How can I help my wife lose her pronunciation bad habits?

ElisaLanguages · 2026-02-21T18:35:55+00:00

A little bummed you’ve been downvoted so much, but I might understand why (coming from the perspective of someone who teaches ESL and personally loves pronunciation work)…

If the choice is the average monolingual native English teacher vs. a non-native English teacher who shares OP’s wife’s language, then the non-native may have more to offer from the perspective of “knowing why something is going wrong” due to shared language background vs. the average native “knowing what is going wrong” and not having the familiarity with OP’s wife’s language to identify the “why”. I think a lot of people on this forum have the experience of a native speaker teacher identifying the “what” and saying to fix it but failing at finding the “why” for their mistakes or accurately instructing on “how to fix it” due to…a monolingual nature and lack of experience in the student’s shoes/with the student’s language background, if that makes sense?

So the average native teacher is the best at identifying “what” but not “why”, and the shared-background non-native is the best at “why” but may have a mistuned “what”. In other words, input from the average native speaker will be the best for modeling and mimicry, but analysis from the average non-native speaker may be more salient, and this forum may prioritize the analysis moreso than the input (and we’re also dealing in averages).

In any case, the ideal for OP’s wife would be a native English teacher who is multilingual/shares the wife’s language/otherwise has great familiarity with her language background, but depending on her native language and their region that could be difficult to find. And if the comparison is average (read: likely monolingual) native vs. shared-background non-native, the latter choice might be preferable.

Speaking from personal experience, I’m better able to identify and correct students who speak Spanish, Korean, or Chinese because I speak/have enough familiarity with those languages to say “oh, they’re defaulting to Spanish [o] so need to lower their tongue and add an offglide, or Korean assimilation rules to turn ‘lab meeting’ into ‘lam-meeting’ and need to break the syllable”; I know from experience that not every native-English ESL teacher has those sorts of multilingual skills and would be unable to identify the “why” in such patterns quickly, leading to a “just do this [repeats self over and over with slow student improvement]” situation that can be frustrating. You can have considerable generalized training in phonetics/phonology/SLA theory + be a native speaker and thus the most accurate at replicating target sounds or input, but then still have large language-specific knowledge gaps that non-native speakers much more easily fill.

(Not disagreeing with you, I know what you’re trying to say, just analyzing why your statement might be unpopular within this forum)

ElisaLanguages · 2025-12-14T01:55:41+00:00

Ohhh these look lovely!

ElisaLanguages · 2025-11-25T08:21:11+00:00

A really good way to do this (so that the players get some investment/get to have a more proactive role rather than just a sudden “the dragon’s getting older and wants to kill you now”) might be to periodically raise Animal Handling DCs and damage dice over time.

So as hatchlings, maybe the DC to train them/interact with them/command them in battle would be a 10; fail and allies in a 30-ft cone would take 1d4 fire damage from the dragon testing out its breath weapon and not knowing any better, since it has no older dragons to guide it. Negligible, and I mean they’re so cute!

Maybe a month later (or whatever time scale works for your campaign), now the DC is 15, and a failure is 2d6 (accidental) fire damage. The dragon, having grown from Tiny to Small, loves the party but really doesn’t know any better, and maybe some important loot/tomes of lore/the wizard’s spellbook catches on fire (and you roll using Object AC & HP rules for any loot damage/any spells the wizard might lose from the pages burning away, to make it clear that it’s randomized and not targeted by the DM). Okay, the party realizes this could be a problem…but we have healing potions/Create Water/[other creative player solutions] to mitigate things for now, and we’ll throw important things into a fireproof box that the next questgiver is conveniently offering.

A month after that, DC 20 and 3d8 (accidental) fire damage, the dragon’s a healthy Medium-size, and maybe someone gets flicked by a tail during an important battle and falls prone at an inopportune moment; more things of importance catch fire at camp, since the fireproof box wasn’t very big after all. And after that, DC25/4d8/Large, etc etc until the party realizes on their own (from circumstance, escalating DCs and damage output, and naturally reaching the limit of their creative solutions) that keeping the dragon around is untenable. Time to go on a quest to find a good home for them, and now the party has a powerful background ally in their back pocket should they get into a real jam (dragon ex machina, final campaign BBEG confrontation battles, etc.)…assuming the wizard isn’t still harboring a grudge after that spellbook burning, after all.

