December 22, 2004 - Lida Baker: Five New Year's Resolutions for English Learners

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Broadcast: December 22, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: English teacher Lida Baker suggests five resolutions for people who want to improve their English in the New Year.

LIDA BAKER: "My first resolution that I would recommend people make is to spend a certain amount of time listening to English -- and it can be five minutes a day or it can be 10 minutes a week or it can be whatever suits a person's work schedule, life schedule or whatever. But it's really important to set goals and to stick to them. And it would be very helpful if people had Internet access to do this, because what I'm going to recommend is listening to sites that have scripts included. "

RS: "What do you do if you don't have access to a computer, how can you listen better?

LIDA BAKER: "Well, almost everyone all over the world has access to pop music. And one of my resolutions would be to spend time listening to English music. The advantage of listening to music is that it's a really wonderful way to work on your pronunciation, because you get a feeling for the stress and the rhythm of the language when you're singing. And also music is full of idioms, so it's a terrific way to learn colloquial vocabulary and to work on your pronunciation. And a third advantage of listening to music is that it's really easy to remember.

"So for people who have access only to a radio, even they can do something to improve their English just by listening to pop music. And I might add, if you do have access to the Internet, there are lots of Internet sites that will give you the lyrics to pop songs. Do a search, type 'music' or 'songs' plus 'lyrics,' and you'll find sites where you can type in the name of the song and it will give you the lyrics to the song.

RS: "So spend a little bit more time listening, or have a goal for listening. Listen to English music. What else?"

LIDA BAKER: "Something else I tell my students, and they're always surprised when I tell them this, is read children's books."

AA: "That makes sense, though."

LIDA BAKER: "Yeah. Why do you say that?"

RS: "Well, few words."

AA: "It's simpler."

RS: "Direct, simple. Lots of pictures."

LIDA BAKER: "There you go."

RS: "That puts it in a context."

LIDA BAKER: "There you go. And the other thing is, you can find children's books at all levels. If you were a total beginner in English, you start with books that have just a few words on the page and lots of pictures, and you can work your way up to books that have relatively speaking more text and fewer illustrations. But again, children's books are very motivating. To this day I enjoy reading the books that I read to my daughter when she was a little girl."

AA: "So now we've got the listening to the radio, listening to music, going online and looking for scripts of programs to go with the audio, reading children's books. What's your next resolution?"

LIDA BAKER: "Learn a new word every day. And if you don't have time to do it every day, do it every other day. Again, pick a realistic goal. Choose your word, look up the meaning, but then don't stop there. Look at the examples in the dictionary for how the word is used. Is it used as a noun? Is it a verb? Is it used to talk about people? If it's an adjective, does it have a positive meaning or a negative meaning? So look for what's called the connotation of the word. And then, when you're sitting in your car, or you're walking to the bus stop or sitting on the bus, practice. Put the word into your own sentences. Think of ways that you could use that word.

"And so now we come to our last resolution, which in a way is the most difficult one, because my last resolution would be, even if it's only very occasionally, talk to native speakers every chance you get."

AA: Lida Baker from the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, with five New Year's resolutions that people can make to improve their English.

RS: Before we go, as we come to the end of another year, we note the passing of Mary Newton Bruder, the linguist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, known as The Grammar Lady. She dedicated her life to helping people improve their grammar. We are grateful for her contributions to Wordmaster. Mary Newton Bruder died in August at the age of sixty-four.

RS: That's all for Wordmaster this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. And Internet users can read and listen to all of our segments at voanews.com/wordmaster.

RS: Wishing you all the best this holiday season, with Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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December 15, 2004 - Pronunciation, Part 2

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Broadcast: December 15, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: more of our conversation with Jim Tedder, the creator of VOA's online Pronunciation Guide.

RS: It used to be that when announcers at VOA needed to know how to say the name of someone in the news, they would have to look it up in a file of index cards.

AA: Then, about five years ago, Jim Tedder got the idea for a system to make this information available -- complete with audio -- to any user of the Internet.

RS: Today Jim is still responsible for keeping the Pronunciation Guide stocked with the latest names in the news. But it's not always easy.

JIM TEDDER: "This is kind of a funny example. When I go to the Urdu Service at VOA and ask for pronunciations about words from Pakistan, it usually starts an argument. If I ask for a single pronunciation, I'll get 10 different variations because I'm talking to someone from northern Pakistan or eastern Pakistan or western, or one tribe or another. So you have to sometimes just make a -- take a consensus and say 'OK, I'm aware of the fact that it's said 10 different ways. For consistency's sake, I'm going to enter it this way."

AA: "Well, now, which brings us to a question from a listener of VOA News Now named Harry Wang in Shanghai who says -- and am I pronouncing that correctly, Shanghai?"

JIM TEDDER: "That's one way to say it, sure. [laughter]"

AA: "How should I say it?"

RS: "What's the standard VOA way?"

JIM TEDDER: "A little more 'shong' rather than 'shang,' but 'shang-hai' is fine."

