How to Pronounce Like a Native or Almost
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
kiukzy We're going to have one tomorrow (Thursday) and it will be at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time here in Vancouver or on the west coast of North America which is midnight UTC, which used to be known as Greenwich Mean Time. So we don't expect any European participants. On Saturday we're gonna have one at 8:00 a.m.
Pacific Standard Time, which is 4:00 p.m. or 1600 hours UTC or 5:00 in the evening Central European time, Germany, France. That one is going to be primarily in German, primarily or maybe entirely in German, depending on who shows up. With regard to the one on Thursday, I don't know.
I think we have someone from Turkey who lives in Sweden and we have, I hope, someone from Japan, so we'll see which languages are used there. I'm going to be talking about the recent changes to LingQ and, also, language learning in general. Now, I had a request.
Again, I'm very bad. I get these requests and then I forget the name of the person, but this is a gentleman from Russia who is very pleased with the input-based approach to language learning. He says it's really helped him improve his comprehension and his skills, generally. Certainly, he wrote a flawless message in English at YouTube, but he says what advice do I have for getting closer to native-like pronunciation. Okay.
I am not a speech therapist. I have not taught people to pronounce. I remember once when I was 19 in Montreal I was hitchhiking and I met another fellow hitchhiker who was a recent immigrant from Italy. He couldn't say small, he would always ‘zmall'. He was from southern Italy and I tried to get him to go ‘ssssssmall' and he would always go ‘ssssszmall'. That was while we were waiting to get a lift there by the roadside. I think I might have invited him to my home and helped him out or whatever. I can't remember, but it wasn't very successful. What do I recommend for pronunciation?
The first thing is listen. Listening is the key, in my opinion. Listen a lot. Listen to a limited amount of content over and over again. Listen to content that you like. Listen to content that has some rhythm, some bite to it so it's almost like music. I mean you can't listen to a radio newscast, but you can listen to a comedian or someone who's got a little bit of rhythm so that you can listen to it over and over again. Even if you don't understand it all, you're catching that rhythm. I mentioned before there was an immigrant to Toronto from China whose name was Gerry Dye.
He was in his mid 20s, he'd been in Canada for five years and I thought he was a native born Canadian, that's how good his pronunciation was. His secret was he listened to one CD like thousands of times. Maybe that works, but who's going to do that. I wouldn't do that, but I know that listening to these _ comic dialogues in Chinese was tremendously helpful for me in getting the tones right in Chinese. So listening, get the sounds right in your head.
You can't pronounce something that you can't hear. If you can't hear the range of sounds you're not going to be successful in pronouncing it, in my view, no matter what use you make of the international phonetic alphabet or diagrams of your palate and tongue or these machines that you talk into and back comes some kind of a graph showing your sound that you compare to the native speaker. None of that is going to work unless you can hear the sound, so lots of listening. Also, forget your own writing system.
I think Japanese people suffer because they have this kana system which is _. Each syllable has a symbol and so, therefore, bridge is . You've just got to have syllables. Similarly, in English the relationship between pronunciation and how words are spelled is pretty haphazard. You can't rely on how it's written, so people who see the word ‘word' want to say ‘ward' because ‘o' is there. If it's ‘bird', they want to say ‘beard' or something. Forget it, you have to listen. Like when I was learning Russian, it's not _. It's _. Even though it's written _, that's how they pronounce it. So forget the writing system and do a lot of listening. Some sounds are difficult, but generally speaking it's not the sounds that cause the bigger problem.
I know when I was learning Chinese I had trouble making that ‘sha' sound, _ and the ‘c' sound. There's a few of those. The notorious _ sound in Swedish. Like is very difficult to say. There's always going to be a few of those. You work on the ‘th' sound for some people. In French or any language has the _ sound. You go ‘ooh' and then try to say ‘e'. So ‘ooh' become ‘ooheu'. There are a few sounds, but that's normally not the biggest problem.
