"Not every white house is the White House and not every black bird is a blackbird"

Before I summarize the painful readings for this week I would just like to say that I have acquired even more respect for people who have learned English as a second or foreign language! Holy Cow! The two chapters in Finnegan illustrated how dreadful learning English can be and I did not realize how complicated it was! So, if you are reading this and English is not your native language CONGRATULATIONS!

Anyway, Chapter 3 in Finnegan concentrated on Phonetics. After realizing that my career as a linguist was over before it started I read some really interesting information. It was so interesting that I drew a smiley face next to the things that really got me excited. The first smiley face worthy information was about voicing. The difference between s and z is that z is voiced and s is not. In other words people use their glottis and larynx when speaking the z. The tongue is in the same spot for both the consonants but like the book said I put my hand near my Adam's apple(Wait, do girls have Adam's apples?) and felt the vibration and it was amazing! I never ever noticed that in my whole 24 years of speaking!

Another point in the book that was very interesting was about the nasal sound of m. The book said to say, mmmmmmmmmm and then try and plug our nose. I did it and I could not speak the mmmmmmmmmmm anymore which illustrated perfectly the way nasal sounds work.

After Chapter 3 I found that I am either going to create a word bank of all the important terms or possibly commit an educational faux pas and make flash cards. (Lately I have heard bad things about them).

Chapter 4 was much more painful and I found it to be rather wordy. I did learn that children need to differentiate between all the words that adults make. That is to say that a sentence can seem like a giant string of noises to a child. Over time children learn the words and where they belong in different contexts.

Now I bring up a question. I did NOT understand the concept of complementary distribution on page 108-109. Along with that I do not understand the exact concept of phonemes and allophones. If anyone can give the definitions to me in layman's terms that would be amazing.

To go back to topic, this chapter further dissected the English language and one thing I found interesting was that when speaking we anticipate the next letter in the word which formulates how we say the previous letter. The book used the example of cop and keep. Our tongues go to different places when anticipated the upcoming vowel. While I was reading this in the coffee shop I am sure people thought I was crazy to see a girl sitting over a book saying, "cop, keep" or with her hand up to her mouth saying "pet, pen".

To conclude, although these 2 chapters were painful I am glad they gave me such insight on how the English language works and what that means for my students in the future.