AA: "Well, he has noticed that some of our announcers on News Now apparently have switched between saying the word 'either,' e-i-t-h-e-r, they're pronouncing it either 'ee-ther' or 'eye-ther,' and he wants to know which is more correct or considered more acceptable by most Americans. And [he] goes on to say, 'Should it be the rule set by your station or just simply a personal preference?'"

JIM TEDDER: "Well, this goes back to what we talked about earlier. It's a request that I think all human beings have, a desire, that somewhere there is an absolute that says 'this is right and this is wrong.' The truth is, having studied this for many years, no such standard exists.

"When Mister Wang wrote to us -- and I appreciate him getting in touch, it's a very good question and I understand how it could be confusing for an international listener. If you go as I did -- upon reading his letter, immediately I went to the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

"In this case, the largest one we have, the most complete, is the Third International Unabridged -- a huge, thick, heavy-to-carry-around book. And it gave, as I suspected, 'ee-ther comma eye-ther.' In other words, they're saying with a common word like this, it is said by some educated people as ee-ther; other educated people say eye-ther. They make no distinction that one is a better way to say it than the other."

RS: "I think here, as a former foreign language teacher, I would prefer my students just to be consistent. I really wouldn't care which one they used. I just would prefer that they would be consistent the way they pronounce words."

AA: "It's like the word 'often' [aw-fen] -- or 'awf-ten,' right? -- where you've got half the people say it one way and I remember seeing someone point out that, for the ones who say it one way, the others think they're illiterate and uneducated, and the same way vice versa. So which do you say? Do you say 'aw-fen' or 'awf-ten'?"

JIM TEDDER: "I say 'aw-fen' and leave the t out, and the only reason I do is because that's what I was taught when I was in school. It's a habit that I have kept over the years. And I agree with you. When I was in school my teachers, my English teachers, would say 'don't say awf-ten; that's what uneducated, ignorant people say.' And I grew up believing that.

"But, indeed, if you look at what the lexicographers say, they say 'no, we're not saying one is better than the other. We're saying both are said by intelligent, informed, interested people.'

"So what happens for a foreign listener -- and it makes it more difficult in our language -- is, they have to be aware that one can say that word as aw-fen or awf-ten, and we hope that there's not confusion there, but I'm sure there is to some degree."

RS: VOA's Jim Tedder was on the phone with us from his home, since he works evenings and we don't get to see him much.

AA: Besides being one of the voices of Special English, Jim Tedder is the keeper of VOA's online Pronunciation Guide. That's where you'll find phonetic spellings and audio files to go with about five thousand names in the news. It's all free, and you can find it at voanews.com.

RS: And if you go to voanews.com/wordmaster, you'll find our weekly segments going back to 1998. If you ever have a question, just as Harry Wang in SHONG-hai did -- write to word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.

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December 8, 2004 - Pronunciation, Part 1

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Broadcast: December 8, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: VOA's prince of pronunciation.

RS: Jim Tedder has been with VOA for 25 years. He works in the English production branch, and is one of the news readers in Special English. But he's also the creator -- and voice -- of the online VOA Pronunciation Guide.

AA: The guide is used not only in-house, but also by competing international broadcasters and by American radio and TV networks. In fact, just about anyone in the world who needs to know how to say a name in the news might find it just a click or two away.

RS: Stay tuned for the address. But first, some background from Jim Tedder. Since our schedules are different, we called him at home to talk about the pronunciation guide.

JIM TEDDER: "It's been online about five years. It now has about 5,000 names in it, spelled phonetically and then pronounced with an audio file with it. And it's been a tremendous success. It's been a great deal of satisfaction."

RS: "Let me ask you something, Jim. How do you know what's right? How do you know how to pronounce a name or a word?"

JIM TEDDER: "It's a strange situation, in that people will ask me that question a lot. They ask it as if they know or think or suspect that somewhere, written in stone by the hand of God, there is a correct and a non-correct, a right and a wrong way, to say things.

"When you're dealing with a person's name, we have a methodology that we have set up, and the methodology is pretty simple. When dealing with a person's name, we try to go to that person himself or herself and say 'how do you say it?' Most of the time this isn't possible when you're dealing with international leaders. So we go down one notch on the priority list and we contact their office. If that doesn't work, the next line down is that I go to the various language services at VOA and talk to people there.

AA: But when it comes to geography, there's a different methodology.

JIM TEDDER: "Again, let me refer to what I said earlier: For person's names, we want to say the name as that person says it. Place names are an entirely different matter. We chose many years ago at VOA to use the Merriam-Webster Geographic Dictionary as our main guide.

"When we talk about a place name, I get amused a lot of times because people will say 'well, what's correct? Webster gives two different pronunciations.' Well, if you read the fine print in the front of Merriam-Webster's dictionaries, essentially what they say is, they are not the pronunciation police. They're not in the business of saying 'this is correct and that is wrong.' What they are in the business of doing is have their lexicographers do research and say 'we have tried to find out how to pronounce this place name, and we have found that most people in that area of the world, in that area of the country, pronounce it this way."

"Or they may have a comma after that pronunciation and have another pronunciation. Most people in the United States, I think, who have not read the methodology would say 'oh, OK, Webster's prefers the first pronunciation because they listed it first.' Big mistake. What Webster say is, 'we have to put something first. We aren't saying this is preferred over that. What we're saying is that educated, informed individuals -- some of them say this, some of them say that.'

