They do teach pronunciation in ESL courses, but there is so much nuance to any language that I think most people need some degree of exposure to native speakers to be able to pick up on all of the subtlety that they have had the benefit of hearing from birth. I took years of Spanish myself but my verbal skills never developed nearly as far as my ability to read and write because I didn’t take the opportunity to put them into practice.
That makes sense. I can read Spanish pretty well, and I can understand Spanish when it is spoken by a non-native speaker, but when I hear native speakers it turns into a jumble of sounds I can’t make sense of. I also struggle with the different sentence structure, and the non English sounds, like the rolled R. Basically I can only speak and understand Spanglish and restaurant Spanish.
They do teach pronunciation in ESL courses, but there is so much nuance to any language that I think most people need some degree of exposure to native speakers to be able to pick up on all of the subtlety that they have had the benefit of hearing from birth. I took years of Spanish myself but my verbal skills never developed nearly as far as my ability to read and write because I didn’t take the opportunity to put them into practice.
That makes sense. I can read Spanish pretty well, and I can understand Spanish when it is spoken by a non-native speaker, but when I hear native speakers it turns into a jumble of sounds I can’t make sense of. I also struggle with the different sentence structure, and the non English sounds, like the rolled R. Basically I can only speak and understand Spanglish and restaurant Spanish.