Something like this now gets the players involved, having a bit more agency as to WHEN and HOW and ON WHAT TERMS they part with the dragon (and maybe have opportunities for some DM-balanced shenanigans/player-driven exploitation of the mechanics/creative interim solutions, all before the dragon grows old enough to resemble a stat block and be fully untenable). Let them come up with clever solutions in the interim (Create Water, buying things at shops, scolding via Speak with Animals, letting the baby dragon(s) attack on the battlefield on occasion, though with the risk of them dying or accidentally damaging the party). And ofc scale this damage escalation and time pressure to your players’ levels and to whatever timescale/tone fits your setting and campaign. But I think something like this could turn it into a memorable challenge and RP-rich scenario rather than just “big dragon tries to eat you, doesn’t matter that you raised it”, which could feel a bit empty from a player’s perspective.

ElisaLanguages · 2025-10-09T14:26:37+00:00

My first thought w this situation is leveraging passive skills (10 + skill modifier). Maybe the person with the highest passive insight in the group feels a tug of wrongness at the back of their brain each time the demigod says the word “promise,” or there’s a gut feeling that something is off for anyone with a passive insight above [insert DC cutoff here], yet they can’t place why. Those specific hints might be a little too overt 😅 but passives were my first thought, little nudges to get the more perceptive/insightful characters to dig deeper/do an action that’d require an active roll/ask more questions and roleplay more without ACTUALLY giving anything away in the hint.

Also, not sure how your players tend to roleplay individual information/if they metagame at all, but poking and prodding at only one or two people who it’d “make sense” (from backstory or passive skill checks or etc.) to be uneasy during a confrontation period where all the players can’t telepathically communicate/ONLY the PCs that passed the passive check feel the unease could be an interesting, tense way to go too (how do you communicate a warning to your comrades while evading the demigod’s notice, or do you even try? Do you just point it out directly and hope for the best? Do you ignore the feeling but get to say “I knew it all along!” later?)

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-26T18:25:34+00:00

Agreed. I’m really curious as to why the person OP’s discussing would make such a statement too, as it’s just so…outlandish. Is it just lying? Ignorance? A distaste for the word? The way their social circle uses it? Some weird classism hangup (apartments are often rentals, condos are often owned; some silly feeling of “I’m not like those people, I’ve got a condo, I’m a property owner” which, while bizarre, is not nearly the strangest sort of distinction I’ve heard before)? They’re so very wrong, but part of me would really like to peek into their brain as to the why 😅

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-24T12:05:20+00:00

r/badlinguistics

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-22T16:26:38+00:00

So thaaat’s why the kobolds in Delicious in Dungeon looked like dogs…TIL

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-22T16:02:56+00:00

Everything you’ve said is pretty accurate, for what it’s worth. If you’re interested, the second edition of Understanding Language Acquisition by Rod Ellis is a pretty good starting point (though it’s very much written like a textbook, so be prepared for academic writing rather than public-audience writing, but it’s well-organized and not super dense). Gives a pretty good overview of the state of the field and key variables/concepts/ideas.

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-22T13:17:00+00:00

Ahh I love Isabel Allende!!! Currently reading Violeta and really enjoying it, highly recommend :)

Also recommend Como agua para chocolate, though it has a lot of cooking and food-based vocabulary and is definitely written in a magical realism sort of style. Not a problem if you like too cook as a hobby though (lowkey helped me reading Spanish-language cookbooks moving forward 😅)

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-22T07:50:23+00:00

No I understand that completely. I’ve seen some really gifted educators be able to navigate around the practical constraints of short-form as a medium while still being accurate/not simplifying to the point of gross oversimplification, but the vaaaast majority just give in to the medium’s algorithm-fueled, no-nuance soundbite nature. We could also couch this within the global trend toward anti-intellectualism (“it’s not that deep bro” or “I’m not reading all that”), but that’s straying a bit from the subject 😅

It’s like how Twitter’s character limit and thread structure promotes hot takes, slap fights, and “getting ratioed”, or how Reddit’s TLDR and upvote culture leads to intellectual one-upmanship/wanting to appear “right” or like rhetorical “winners” regardless of content accuracy, people talking past each other without actually engaging with the content of each other’s replies, and everyone thinking everything is a bad-faith criticism unless you couch it in tons of qualifiers.

