Tricks To Improve Your English Pronunciation

I had another A-HA moment just 2 weeks ago, when I found my progress in English speaking was stagnating again.

If you ever record yourself when you speak, you will have an idea of how other feel about your speaking.

What I found was: I pretty much sound the same over the past three months. There is no noticeable breakthrough despite of putting in hours and hours of practice.

What went wrong?

One thing I did notice from all of the past recordings I made: something didn’t sound quite right with the way I pronounce individual words.

After paying $60 for a one-on-one session to an actor trainer for accent reduction, I went ahead and bought an online pronunciation workshop. Which workshop I paid for is not my message here. What I want all the ESL speakers to know this truth: pronunciation with individual words matter as they affect how you sound when you speaking in sentences.

That is: spend some time practice pronouncing individual words.

For those ESL speakers who are determined to improve their English speaking skills, we all know that mimicking native born speaker is extremely helpful. However, one can not spring without knowing how to crawl.

That’s why learning the basic is the key to success. Even though you are an advance English speakers, if you want to reduce your accent to an significant amount, you have to start to training yourself on the basic elements.

There are three helpful tips for ESLs who target on accent reduction.

1) Practice Individual Words

List out words starting with each alphabet. Write down their phonetic symbols right beside. Practice pronouncing these words based on their phonetic symbols. For those who have trouble pronouncing phonetic symbols elements, you can find more practice from the following link:http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/phoneticsymbolsforenglish.htm

This exercise helps you to create English Speaking Muscle. Repetition is the only way to build the muscle memory. Don’t’ rush, this practice will take you a while since you need to repeat A LOT. During our daily conversation, we can’t focus on the contents while thinking about pronunciation. Therefore, it’s critical to repeat single words with authentic pronunciation when you have a chance if you wish to reduce your accent.

2) Slow Down

When reading article aloud, I strongly recommend you to slow down, so that you could put emphasis on each vowels, consonants. Making sure you focus on each syllable without ‘swallowing’ it. Therefore, you need to slow down while reading aloud- either it’s an article, a paragraph, or something completely random.

Many ESL speakers have this misconception: I need to speak as fast as a native born speaker so that I would sound close to them. This belief is detrimental to accent reduction. In general, most non-English speakers find it’s challenging to place their tongues in the right position when pronouncing words comparing with native born English speakers. In other words, ESLs need more time to make correct placement before spilling out any English word.

The reason is simple: many vowels and consonant sounds are a lot different from those used in the native languages of ESL speakers. Since ESLs have muscle memory from their native tongues. This can cause them to pronounce an English word using their first language muscles that produce subtle differences in pronunciations, which result in accents.

By slowing down, you are giving yourself sufficient time to place your tongue in the right spot before speaking an English Word. I guarantee that you can hear yourself sound a lot different than rushing into a 145 word/ minute speed. For now, 75 words per minute is good starting point.

3) Different Tones

Despite of the benefits we get from speaking aloud, we all feel that reading aloud make us sound a bit unnatural. Practice speaking in different tones helps solve this problem.

In day to day conversations, native born speakers sound relax and natural. However, for those ESLs who just start their accent regime, focus on pronouncing each word correctly is critical in the beginning. The flip side is that it makes them sounds a bit rigid. However, when they start to speak naturally, they lose focus on pronunciation.

Don’t fret. There is a win-win solution. If you incorporate different tones while practice the same lines or paragraphs, you will get use to various speaking tones in accurate pronunciation. That’s how you can still sound natural in conversations without compromising accurate pronunciations.

Improve a skill set requires us to have a lots of patience, as well as the courage of going through many trials and errors. Practice is not about repetition but more about paying attention to details and finding the better ways. No matter how old you are and how slow you learn, as long as you don’t give up, you will be there one day.

Let’s try a simple analogy here: snail crawls slowly but it’s still moving forward. It would talk a long time for it to go from downtown core center to city hall (3 blocks apart), but if it never gives up, it will reach the destiny.

Hope these tips are helpful to you. There will be more to come. I will share them with you as I explore along the way.