Check this out. It’s an explanation of how to pronounce past tense verbs, such as “called” versus “played” vs “walked” versus “visited.”
I literally never noticed how differently -ed is pronounced for different verbs. Not only that, but when I think carefully and touch my throat and all that, I still have trouble telling whether consonants are voiced or unvoiced — though this guy here picks verbs that are clear in this regard.
Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to memorize rules like this in order to pronounce past-tense verbs.
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I think anyone learning a foreign language runs into this kind of thing, and it’s a very nicely clear rule at least, without a lot of exceptions. That can be really helpful for anyone learning to speak the language who doesn’t have the time or opportunity to immerse themselves in listening to it being spoken, so these things are absorbed naturally instead of by learning the rules.
A lot of English pronounciation has a lot more complicated rules with a lot of weird exceptions, more so than most languages I’ve heard of. The schoolbook joke I learned here about English speaking is “How do you pronounce ‘ghoti’ in English?” Answer: “fish” (taking the letters from enouGH, wOmen, naTIon). So this nice clear rule is not really scary, and pretty naturally derived from the sounds of the base words.
Really, just listening to a lot of a language (spoken or sung) is the best way to internalise these rules without even realising there’s a rule underneath what you’re doing. Just like reading a lot helps with learning spelling and vocabulary (though not pronounciation, if it’s English).
But without that experience, it helps a lot if someone can formulate the underlying rule clearly like this, when most native speakers don’t even realise there’s a rule to what they’re doing.
I was taught French at school and had a mother who was fluent. I found I learnt best by absorbing the sound and “feel” of the spoken language. Part of the school problem was that 50 years ago I wasn’t taught any grammar beyond noun, verb, adjective and adverb. Then French comes along with teachers and text books that talked about perfect, imperfect and pluperfect verbs, conditional tenses, declining/conjugating (Latin, I think, not French) and stuff I’d never come across in English and had to grasp from the viewpoint of a foreign language. From the Duolingo languages I’ve played with more recently, I found it does help me to have simple rules but I’d much prefer to learn from (gentle!) immersion
I certainly believe you both that immersion — just hearing the language — is surely the best way to learn this stuff. As a native speaker, it’s just neat and interesting to have my attention drawn to something about the language that I never noticed consciously, like this kind of pronunciation or like the order of adjectives.
When I was in grad school in psychology mumble-mumble years ago, I was a research assistant to a professor who studied “nonconscious learning.” He was interested in how people absorb patterns without ever being told an explicit rule, and without being able to articulate a rule if asked. The thing that sparked his interest was that he was not a native English speaker, and as he tried to improve his English, he would ask people why you said something this way and not some other way. And people were quite certain what was right, but couldn’t tell him why.
For a non-language example, I programmed a computerized experiment for him. The computer showed a series of matrices of numbers – 12 x 12, maybe? One and only one of the digits within the matrix was a zero. The task was to find the zero and press a button to indicate what quadrant of the matrix the zero was in as quickly as possible. The “trick” was that the backgrounds weren’t random numbers. There were four background matrices, one for each possible quadrant. Nobody identified that the backgrounds were always the same, but they clearly learned the patterns without conscious recognition because they got faster and faster at identifying the quadrant – until we switched the backgrounds and their performance fell apart. And they didn’t know why.