LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

  In the Preface to his The Defence , Vladimir Nabokov , lashes out against book reviewers and others, saying: "... I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers - and, generally persons who move their lips when reading...". As I understand it, those who read moving their lips are equated in intellectual stature to hack reviewers. I promote reading a foreign language with the lips and in a whisper. Reading in the brain does not exercise the mechanical part of the language: throat, lips, teeth, alveolar ridges, nose, air, vocal cords, and even the saliva that make language what it is. We may scoff at those who read with their lips as ignorant intellectual dwarfs but in language learning it is essential to drill out loud moving the lips, the tongue, and everything else. Perhaps Nabokov, a polyglot himself, was blinded in this instance by his dislike of book reviewers, probably rightly so. So, you should practice the language you are studying by reading aloud, in a...

La boca, los labios, las encías, los dientes y especialmente la lengua, forman la parte mecánica del aprendizaje de un idioma: La parte más importante. Tenemos que colocar la lengua en una posición especial para repetir un sonido. Si no la colocamos bien, el sonido saldrá mal. Y como ya tenemos hábitos hechos, la lengua se resiste a hacer movimientos a los cuales no está acostumbrada. Hay que entrenar esta parte mecánica del idioma por medio de la repetición en voz alta. Los trabalenguas ( tongue twisters ) ayudan. En mi PHONÉTICA INGLESA he copiado muchos e inventado muchos. Sugiero que repita trabalenguas que siempre enfatizan un sonido. Para practicar el sonido /sh/ digamos en voz alta: "Sheila is selling her shop at the seashore in Chicago." Para practicar la /p/ repetiremos en voz alta: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." Para practicar la /t/ repetiremos: "Betty bought butter but the butter Betty bough was bitter."

RITUAL 1 Slow, purposely adequate reading aloud, even in a whisper, will help in forming the sounds of English. Try reading this poem by Emily Dickinson : "Hope" is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all. Or this one by Walt Whitman : I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. And the end of Robert Frost 's famous poem: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. Feather: pluma Perch: posarse Assume: asumir, pensar