Two Tricks to Improve Your English Pronunciation

If you are an ESL (English as Second Language) speaker, you know what I’m talking about here. English pronunciation can be challenging.

When ESLs speak English, their tongues and lips position in ways that they do when speaking their first languages. That’s why they have accents when speaking English.

I am an East Asian. I spoke Mandarin for the first 19 years of my life. In Mandarin (Official Chinese language), there is no syllable that sounds close enough to those of English words. Such made it difficult for me to pounce English words without a distinct accent. Throughout years of practice I’ve gone much better. Recently, I discovered a way of improving my English accent noticeably within only 1 week. Keep reading if you are interested in finding out about it.

Earlier this year, I published an article “Don’t Give Up Yet”, which summarized 9 tips I employed to improve my spoken English over the past 1.5 years. If some of you still recall, the first tip in that article is “Podcast Imitation”. The two tricks I’m going to present today are the extensions of the same tip.

(To check out blog: Don’t Give up Yet, visit the following link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-give-up-yet-helen-zhao?trk=mp-reader-card)

The two important elements here are ‘speaking pace’ of the speaker and ‘material content’. From my past experience of mimicking various speakers such as broadcaster, news reporters, TV show hosts, movie characters, politicians, and others, I could have made better improvement if I stick with simpler audio materials and mimic speakers who talk in slower pace. Not all the audio materials are good pick for accent correction purpose. The issue is the speaking rate: too fast.

I found that more efficient way to improve my English accent is to mimic TED Talks. Most TED Talks are easier to understand, and speakers don’t speed talk like some broadcasters on CBC Current as if they will run out of time. Of course, there are plenty of options out there other than TED. I’m a TED Talk junkie, which is why I have an inclination to make recommendation on it.

Here is why you shouldn’t undermine the power of ‘speaking pace’ and ‘material content’.

Speaking Pace

For ESL speakers, they need time to put their tongues and lips in the right positions when pronouncing English words in order to sound close enough to those who are native-born English speakers. Audio materials with slower speaking pace allow them sufficient time to position their lips and tongues so that their accents could be much reduced. If you are serious about reducing your home country accent and improve your English accent instead, speak slower: it would help you to pronounce clearer. Eventually, you will speed up like a true Canadian with nearly no distinct accent.

Take TED Talks for example. When I mimic one, I put on my headphone and turn on the subtitle. ESL Folks, this is super important. The purpose of reading the subtitles while mimicking the speakers is to know the content ahead of time. That way, you will have time to put your tongue and lips at the right position before speaking, as well as be able to speak the exact contents with the speaker at the same time. By speaking at the same time with the speaker on the exact same contents, you would be able to spot any pronunciation error immediately. Meanwhile, you can observe how the presenters’ lip movement. Overtime, you will form a habit of position your lip right so that your accent could be much reduced.

Material Contents

If you want to sound colloquial, forget about mimicking new reporters. No one would talk like that. Rather that imitating challenging audio materials, sticks with simpler one.

When choosing audio materials, you want to go for those that are closer to daily conversations with moderate pace. Back to the TED Talks example, most contents are pretty straightforward. By reading the subtitles to prepare for the mimic, you always work on pick up the fluidity. Within that half second of scanning at the subtitle, your brain is working on figure out the meaning of the line, how to put them together nicely, and how to position your tongue and lips correctly. That’s another reason why you want to stick with less complicated materials.

Take some time to give a try on the following TED Talk video. You would see how the two points I mentioned above make sense in improving your English pronunciation.

https://youtu.be/TFbv757kup4

I hope this article provides useful tips for you. In the future, I will keep posting tips I found useful for improving spoken English to support ESL speakers.

Please let me know how helpful these tips are, or some unique ideas you have to improve English accent. I enjoy learning from you as much as enjoying writing this article for you.

(Source/ Credit: Inspired by a friend of mine who recommended me not to minick newscasters anymore rather focusing on duoable contents. Thank you! )

** Disclaimer: This article is NOT written for sales. It's published for ESL speakers to improve spoken English. The contents reserve 100% originality and are written from personal learning experience. Please do not copy this article for purposes other than learning. Thank you for your corporation **