Week 13: Suprasegmental features_prominence and intonation

This time I tried to focus my practice on prominence and intonation. I read again my blog post for week 8 on prominence and week 9 on intonation trying to recall what I have learned and accomplished, and what I should practice on more. I listened to my recording on intonation several times trying to figure out whether or not I put the prominence on the right words. I also tried to listen to my intonation patterns.

listening to the recording several times, I can hear that I really tried hard to put the prominence on the most important words so that sometimes they do not sound natural. However, I think the overall intonation patterns are quite accurate since there are not many variations in terms of prominence placing and intonation patterns in my archetype since it is only someone reading a story. I guess if the person is telling a story instead of reading it, the intonation would be quite different.

What I learned from my recording this week is that when I focus on some features, I tend to put my attention primarily on these certain features and probably miss some other features. For example, in my recording for week 9, I focused on intonation, so the intonation patterns are quite accurate, but I feel that I was loose in segmental features such as vowels such as /æ/ in began that I pronounced as /bi'gʌn/ and consonants such as /θ/ in north that I pronounced as a glottal stop. I also missed some non-rhotic /r/ as in there, letter, and surprising. 

Here is my recording for this week:

For this recording, I really tried to not only pay attention on prominence and intonation, but still my recording is absolutely not 100% accurate. I think I still missed the /θ/ in north and also some non-rhotic /r/. For me, it is quite a challenge to not pronounce the /r/ sound since the /r/ in my native language, Indonesian, is a flap /r/ in which the /r/ is rolled. Also, I am more exposed to North American English with its rhotic /r/. Thus, if I am not really pay attention to that particular feature while speaking, I will tend to mispronounce it.