an adult learner of the English language?  To learn to speak English well, we need to study two areas: pronunciation and prosody. Pronunciation is about saying words correctly, and to do that we need to learn vowels and consonants of English. The English alphabet letters are an unreliable means to represent spoken English sound as there is no one-to-one correspondence between the letters and the sounds. So we should learn pronunciation using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) as it was invented for the purpose. American English has 15 vowel phonemes:

i, ɪ, ɛ, æ, u, ʊ, ɔ, ɑ, ʌ, ə, eɪ, aɪ, ɔɪ, oʊ, aʊ/

English has 24 consonant phonemes:

p, t, k, f, θ, s, ʃ, tʃ, h, b, d, g, v, ð, z, ʒ, dʒ, m, n, ŋ, r, l, w, j

So how should we learn all these phoneme sounds? According to speech-language pathologists, those experts who help people speak better, the best methods for learning pronunciation are phoneme consistency and phoneme comparison. Phoneme consistency means practicing the same phonemes in different words, and phoneme comparison means practicing different phonemes in similar words. The book English Pronunciation: the American Way utilizes these two methods by way of presenting phonemes in different words and using the minimal pair methods.   

Now, even if we say all the words correctly, we are not understood easily when we do not use the rhythm and melody of English. Rhythm means a regular pattern in the flow of things, such as the tick, tick, tick of a clock or the lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub of a beating heart. Melody means the ups and downs of voice. All spoken languages have rhythm and melody, but they differ in the way they occur and perform in speech. Speaking English fluently implies the ability to produce the rhythm and melody proper to English. In linguistics, the study of the rhythm and melody of a language is called prosody. Aspects relating to English prosody are syllable counting, word stress, sentence stress (also called rhythm stress), thought grouping, focus word stress, and intonation. So to speak in the prosody of English, we need to learn all these aspects. 

To approach prosody in a systematic way, linguists divide the flow of speech into units that share similar properties and then organize the units from the smallest to the largest in a ranked order. When speech sound is organized in this way, a prosodic hierarchy is obtained. The units of a prosodic hierarchy from bottom to top are syllables, words, rhythm units, thought groups and sentences. Sentences must have intonation, thought groups must have focus words, rhythm units must have stressed syllables, and syllables must have vowel sounds. To satisfy these requirements we need to learn syllable division rules, word stress, rhythm (sentence) stress, focus word stress and intonation. The book English prosody: Rhythm and melody is designed to help you learn all these aspects of English prosody.