The bigger problem is the rhythm of the language, so when you listen try to catch the rhythm of the language. Where do the stresses fall? It's often very good to listen initially to a sentence and after that a paragraph and then try and repeat it. Even if you can't pronounce every word, try to get the rhythm. Obviously, the thing there is to listen and repeat and, also, to hear yourself.
Here I would suggest, although I have no proof of this, don't try to compare yourself to the native speaker too early. I think there's real benefit in not hearing yourself too much and in focusing on hearing the native speaker. Whichever native speaker you want to imitate, how they speak. So focus on getting the sounds into you and noticing, making sure you notice. You've got to notice that it's _ and not _. You've got to notice that ‘word', ‘bird', ‘heard', ‘third' are all pronounced the same in English. You've got to notice that. My father, for example, who was born in Czechoslovakia and lived in Canada from 51 to 80 (30 years) spoke excellent English.
There's a province in Canada called Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia, N-o-v-a Scotia S-c-o-t-i-a, Nova Scotia. That's how it's pronounced in English, but to him it was Nova Skotia. He wasn't going to give in. To him it should be ‘Skotia' because that's the value of those letters in Czech or German, whichever language. I think he spoke more German than Czech, but he spoke both. He wouldn't let go, but you've got to let go. You've got to notice it's Nova Scotia. If you want to speak you can hang on to Nova Skotia. If that's what you want to do that's fine, but if you want to sound like a native you've got to let go, notice how they say it and then get used to saying it the same way. I think that eventually you want to do some listening and then recording yourself and comparing to really fine tune it, but the main thing, first of all, is to listen many, many times.
Deliberately notice and get those sounds into your brain. Divorce from how you think it should be pronounced based on your alphabet or anything else. One other thing, when you go through all of that make sure about one thing, though, that when you speak you don't worry about your pronunciation.
I have dealt with so many people in English who speak excellent English and have obvious accents. It doesn't matter. It is far more important to have sound command of the language, of vocabulary, of phrases, to be able to express yourself, to indicate obviously that you understand what the other person is saying. All of those things that have to do with effective communication are much more important than the pronunciation of words. I can remember I dealt with a Swiss banker here and he had a sidekick (an assistant) who was from England and the Swiss banker spoke much better English than the fellow from England.
His use of words, he was so precise in how he used the language. Wide vocabulary, but _, whereas this English guy stumbled in his own native language. It's just to say that what really matters is how well you express yourself overall and if you get uptight about your accent, if you think people are judging you about your pronunciation, in fact you will be worse. Everything in language learning has to do with relaxing, feeling comfortable, feeling confident and just taking it for granted that you are communicating effectively and people are happy to communicate with you.
That goes, in particular, with pronunciation. Some people are going to be better at pronouncing than others. Maybe that's another reason why when I'm a language I don't worry about pronunciation at the beginning at all. I've found that people either begin pronouncing fairly well and then improve a little bit over time or they begin pronouncing very poorly and never ever improve. I know people who have lived in Canada for 30, 40, 50 years, speak English and their pronunciation has never improved.
They interact daily and they haven't improved. So I think it's worthwhile to make sure you get enough of the language in you that you're familiar with the sounds. More than you being familiar, the brain is used to these sounds. The brain recognizes the sounds so you know if you're pronouncing it correctly or not. So make sure you get a lot of listening exposure and then start doing some of these other things like working on the rhythm, listening and repeating and then at some point, but not right at the beginning, listening, repeating and recording yourself and comparing so that you can really fine tune it.
But I wouldn't do that at the beginning because you don't want to reinforce any pronunciation problems that you have at the beginning. If you let it go for a while after your brain is more familiar with the sounds, you will probably do better. I don't know if that's helpful.
I am sure there are professional accent reduction people who can give you better advice on pronunciation, but I was asked to do one on pronunciation so there you have it. Thanks for listening, bye for now.
