Interesting theory and very nice reading.

你的句子重音处理得真好。我最近做了一点点这方面的研究，发现我们读/说时，跟native的主要差距之一就在重音上。他们读起来有明显的轻重和起伏，而我们程度不同地做得不够。我有时把重音词标出来，再读，可还是觉得调不对。Ann Cook好象讲过处理句子里被强调词的几种方法，我记不太清楚她原文怎么讲的了，只是最近才慢慢对她的说法有了一点感性认识，---- 就是重音的处理不是只有加大音量这一个办法。所谓的staircase挺重要的，有时我们读得太“平”，是不该被强调的词没有降下去；还有些时候，强调一个词是通过拉长或升调来实现的。对这个问题我的认识还不是十分清晰，表达起来也有难度。在此跟你分享，权当抛砖引玉吧。因为从你这篇作业来看，你一定也是留意到了这一点的。

下面两段录音，分别是两位作家朗读他们自己的作品。前一段出自Yunte Huang，他在哈佛教过英语，现任教于加州大学。一个中国人，英语到这个程度，是非常非常了不起的，差不多是到头了吧。可即便如此，仔细跟后面Jonathan Franzen的朗读比较，还是能听出差别，并悟到一些东西。（我相信黄教授本人早都悟到了，但体会到和变成自己的本能之间，一定还隔着千山万水。所以“矫正口音”可能就是一条没有尽头的路啊。）


Yunte Huang reads an excerpt of "Charlie Chan":

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Climbing up the rickety stairs to the second floor, he turned and faced the room packed with gamblers, all Chinese, huddling over games of Fan-Tan, Pai Gow, Craps, and Mahjong. The air was a mix of smut and smoke, the den ringing with (unintelligible) jeers(ph) and the sound of clicking dice and Mahjong tiles.

He observed the ballyhoo through his dark lenses. Someone at the Mahjong table looked up and immediately recognized the face of the infamous cop whose name elicits shutters from the spines of Honolulu criminals. Chai Lo(ph) - before the Cantonese cry for cop drop to the ground, a five-foot bullwhip had uncoiled like a hissing rattlesnake from the detective's waist.

One crisp snap of the whip and the entire room froze like a gambling hall diorama under glass. Only clouds of cigarette smoke still wavered, the afterthoughts of exploded firecrackers not sure where to settle in the deafening silence.

Many there had already heard of and some had even tasted the might of this unusual weapon wielded by the former rough-riding paniolo. Resisting arrest will be futile, even though they knew he had, as usual, brought no backup. His whip had spoken louder than any law or gun.


Jonathan Franzen reads an excerpt of "Freedom":

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Walter and Patty Berglund were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill, the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier.

They paid nothing for their Victorian and then killed themselves for 10 years renovating it. Early on, some very determined person torched their garage and twice broke into their car before they got the garage rebuilt.

Sunburned bikers descended on the vacant lot across the alley to drink Schlitz and grill knockwurst and rev engines at small hours until Patty went outside in sweat clothes and said: Hey, you guys, you know what?

Patty frightened nobody, but she'd been a standout athlete in high school and college and possessed a jock sort of fearlessness. From her first day in the neighborhood, she was helplessly conspicuous. Tall, ponytailed, absurdly young, pushing a stroller past stripped cars and broken beer bottles and barfed-upon old snow, she might have been carrying all the hours of her day in the string bags that hung from her stroller.

Behind her you could see the baby-encumbered preparations for a morning of baby-encumbered errands. Ahead of her, an afternoon of public radio, the Silver Palate Cookbook, cloth diapers, drywall compound, and latex paint. And then "Goodnight Moon," then zinfandel. She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.

In the earliest years, when you could still drive a Volvo 240 without feeling self-conscious, the collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture and how to encourage feral cats to defecate in somebody else's children's sandbox and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.

There were also more contemporary questions like, what about those cloth diapers - worth the bother? And was it true that you could still get milk delivered in glass bottles? Were the Boy Scouts okay politically? Was bulgur really necessary? Where to recycle batteries? How to respond when a poor person of color accused you of destroying her neighborhood? Was it true that the glaze of old Fiestaware contained dangerous amounts of lead? How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be? Did your 240 sometimes not go into overdrive when you pushed the overdrive button?

Was it better to offer panhandlers food or nothing? Was it possible to raise unprecedentedly confident, happy, brilliant kids while working full-time? Could coffee beans be ground the night before you used them, or did this have to be done in the morning?

Had anybody in the history of St. Paul ever had a positive experience with a roofer? What about a good Volvo mechanic? Did your 240 have that problem with the sticky parking-brake cable? And that enigmatically labeled dashboard switch that made such a satisfying Swedish click but seemed not to be connected to anything: what was that?