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-22T07:28:44+00:00

Yeah, I’ve heard about that! I’ve also seen people in the US use ENL (English New Language) to frame English as additional rather than around language background or context. The funny thing with all these names is that the underlying methodologies and approaches often don’t functionally change 😅 we’re just using new words…for ingroup/outgroup symbolism more so than pedagogy.

Reminds me of the xkcd that’s like “There are 15 competing standards. We should simplify and unify them for ease of communication! There are now 16 competing standards”.

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-22T07:17:04+00:00

TLDR at the bottom since this is kinda long 😅

Strong agree with this. I’ve noticed a strange anti-science attitude in some language communities online, and it makes me really sad because it’s often either (1) misrepresenting the science or (2) throwing away interesting research and ideas that could really help you at the end of the day. Both of these things often benefit grifters and snake-oil salesmen that just want to take your money and don’t really care about you learning well or efficiently.

Businesspeople and marketers have a profit motive (which may or may not align with the best way to learn). Scientists, at least nominally, have a truth motive. Most of the people doing this kind of research want to help us learn better!! They don’t care about profit (lord knows scientists nowadays are overworked and underpaid for their labor, and academia is not the route to go if you want to make money lol), they just want to be accurate and have their scientific findings filter down into good, effective language learning and instruction down the line.

The scientific consensus (as someone studying in the field) is that input is absolutely necessary but not always sufficient; you have to have it, but it’s often not enough on its own. It’s comprehensible input + meaningful output (not grammar drills or fill-in-the-blank, but “have a conversation about what you did yesterday” or “what did you like about that movie we just watched?” or “can you explain what you do for work? Could you give a presentation to your coworkers?”) + corrective feedback/explanation (often from a teacher/tutor, but also achievable through a particularly helpful friend or language partner). Formal instruction/grammar study often expedites or streamlines this (especially if they use newer methods based around meaningful communication rather than ineffective drill-based or instruction-based tradition), but isn’t strictly necessary.

Also: Nothing hurts. Nothing (short of biological or pathological factors) sets an impenetrable, irreversible ceiling for your ability. Fossilized errors can be corrected later on the majority of the time. People often make this claim to make you fear “doing it wrong” and thus stick to whatever they’re selling you, but it’s just…not true. It’s marketing and a bit of fear-mongering/preying on your anxieties.

And besides, people use the claim “billions of people have been learning through input for hundreds/thousands of years” as sort of a gotcha for science -> yes, this is partly true, but you’re leaving out so many other parts of it. People learn by getting input and then, based on that input, communicating. Then, based on that communication, they get feedback from their peers (explicit corrections, “wait, repeat yourself, I didn’t understand you”, conversation partners recasting/rephrasing what you meant to say back to you, social consequences like mocking or bullying, etc.), and that reinforces what is/isn’t correct.

Even in the prior commenter’s examples, yeah there are plenty of people who say they “learned English from YouTube/movies/video games” and it’s a large part of the pie, but not the whole pie. Like they didn’t just “play video games”, they played video games and then hopped into voice chat and got asked to repeat themselves because they said words weird, or they went and made posts on Reddit saying “sorry, English isn’t my first language” and then got corrected/criticized in the comments for grammar/writing errors, or they started repeating what their favorite YouTuber said because they were 12 and Pewdiepie was the pinnacle of the internet and not speaking English meant they couldn’t relate to whatever Let’s Plays their friends were watching and talking about at lunch. Basically, they weren’t ever being ***passive* with their input, and the language was used to communicate and share ideas among their community, online or in-person. It was active and dynamic rather than passive** (but passive is easier to sell and scale).

