Key to Pronunciation: Feel You Want to Belong

Steve: Hello here again, Steve Kaufmann, and today I'm going to talk about pronunciation and cultures. Should take my glasses off I don't need them. Remember if you need the... if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications. And if you're following me on a podcast network, please leave a review.

So today I have the pleasure of speaking with Iryna. Now, Iryna has a YouTube channel, and I will leave a link in the description box and her background is very interesting. She traveled from Ukraine to Mexico. So as a Ukrainian, of course she speaks Russian and Ukrainian. She speaks excellent English, but also Spanish as well.

I want to talk a little bit about that journey to Mexico and she is now so good at Spanish that she provides advice and help to people on YouTube about learning English and about learning, uh, Russian and her pronunciation in Spanish to my ears sounds very Mexican. And I don't want to exhibit any prejudices, but very often Slavic language speakers seem to have trouble speaking sort of accent-free... that's a generalization.

It's not fair. So I'm very curious to find out how, uh, Iryna found herself in Mexico and how, how come she speaks such good Spanish and English. Hello Iryna.

Iryna: Hello, Steve. How are you?

Steve: Fine thank you. Sorry for the long introduction, but I think it's going to be quite interesting to our viewers. First of all, what brought you to Mexico from Ukraine?

Iryna: Uh, so I moved to Mexico in 2013 because I met my Mexican right now husband in that time boyfriend. And so love brought me to Mexico. Uh...

Steve: Often the case.

Iryna: Yes. Yes.

And right now it's very popular. These kinds of stories. And my, and my life changed like completely like completely. Yes.

Steve: And when you arrived in Mexico, what was your level of Spanish?

Iryna: Zero. So I knew before, uh, before I moved, I traveled to Mexico several times. Uh, I've been like six weeks and three weeks and I didn't learn really an, anything about... in Spanish. I knew like gracias, how are you? Like all this basics, basic stuff. And I moved and my goal was to learn spanish. You know, you told me that my English is good? Actually I all, all my life, I struggled with learning languages, any languages, English especially because for me, it's like very hard. I don't know. Uh, so right now I think I learned, uh, English actually, because I learned Spanish in this point of my life.

Spanish is my like main language after Ukrainian and Russian, of course. Yes.

So, um, I, my goal was to learn Spanish. I wanted to integrate to the culture. I understood that, uh, Mexico is a country with a lot of, uh, like identity, uh, and I needed to learn spanish, uh, to be part of this country, to be a good citizen, you know? And I learned, like I had several courses, uh, there in the school for foreign years and, um, um, I, I took it very seriously.

Steve: So many questions I have, but first of all, you said that you think that studying Spanish helped you improve your English, did I understand correctly?

Iryna: Yes. Yes.

Steve: I've had the same experience. If you learn another language, you get better at the languages that you are, up to that point, trying to learn. So that's very interesting to me.

Iryna: Yeah. It's like a lot of vocabulary is similar and actually grammatical... grammatical stuff also like "has been" ... it's very similar for me. English grammar was always very difficult and, uh, thanks to Spanish grammar i, I could learn some English grammar also.

Steve: I also think, but I have no proof of this, that, uh, when we learn languages, we require a certain degree of flexibility in the brain. And if you say, do different sports, the more sports you do, the more flexible you're going to be.

And I think the, the fact that even of learning Spanish makes your brain more open, more, flexible, more capable of doing better in, you know, language habits in English, but that's, that's just my theory. Um, so the second thing is you said I'm going to become, so you were very determined to be as fluent as you could be in Spanish. Now... and I imagine that not every, I mean, you're, you're married to a Mexican, so I'm not sure you qualify as an ex-pat, but a lot of the foreigners who live in Mexico, they don't all commit themselves to learning Spanish or do they?

Iryna: Yes, of course. Um, some of the people I know, especially... learning Spanish by Mexican telenovelas, of course. I... it's not my approach because I don't think I'm so good to learn languages by listening. So I need some classes. Uh, well, my goal was actually after I moved to Mexico to become a TV host and I understood that I need to speak like no accent, and everybody told me like, it's not possible. You always will have your accent.

So, uh, but at some point I became so fluent that people like... not only fluent, but the question about accent. So some people they don't... they're Confused. They think I'm, I was born in Mexico. Sometimes they ask it's not, uh, just because I want to speak about myself. Like, I, I don't have any accent. No, the accent is okay.

But for me at that point of my life it was so important to, um, get rid of my accent to, to be on TV. And I want to pursue that dream and I, I had the dream, so I really worked on it in Mexican TV and, um, uh, Uh, for me, it was so important that I did it. So I don't know it was, it wasn't my, like my, my cute idea, you know?

Steve: Right. But part of it is that you wanted to be Mexican. You wanted to fit in. And I think that's a very important part of, of learning a language. And it's a very important part of pronunciation. So if you, you want to be like them, you want to be part of that. So then you don't resist the way they pronounce things.

You absorb the way they pronounce things. You start to use their, their structures, their, and their, their, their phrasiology and all of these things, because you, you sympathize with them. You want to be them. And I think that's a big part of pronunciation and a big part of language learning. But you had a very specific goal, which was to be on television.

So therefore I gather you actually took some specific sort of lessons, coaching in pronunciation.

