Forget About Native Pronunciation & Focus on NATURAL Pronunciation

This is a psychological aspect of achieving good pronunciation.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here and today I want to talk about natural pronunciation.

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I do appreciate it.

So I wanna follow up on the fascinating discussion that I had

with Stephen Krashen the other day.

And that was a live stream.

And you may have watched it.

It's available uh, here for you to, uh, look at if you, uh, weren't able

to participate in the live stream.

It is also going to be available as a lesson with subtitles, with the, uh, the

transcript in our English library at LingQ where we have a number of videos from Dr.

Krashen that you can use if you're working on improving your English and if you

want to become more familiar with Dr.

Krashen's ideas.

Now, in the conversation with Dr.

Krashen he had a, he has wonderful stories to tell, but one of his stories

was that, uh, he was in a French class or he heard about someone who was

in a French class and who was always criticized for his pronunciation.

His pronunciation wasn't very natural.

It wasn't, I mean, we don't have to be totally native, but it was still very

much far away from French pronunciation.

He was in a way hiding behind his English pronunciation.

And then for whatever reason, he decided that he was going to

impersonate, imitate a French person.

So he arrived one day in front of the class and he put on a beret because

people think French people all wear...

french men, all wear berets, which they don't, and he pretended to be a Frenchman.

And he was, you know, we can imitate French people speaking English, like

very often, some people can imitate the French accent, the English...

but when they go to speak French, they're still using their English accent.

So he decided that he was going to pretend to be a Frenchman with his beret,

with whatever other disguise he had on.

And he spoke French and he spoke with a very good accent with good pronunciation.

And the teacher said, where has that pronunciation been hiding?

And of course he was in the mood for that.

And so I think we can achieve if not native-like pronunciation, which is more

difficult to achieve, but we can achieve comfortable pronunciation pronunciation

that the native speaker enjoys listening to, even with an accent that feels

natural, that is not strained, but is free of the inhibitions that too often

people feel when they're hanging back in the safety of sort of pronouncing French

... in other words, staying with the less risky sort of pronunciation of not making

an effort to imitate, not to take that, that jump into the, what might be cold

water of trying to actually sound like whatever language it is we're learning.

I mentioned to Dr.

Krashen that I have referred to this as cultural weightlessness and

that this is a psychological aspect of achieving good pronunciation.

There are many other things that we can do to improve pronunciation.

Uh, listening is certainly one, listening to things that engage us

emotionally is going to help us.

But also at some point you have to recognize that you have to sort of lift

yourself up, this cultural weightlessness.

You're not a part of your native culture now.

You in fact are gonna try to sort of immerse yourself, throw yourself

into the water, into the culture of the language that you're learning.

You're gonna pretend to be one of them.

And if you do that, and, and I think that's, as I said, also to Dr.

Krashen why very often actors, I remember once hearing Jody Foster

speak French, she has phenomenal pronunciation in her French.

She makes mistakes on her.

gender So it's not to say that her French is perfect, but if we are

concerned about pronunciation, if we think of an actor or an actress that

has to, they're no longer, she's no longer Jody Foster, she is whatever

person she's playing in the movie.

And so actors are used to the idea of projecting them themselves

into the role of someone else.

And when we speak a language, not only do we have to learn the words and

the phrases and so forth and improve our comprehension, which I always

stress, but if we want to improve our pronunciation, if we want to achieve

natural, comfortable pronunciation, comfortable for you using it, comfortable

for the person listening to it - it needn't be perfect - I think that requires

that willingness to play act to, to sort of pretend you're someone else.

And once you've done that a few times, that then becomes the natural

pronunciation for you because you have now moved as a speaker, I use French,

but it could be any language, you've moved from being sort of a foreigner

attempting to speak the language to this new role where you see yourself

as a member of that cultural group.

And I think if we can learn to do that, and it's certainly what I try

to do when I learn a language, we then develop what I would call natural

pronunciation, which is not the same as native pronunciation, because

realistically it's very difficult to achieve, uh, uh, a level of pronunciation

that is where you'll be mistaken for a native, by and large not gonna happen.

However, you can achieve a level of pronunciation that is

very pleasant, very natural.

So that's my recommendation when it comes to pronunciation and I'll leave

you with a couple of, uh, videos that I've done in the past on pronunciation.

You may also wanna visit the, uh, Krashen interview whether, uh, at the YouTube

channel here or in our library at LingQ.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.