Pronunciation II

Hey guys! :)

In my last post I talked about the POSE test, a tool to help non-native English speakers diagnose problems in speech and perception. The results showed that I still need to work on a few things.  Consequently, I searched for useful websites to help me improve my pronunciation. If you also struggle with minimal pairs and rhythm read on carefully, because here's what I found:

•  Minimal pairs (=pairs of words or phrases which differ in only one phonological element and have distinct meanings): Firstly, I strongly recommend you to have a look at this website. There you'll find lists to practise repeating minimal pairs such as bed/bad, man/men, ship/sheep, etc. The website is clearly structured and easy to use. All you need to do is hover your mouse over the word you wish to hear and repeat it as long as you get it right. Besides working on the pronunciation of minimal pairs, you can also refresh you memory of the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols. Personally, I had difficulty making a distinction between e and æ, as found in the minimal pairs bet/bat, pedal/paddle and shall/shall, and between s and z, as found in the minimal pairs ass/as, hiss/his, face/phase and race/rays. Secondly, I suggest you use tongue twisters to practise special sounds. I found this website where you can practise numerous rather short tongue twisters. Just a heads up - don't get frustrated if you can't do them very well at first, just keep practising and have fun! I guarantee you that you'll have fun! ;) Thirdly, practise the sounds of English by using the phonemic chart. I recommend this website to you, because it provides an interactive phonemic chart. That is to say, you won't only hear examples of the English phoneme set, but also a sample word.

• Rhythm: In order to sound more like a native speaker it is crucial to work on one's rhythm. As English is a stress-timed language (=syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is perceived to be a fairly constant amount of time (on average) between consecutive stressed syllables), it is important to maintain the flow of the language. If you want to work on your rhythm I suggest you practise reading poems or basically any English texts out aloud to get a sense of how English rhythm works. For exmaple, check out this website for improving stress as well as rhythm. There you'll find a poem read out aloud by an English native speaker. You can listen to the audio file and then repeat the text concentrating on the rhythm. You can also do imitation exercises for any accent you wish to train. If you are interested in imitation exercises for American English accent training, as I am, you might want to check out this website. The goal is to simply mimic sounds. Sounds pretty easy, but try it out yourself and you'll see that it's not always as easy as it seems.

Finally, some general advice for those who are trying to improve their pronunciation. I think it is essential to have a very specific target for improvement for each week. Wanting to improve one's pronunciation is the first step, but it takes a little more to actually change something. Just saying "my aim is to improve my pronunciation" is too general and unfocussed. You should thus try to work specifically on one aspect of your pronunciation each week. Then you'll see that soon enough people won't misunderstand you anymore, they won't ask you to repeat what you just said. Instead, they'll be delighted by your language skills and they might even consider you to be a native speaker. 

Pronunciation

So, a few weeks ago we did a pronunciation diagnostic exercise which consisted of three different tasks. The aim was to get a picture of what your English sounds like when you read an unknown text, when you read an unknown dialogue and when you describe a picture. We recorded ourselves individually during class time using a digital recorder and were then given feedback by our teacher. Guess what - apparently I did pretty well on the test! :))) I only had difficulties with one word, namely aluminum. That does not really surprise me though, because I had never heard this word before. Consequently, instead of reading out loud aluminum I mixed up the word with one I had seen before several times and resembles the word aluminum a lot, namely aluminium. Quick reminder: alumInium = BE, alUminum = AE.

However, although my test result was pretty good, I think there is still room for improvement - there always is. Thus, I have been thinking about how I can possibly improve my pronunciation and make my English sound even more English and less German. In order to reduce my "teutonicity" I developed my own strategy:

• First of all, in order to know what I still need to work on, I took the pronunciation test provided by antimoon.com. My score was 9/10. They only question I got wrong was the following one: Does of have an f sound or a v sound? Do you know the answer? If you want to check your answer, take the test. However, as this test did not really tell me what I still need to work on, I took the POSE test as well, a tool to help non-native English speakers diagnose problems in speech and perception. The results showed that I mainly need to work on distinguishing words like "men" from "men" or "pan" from "pen" (vowels).
• Secondly, I decided to watch more TED talks. I am sure that by now you have all heard about this amazing website. You can watch videos of people from all over the world - and I literally mean people from all over the world. That is to say, you'll hear different accents (USA, Great Britain, Australia, Africa, India, etc.) and different languages. So, if you are studying French, Russian or basically any other language as well, you can listen to TED talks in those languages too. Anyway, the speakers are giving presentations about a wide range of topics for five to twenty minutes. Listening to TED talks allows you to work on your listening skills, as well as on your pronunciation skills. What's more, you can improve and expand your trove of academic vocabulary and get some detailed information about basically any topic you would like to know more about (science, physics, biology, business, stress management, thinking positively...). You see - there really are only advantages to watching TED talks!

• Thirdly, I figured that the only way of knowing whether the interference of my mother tongue with the delivery of content decreases, is recording myself and analysing my pronunciation. So, in order to improve I need to practice difficult sounds until I am able to produce them correctly and consistently. Thus, I decided to look for difficult texts on the internet, read them out aloud and record myself until I was happy with the result. 
• Last but not least, I think that it is helpful to practice tongue twisters to improve your pronunciation as well as your fluency. Many interpreters use tongue twisters before interpretations to sound clearer when speaking. I found a website where you can find some of the most popular English tongue twisters. I really like the first tongue twister you can find there, because I remember practising it in school and this was not only very helpful, but also a lot of fun! :D Try reading this tongue twister out aloud as quickly as possible without making any mistakes. I guarantee you that it's not as easy as you might think.

 Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

 

 

 

That's it for today. I hope that you find some of my ideas helpful! :)