RS: So what do international broadcasters do when they try to find how to pronounce a place name -- and there are variations?

JIM TEDDER: "And here's an example. There's a prominent city that shows up in the news every day almost in Iraq, M-O-S-U-L. That's one spelling of it. It can be pronounced a number of different ways. But one way is mo-SOOL, the other is MO-sill."

RS: "Very different."

JIM TEDDER: "Very different, to the point where I think an international broadcaster, editors, should say we're going to standardize this. We're not going to say that one is right and one is wrong. But for the sake of our listeners' understanding what it is we have to say, we're going to settle on this and make that our standard and hold people to that. At VOA over the years sometimes that has been enforced to a greater degree than others. Right now it's not being enforced for place names. For persons' names, again, a different item."

AA: We'll hear more from VOA's Jim Tedder next week. So how do you find the VOA Pronunciation Guide? You can go to voanews.com and click on the link at the bottom of the page. You'll also find a link at our site, voanews.com/wordmaster.

RS: One technical note: Jim says he would have preferred to use the International Phonetic Alphabet for the entries. But it's pretty complex for most people who aren't professional announcers. So you'll find a system of phonetic pronunciation that's easier to use.

AA: And here is one more address. It's our e-mail address: word@voanews.com. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

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December 1, 2004 - College Slang

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Broadcast: December 1, 2004

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: college slang.

RS: When Tom Wolfe was doing research on college slang for his new novel, "I Am Charlotte Simmons," he consulted some experts. One was Connie Eble, the author of a book called "Slang and Sociability: In-Group Language Among College Students."

AA: Connie Eble is an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

CONNIE EBLE: "One day I came to my office and there was the flashing red message light, and when I picked up the phone to retrieve the message, there was this very friendly voice introducing himself as Tom Wolfe and telling me who he was -- and of course I knew who he was, but I thought that was very nice -- and telling me what every author wants to hear, music to my ear, that 'I was reading your book, and I had some questions.' [laughter] And he said he would like to talk to me, and so I returned the phone call and he said he was coming to North Carolina for purposes of research on a novel he was writing, and could he set up an appointment to see me when he came. And that's exactly what he did."

AA: "Some of the slang terms, or I guess a good number of the ones that I've read so far in Tom Wolfe's book, we couldn't say on the radio, so let's stick to some that maybe we can. What are some slang terms that are current and that catch your ear?"

CONNIE EBLE: "Well you know, to tell you the truth, not many catch my ear because students don't use slang around me very much. For the most part, when they talk to me they use informal language with me, but they rarely use slang, because that's not the point of it."

AA: "So how do you collect your information?"

CONNIE EBLE: "I have a very simple-minded -- and not particularly good in terms of research design -- way of doing it. Once a semester I ask the undergraduates in the same class to bring into class on a specific day ten items that they consider good, current campus slang. And in April in this one class -- you have to remember it is just one class, and they were not necessarily volunteering ones that would be shocking -- the most frequent term that was turned in was to 'bounce,' meaning to leave. Students for at least 30 years have had different slang synonyms for leaving. So, you know, 'this party's lame, let's bounce.'

"They also commented that they would use 'bolt,' b-o-l-t, 'let's bolt,' or 'let's jet' -- those were the three that they reported to me last spring. Another one that was fairly frequent last spring is 'whack,' 'that's whack,' meaning silly or stupid or strange."

AA: "And that's w-h-a-c-k?"

CONNIE EBLE: "Well, who knows how it's spelled. Some of the students spelled it w-h-a-c-k and others spelled it w-a-c-k. Also, lame. Now lame has been around for a long, long time. It means basically the same thing as whack -- something is silly, stupid. So anything that could be negative just about you could call lame or whack."

AA: "So whack, lame -- what was next on the list from April?"

CONNIE EBLE: "Bling-bling. Now that one is straight from rap music. It means jewelry. Now it also can mean wealth. For example, the students reported that you could look at someone's engagement ring and say 'I'd say your man's got the bling-bling,' meaning that he's wealthy enough to buy you a large diamond engagement ring. And then 'tight.'

"Tight, of course, has been around for years meaning drunk. But now it means trendy or impressive or interesting. And then the next word in terms of frequency of submission is 'banging' [pronounced bangin']. And banging I think also comes out of the whole hip-hop culture and the lyrics to rap music. It means great or good or awesome or whatever."

AA: "So do your students think you're pretty bangin' for doing this?"

CONNIE EBLE: "No, they just think I'm some ancient woman who is somehow off in her own world. And so they help enlighten me once a semester."

RS: And for helping enlighten Tom Wolfe, University of North Carolina Professor Connie Eble gets credit in the acknowledgements of his latest novel.

AA: And that's all for Wordmaster this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com, and all our segments are online at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

MUSIC: "She Bangs" from the album "Inspiration" by William Hung (a University of California, Berkeley, student who became a star by mangling the Ricky Martin song "She Bangs" on the TV talent show "American Idol.")

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