Iryna: Yes. I had coaching of my accent, for my accent. I had a great teacher, actually. She's very good. She's uh, working with actors, uh, uh, that are coming from different places. And a lot of them are from Slavic countries, which is difficult to work with this, with us because we have a lot of accent.

Uh, and, uh, I work like for one and a half years. Um, maybe like really, um, working hard maybe for one year. It was one class a week, but I had also honework, I need to so the pronunciation stuff, like exercises, working with um, uh, with some stuff and, uh, texts, uh, texts and all of that. So, um, the...

Steve: I was just going to say what sorts of things, like when you say... I know a lot of actors and actresses, they have accent coaches. And we see movie actors who can, you know, speak in different accents and very well and so forth and so on. But what did they do? What specifics? Like, what are the specific steps? Instructional method?

Iryna: The first idea that we need to understand: what is accent? Accent is three things, uh, the vocabulary, because Spanish is very different in all of the countries, Latin America and Spain. So vocabulary is different. The second one, the, the phonetic, uh, the pronunciation of certain, uh, letters. Because in, I don't know... I had problems with R and D. It's different in Ukrainian and Russian. And of course, when you speak about the Spanish of Argentina or Mexico it's different because in Mexico we don't say... like, uh, we, we pronounce some words differently and letters. Yes.

Uh, and the third one is the song, the melody that has the language. Yes.

So actually the same in different, not only Ukrainian, Russian are different from Spanish, but also Spanish in all of these countries is different. Argentinian accent have their own song. The Spanish from Spain is their own song.

So I very... I like so much Spanish because of that. It's so different in all of these places. And I like to get to know people from Bolivia or Venezuela, Colombia, uh, I don't know, Spain, different parts of Spain, Argentina of course. So, uh, what we do in our classes, what we did is, um, I don't know, we worked with um, one of the classic, um, exercises is with a pen. So you put a pen like this and pronounce things, but, uh, this one is a little old, old fashioned exercise. We use the, how do you call from the wine? ... the bottle of wine. And you have these, uh, ... that you close the...

Steve: Cork

Iryna: yes. And you put it like this and,and you start to pronounce this.... yes, pronounce, uh, the text, um, we, uh, worked a lot with um, texts that are oriented to several, uh, to specific letters, yes. It's R it's B O, uh, because you know very well that in Russian, we don't pronounce O.

Steve: But you do in Ukrainian.

Iryna: Yes, we do in Ukrainian. So I think that's why I think like Ukrainian Ukrainians, they have more possibilities to improve their accent because we have more, um, we speak both languages that are similar, but they also have different pronunciation and different, I don't know the philosophy, the feeling is different.

So we have more...

Steve: I think Ukrainians speak two languages so they're at an advantage. The more languages the easier it is to learn new languages. For sure. Now at your YouTube channel, you, uh, teach English to Spanish speakers. Spanish, no Russian, no. Sorry. Okay. Let me, I mentioned this because I'm going to make sure people go to your channel to hear the interview that we just did in Spanish so they can hear you in Spanish.

Because some people were asking... probably saying themselves while I'd like to hear you, you know, speak Spanish, they can go to your channel and they can hear our interview in Spanish. But tell me, what do you do at your YouTube channek?

Iryna: Well, my, actually I started my YouTube channel when I wanted to improve my accent and improve my Spanish because it's so difficult to, like... you speak and you don't hear yourself when you speak in your daily life, but when you hear yourself speaking on camera, when you see here, these recordings, you're like, My accent is so strong, or I started to understand my pronunciation, like... mistakes that I make.

It was actually one of the exercises that, uh, uh, helped me improve my Spanish. So I started my channel to be, uh, on, um, to have followers to grow, uh, that people can see me or that I can work later on TV, uh, also to practice. And I started to share my life as a Ukrainian in Mexico. Do blogs. Um, uh, speaking about my journey, how I learned Spanish, because a lot of my followers are from Mexico and they want to know how did you learn Spanish so well? Can you help us to, uh, to learn another language, especially Russian?

Steve: I saw a video of yours where you were talking about pronunciation in English so I had assumed you were also helping Mexicans learn English, but it's more Russian or languages in general.

Iryna: I also promote to learn English because English is very important for career, for our travels. Of course it's important. Uh, but mostly what can I help...uh, I can't help with, uh, accent in English clearly. Uh, but, uh, what I can help with is, uh, uh, like a motivation to learn language, wherever you want. I always say that you need to learn a language that you want to get to know, you want to get to know the culture of this, uh, uh, country, uh, uh, because it's so important for me.

It's like, uh, uh, learning Spanish from Mexico is, it's incredible because I got to, uh, learn the history of Mexico. They're famous people. Um, the Mexican culture is so rich, so it's incredible to learn another language. It gives you a lot of knowledge about history, culture, people, and all of that.

Steve: You know, I, I couldn't agree more, uh, we'll leave a link to your YouTube channel in the description box.

And what you just said about learning about Mexico and their history and their culture is exactly what I have experienced. Whenever I have learned another language, uh, you have more of a perfectionist approach than I have had because you had a professional reason, plus you're living there, but it doesn't matter what our goal is, but we want to achieve perfection and get rid of our accent, or simply explore the language.

Language learning is such a worthwhile activity and, uh, so I think we're going to leave it there cause we could probably, we have so many things that we agree upon we could speak forever. Uh, but I would encourage people to go to your YouTube channel and thank you very much for taking the time to visit with me.