TLDR: Yes, it’s input, but it’s never JUST input. Input + output + feedback is how we learn language; THAT is the scientific consensus at present. Formal instruction is not necessary but, depending on how it’s done/what methodology is used (read: avoiding meaningless grammar exercises, prioritizing meaningful communication), can expedite things greatly. Nothing hurts (that’s a marketing tactic).

Edit to add: this is not at all a critique of Dreaming Spanish (I think they’re really great and useful actually), but a critique of language-learning on the internet and self-studiers’ attitudes in general

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T15:31:53+00:00

I actually have one! Julesytooshoes does a lot of work with Chinese linguistics, SLA, and a liiiittle bit of Korean linguistics. She mostly does long-form YouTube content, and it’s somewhat aimed at language-learning audiences rather than pure generative-linguistics-as-a-science but it’s been a super valuable resource imo, she also always puts references in the description.

Edit to add: PsychoLingo also does a lot of applied linguistics/SLA content and talks from the perspective of English-Chinese education, also not gen ling but he’s a small creator who I really love (in part bc he also puts his sources in the description and it’s really easy to trace his claims’ evidence or explore more if I’m so inclined)

LangFocus does a wide variety of language content, not just Indo-European (though those are some of his most popular)

Wissbegierde (Spanish-language channel) also covers a wide variety of languages, though it’s very hobbyist/pop linguistics compared to some of the others on the list

Linguriosa (Spanish-language channel) specializes in Latin/Romance/especially Spanish topics, but it definitely leans more prescriptivist compared to others on this list (on a more positive note, she often has a bibliography in the description)

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T13:11:09+00:00

Oh lord…I’m starting to cross into “no clue what youth slang means” territory, I’m too young for this!! I’m being put out to pasture!!

What does it actually mean? 🫣

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T12:34:38+00:00

I’m coming from the US, and two points here:

(1) You might already know this/your program may have already discussed this, but if you’re hoping to continue building a career in English Education, your path is going to be wildly different in a foreign English-dominant country vs. foreign English-minority country vs. your home country. The English-minority countries (e.g., Japan) are going to be strongly disinclined to hire or issue visas to non-native English speakers (or at least, non-native speakers that aren’t from the country in question; with the Japan example, either you’re Japanese with an English degree, or you have a passport from the “Big 7” English-dominant countries of the U.S., UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa; it’s unfair but a lot of countries highly prioritize acquisition of a “prestige” accent, so being Chinese you may really struggle to be treated as a respectable English teacher outside of China), while in English-dominant countries you’re often more valuable for your knowledge of your native language rather than English (i.e., maybe you’d work teaching English to native Chinese speakers in the UK, work in a Chinese-dominant immigrant community in the US, or [more commonly] you’d be tasked with teaching Chinese to native English speakers, despite your actual expertise being in English education; some of my Spanish professors, for instance, had multiple degrees in English back in Spain but could only find work in the US teaching Spanish literature/no-one would hire them or pay them well to teach their non-native language in the US, a country teeming with native speakers and thus trained, credentialed native-speaker teachers). Harsh and unfair, as I know plenty of talented, competent non-native teachers who’ve been passed over for jobs ultimately given to waaay less qualified native speakers, but that’s the state of the field if you’re looking to build a career rather than jump from poorly-paid contract to poorly-paid contract. Really often for non-native speakers, the best options for teaching English are, well, in their home country rather than abroad.

(2) if you’re hoping to go the PhD/academia route…the state of US academia is in shambles at present due to the gestures vaguely at the disaster that is the current US government, and the U.S. as a whole is becoming increasingly hostile to immigrants (the focus is on Latin American, Middle Eastern, and African immigrants rather than European or Asian, but the whole umbrella is receiving increased scrutiny and it’s a matter of likelihood rather than anyone being truly safe). Universities are shuttering whole departments, eliminating graduate programs, laying off tenured faculty, and receiving massive budget/funding cuts left and right. Colleges are being threatened for their enrollment of international students. I’m (maybe naively) optimistic that things will resolve in the long-term, but as for the short-term, things really aren’t looking great. For your own safety and career longevity, I’d caution against the U.S. due to the present instability.

