Yeah, they both independently said, "Was this opera?" and I said I didn't know, it might have been opera or church choir or school choir. And they said that if it wasn't opera, your teacher might have had operatic ambitions. :P (And my stepdaughter coommented that some church choirs are trying to sound like Gregorian chants more than others, lol.)
didn't seem to have trouble teaching other Americans how to sing pure vowels! Just me. And that her teacher said he'd also had similar issues teaching Asians who grew up speaking an Asian language, but not Americans.
See, I am also suspicious of this as a blanket statement. First of all, Asians has to be a subset of Asians, since that covers a whole lot of not just languages, but language families. And the one that I know the phonology of the best, Japanese, actually has those pure vowels! Chinese, maybe not (Wikipedia seems to confirm), and Korean...well, Wikipedia tells me at least Seoul Korean has a pure O vowel as well. (Pyongyang has a pure open o instead.)
Second of all, many, many Americans have problems with this, specifically because our language doesn't have these phonemes in its inventory! It's precisely why so many of us have the specific accents in other languages that we do.
Third of all, children growing up in the US get their phoneme inventories from their peers, and if you went to an American school speaking English as your first language, it basically doesn't matter how well your parents speak English. If Korean were your first language and you had an accent in spoken English, then sure, you'd have a Korean phoneme inventory and struggle with foreign phonemes (which I maintain probably *wouldn't* include the pure O, though it might depend on where exactly in South Korea your family was from).
So here's my theory. It has two parts, both involving cognitive bias.
1. Americans who are bad at hearing and reproducing vowels outside their phoneme inventory are bad enough overall at hearing and pronouncing things on demand that they generally don't go in for opera lessons. The subset of people who take opera lessons overlaps significantly with the subset of people who can hear and reproduce those vowels. You, Cahn, are a rare case where you can do more with your voice on demand than someone like, say, me :P, but you struggle with a specific thing that most non-musically-trained Americans struggle with.
That's selection bias.
2. Your teacher's teacher got it into his head early on that this was something Asian students struggled with, and so he tends to remember Asian examples better than non-Asian examples, without actuallly thinking about the individual students' backgrounds or the phoneme inventories they grew up with. This is why you're going to count in his head as an example from now on, even though you have no accent in English and are not a native, unaccented speaker of Korean.
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Date: 2024-03-07 07:29 pm (UTC)didn't seem to have trouble teaching other Americans how to sing pure vowels! Just me. And that her teacher said he'd also had similar issues teaching Asians who grew up speaking an Asian language, but not Americans.
See, I am also suspicious of this as a blanket statement. First of all, Asians has to be a subset of Asians, since that covers a whole lot of not just languages, but language families. And the one that I know the phonology of the best, Japanese, actually has those pure vowels! Chinese, maybe not (Wikipedia seems to confirm), and Korean...well, Wikipedia tells me at least Seoul Korean has a pure O vowel as well. (Pyongyang has a pure open o instead.)
Second of all, many, many Americans have problems with this, specifically because our language doesn't have these phonemes in its inventory! It's precisely why so many of us have the specific accents in other languages that we do.
Third of all, children growing up in the US get their phoneme inventories from their peers, and if you went to an American school speaking English as your first language, it basically doesn't matter how well your parents speak English. If Korean were your first language and you had an accent in spoken English, then sure, you'd have a Korean phoneme inventory and struggle with foreign phonemes (which I maintain probably *wouldn't* include the pure O, though it might depend on where exactly in South Korea your family was from).
So here's my theory. It has two parts, both involving cognitive bias.
1. Americans who are bad at hearing and reproducing vowels outside their phoneme inventory are bad enough overall at hearing and pronouncing things on demand that they generally don't go in for opera lessons. The subset of people who take opera lessons overlaps significantly with the subset of people who can hear and reproduce those vowels. You, Cahn, are a rare case where you can do more with your voice on demand than someone like, say, me :P, but you struggle with a specific thing that most non-musically-trained Americans struggle with.
That's selection bias.
2. Your teacher's teacher got it into his head early on that this was something Asian students struggled with, and so he tends to remember Asian examples better than non-Asian examples, without actuallly thinking about the individual students' backgrounds or the phoneme inventories they grew up with. This is why you're going to count in his head as an example from now on, even though you have no accent in English and are not a native, unaccented speaker of Korean.
That's confirmation bias.
And so that's what I think is going on.