AuthorRachael Archives
September 2024
Categories |
Back to Blog
1. Slow down! If you speak too quickly, you will make a mistake. Give yourself, and the people who are listening to you, time to think. It’s not a race, and by trying to go too fast, you will probably end up repeating yourself because the others haven’t understood, therefore wasting time rather than gaining any. 2. Actively listen to other people. The more you listen, the easier you will find pronunciation. Listen to podcasts, watch series and films in English. BBC learning English offers facebook live sessions where you can message the word(s) that you find difficult to pronounce, and they show you how it’s done. Best of all, try to speak with anglophones. Conversation exchanges also offer a great opportunity to meet others and improve your English at the same time. 3. Be curious. If you’re not sure how to pronounce a word, look it up in an online dictionary which will let you hear the correct pronunciation in various regional accents.You can use the phonetic symbols to check if your word stress is correct. Even if you don’t know the phonetic alphabet, all you need to do is look for the apostrophe. Fifteen /fIf’ti:n/ The apostrophe is placed before the stressed syllable, so the second syllable is stressed, like this: oO, or fifTEEN. You can do this for all words.
5. Pay attention to strong and weak pronunciation.Saying a word in isolation is completely different from saying it in a sentence. Try pronouncing “for”. It sounds like the number “four”. This is the strong pronunciation. Now try saying “would you like to come for tea?” Here the “for” sounds more like “fff”. This is the weak pronunciation. We can apply this to all small unstressed words. If you can master strong and weak sounds, your pronunciation will be more understandable for an anglophone.
Finally, don’t worry about your accent. There are hundreds of regional English accents, and we manage to understand each other!
2 Comments
Read More
|