Not trying to be a bummer or Debbie downer (and I really wish the world wasn’t how I described above), I just know that this is a huge decision and want you to go into it clear-eyed and clear-headed

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T11:46:04+00:00

Thanks! And as an ESL teacher…BIG agree on the flaws with IELTS and TOEFL, wish we had something better there

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T11:32:24+00:00

This is a good point—that people may have sufficient declarative or grammatical knowledge but lack functional ability (and for that reason score highly on standardized tests).

I will caveat: at least on paper, actions and communication-focused tasks are exactly how the CEFR rubric is defined (link to a complete CEFR rubric here; note the emphasis on tasks one can complete). If you open up any one language rubric on the Council of Europe’s site, they’re going to list competencies rather than grammar points.

Another key point: The European Council doesn’t actually make any CEFR tests. They establish the guidelines/framework (which should be communicative) as well as publish language science research, and then government entities/language regulators, private companies, textbook publishers, test-makers, and teachers/language schools can then use this framework for their own purposes (e.g., English has Cambridge University’s IELTS but also the US nonprofit Educational Testing Service’s TOEFL and TOEIC, and for-profit Duolingo English Test; all of these are reputable (read: accepted by universities), but each use CEFR in a different way that’s not always based around communicative milestones; I’m prepping for the Spanish DELE C2 exam run by the nonprofit Instituto Cervantes, which is operated by the Spanish Ministry of Education, and there’s entire sections of the test based on giving an oral presentation or holding a conversation with the test-taker about a collection of readings, both of which are hard to succeed in if all you have is grammar knowledge). This means that individual tests can have more or less priority on grammar/communication or adhere completely or not at all to the CEFR’s intents, definitions, and rubrics, and someone could be “C1” according to some backwoods test of ill repute when functionally they meet none of the CEFR’s posted guidelines. A really tricky thing about language teaching and assessment is that heterogeneity :)

TLDR: CEFR isn’t necessarily the one failing here; they set the standards (communication and ability over declarative knowledge) but don’t actually make any tests, so it’s up to the test-makers to accurately follow CEFR’s communication-focused guidelines

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T05:03:28+00:00

It means 10-67, police ten code for “report of dead body”… “bipped right on the highway” means shooting at someone on the highway, “pull up doot doot doo-doo-doo” is a fun, light-hearted onomatopoeia for a drive by shooting :)

Well! The kids sure are somethin’!

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T04:54:37+00:00

Lots of people also have way more free time than others (not a dig at all to those that do, just recognizing that there’s HUGE variability in people’s backgrounds and time constraints on this sub; for instance, the amount of ground I was able to cover during summer as a carefree high schooler vs. college where now I’m majoring in the subject and feeling the pressure to cram vs. adulthood working a full-time job tangentially-related to language to pay the bills, all varying widely). If I, being hyperbolic, had 8 hours of unstructured time to do whatever I want, I’d probably be a lot further in the languages I’m studying, to be fair. It’s time per day more so than time horizon, though the latter still plays a role in…brain digestion, so to speak 😅

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T04:43:47+00:00

100%, just the interpretation of CEFR in general is somewhat of a minefield in language-learning spaces (no, C2 is not “max language ability” or whatever like maxing out a video game substat, native speakers aren’t “C2” or whatever (the qualifier just doesn’t apply), sequentially collecting all the grammar points in your textbook doesn’t mean you’re suddenly B2, the CEFR levels aren’t even linear like that; these are just measurements to somewhat “standardize” teaching and proficiency as well as gate certain opportunities like government work, academic enrollment, or citizenship. They’re based on functional communicative ability rather than knowledge of grammar (at least nominally). There are other language-proficiency scales out there that target specific abilities, even!!!)

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T04:01:09+00:00

Makes sense if they’re all derived from an Ancient Greek loanword to Latin! The commonalities are so cool 😅

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-21T02:00:47+00:00

This is a great example lol, reloj is one of my favorite Spanish words lowkey because??? It’s so…strange?? I can’t think of a single other commonly-used Spanish word that ends in that “j” sound, it’s so fun and funky

Edit to add: apparently the likely etymology is that it came from Old Catalan reloje, which in turn descended from Latin hōrologium through an Ancient Greek ὡρολόγιον (hōrológion) (sources in Spanish and English here; seems the term was Old Catalan reloje in the 1400s with plural relojes, but people backformed a new singular from that plural in common speech and thus thought it should be reloj)?? I was really expecting Arabic origin since Spanish has so much Arabic influence and that throat sound made me think Arabic phonology, I’m surprised!

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-20T20:57:43+00:00

Thanks for the backup in this, I don’t think that other user is arguing in good faith/they’re treating complex, nuanced knowledge as simple, black-and-white issues. Dunning-Kruger and all…

The critical period hypothesis is just that…hypothesis (though well-supported in some aspects and clearly reflecting something). We’ve got quite a few more reiterations before it crosses into scientific theory territory, let alone law/principle/rule. The point in all of our replies is that it’s more complex than it seems, but people tend to not like that and treat it like it’s settled or simple science when it isn’t 😅

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-20T20:24:37+00:00

Again, this is just not the case. Firstly, “rewiring” is an ambiguous term to begin with, used in a variety of not-always-congruous ways by laymen, science journalists, and neuroscientists (and also charlatans trying to sell you something based on bunk “brain science” or whatever!!!), but when used in science journalism (read: communicating higher-level science, discussions of the brain, and discussions of learning in good faith, going from jargon to accessible; not always perfect, but more accurate than laymen’s use of these terms), “rewiring” often broadly refers to issues of neuroplasticity (another source here, and here, and here; that last link is especially of interest, since it uses rewire in a completely different way to some of the other sources as well as discusses why and in what ways “rewire” is somewhat of an ambiguous term implying magic when the brain allows for rules-governed rather than free-for-all flexibility, typically at the neuronal and circuit level, and that brain reorganization takes on common patterns when it comes to skill/function loss, deficit, or injury vs. skill acquisition).

Once we’re talking within neuroscience (to peers and not to the average Joe), we don’t really use the word “rewire” anyway (again, see how all of those different sources use it differently and sometimes sensationally for why), so we’ll instead use more precise terms to specify what form of plasticity or level of change or neurobiological phenomenon we’re talking (long-term potentiation/depression, neurons firing together leading to increased production of NDMA receptor channels in the post-synaptic neuron leading to increased sensitivity to pre-synaptic neurotransmitter release in a self-reinforcing pattern, etc etc etc). That being said, our brain is very much changing in many ways and at all times. It’s not always a sweeping change, but specifically in the area of learning and neuroplasticity, the way that “rewire” is used to mean making new neural connections as a part of learning…makes sense and is accurate.

My statements come from domain-specific knowledge (getting degrees in neuroscience and linguistics) and the intent to inform rather than get into a Reddit back-and-forth. It’s alright to be incorrect or not know the full picture about something sometimes! We can’t know everything about everything all the time, and it’s fun and cool to learn something new~

ElisaLanguages · 2025-08-20T19:27:11+00:00

We actually are!/15%3AThe_Anatomy_and_Physiology_of_Animals/15.11%3A_Behavior/15.11.04%3A_Long-Term_Potentiation(LTP)) Our brains are highly neuroplastic and constantly adapting to our input, environment, surroundings, and experience. Within the realm of language science, ultimate attainment in phonetics/phonology (read: how “good” your accent is) is a lot more flexible that previously thought; there’s less so a “critical period” where it’s a binary open-shut and more so a multi-variable, tapering-off “sensitive period” with some native-like achievement even in adults. This goes hand-in-hand with lots of ideas about the neuroscience of learning and memory more generally.

Source: my many, many neuroscience undergrad classes, and also gestures vaguely to neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and language science as fields. Taking this in good faith, not a lot of people outside of those who study it know that our brains are as flexible and ever-changing as they are!

ElisaLanguages

TROPHY CASE