[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
of those few sounds that are different from your mother tongue.
When you take on the challenge of trying to sound more like a native, focus on pronunciation and
sit down with a native speaker (in person or during an online call) who can tell you precisely why you
are pronouncing something incorrectly. If you do this, I would highly recommend that you ask the
native speaker to mimic how you are saying it followed by how it should be said. It s a little
embarrassing to feel like someone is mocking your bad sound, but this has helped me notice the real
difference much more quickly.
I remember that I spent several hours trying to roll my r, and over several days I tried to mimic a
purring cat while relaxing my tongue and blowing air over it. Tougher sounds like this, which are
nothing like what you have in your native language, can take some getting used to, but practice and
feedback from natives can help you create them. There is nothing stopping you from genuinely
learning them. The idea that your tongue doesn t have the muscles or other such excuses is nothing
but ridiculous.
This practice is important to both getting the approximation of a new sound and aspiring to sound
like a native while you tweak those lingering minor mistakes.
Singing Your Accent Away
Having a convincing accent is, of course, what most of us consider a crucial factor in being confused
for a native speaker. I think this only works when combined not just with having an overall native-like
appearance, but also with what you re saying. It s not just how you say something but what you say.
Even if you use grammatically perfect sentences and do so with a pristine accent, and even if you
outwardly look like a native, if you say things that are not generally said in that country, you will
stand out like a sore thumb.
For instance, the English phrase go to bed is grammatically incorrect if you consider it
compared to going anywhere else, which requires an article (go to the kitchen, go to a bathroom) or a
possessive (go to my car). Despite this, the phrase is go to bed. Exposure to natives and imitating
and repeating what they say will give you real phrases.
This is how I prefer to work on improving my accent: by saying several words that are genuinely
uttered by a native, learning sentence blocks, and processing my flash cards not as individual words
but as new words in example sentences, which give them better context than learning a single
translation from English.
There are sounds we create by combining words, and we can t get these from learning the sounds
of individual words too well. While my may theoretically be pronounced to rhyme with buy, when
said as one word or when speaking slowly, many native English speakers alter this a bit and say ma
when speaking quickly (in Ireland we even go so far as to say it as mee ). Vowel sounds naturally get
cut shorter and some consonants disappear altogether in English.
These are not described accurately in slowly enunciated audiotapes, which is why I tend to take a
native recording, such as a podcast or a TV show, replay a segment, and try to mimic it precisely as
well as I can. For instance, many Spanish speakers (depending on which country and region) don t
pronounce the d in words with ado in them; when spoken quickly and naturally, something like
pescado becomes pescao. While this may not be proper Spanish, it is how many people speak and
should be emulated if you are aiming to mimic the accent of a native in much the same way I
dunno is often how we say I don t know in English.
For some people, focusing on repeating native-recorded phrases and attempting to reproduce them
is all they need. Many language learners get great mileage out of sentence drilling, and they do so
only with sentences that have been genuinely uttered by natives, rather than translations of what they
might say.
For me, this can get boring, so since I am quite musical, I have found that singing to mimic real
songs in the language can be a huge help and a good break from repeating phrases. When people sing,
they also pronounce the words naturally and quickly (depending on the song or singer).
But rather than do this alone, I have gone back to taking private lessons. Only this time, instead of
hiring a language teacher (language teachers are typically not qualified to help with accent reduction;
they focus more on language content in terms of vocabulary, grammar, expressions, and the like), I
hire a singing or music teacher! I have also had success with voice trainers who specialize in helping
radio broadcasters sound more professional in their native tongues. I ve even gone to speech therapists
once again, those who work with native speakers aiming to improve their pronunciation. The thing
about a singing teacher, a voice trainer, and a speech therapist is that, unlike language teachers, they
are very familiar with enunciation, pauses, mouth and tongue positions, rhythm, tonality, and much
more.
When I tried to get by as a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, my Carioca music teacher helped
me with singing lyrics to popular Brazilian songs after we read them aloud first. One of her criticisms
of my early attempts was that we English speakers . . . tend . . . to separate . . . our words . . . too much
. . . as we . . . speak. In Portuguese, words flow together while your intonation goes up and down, and
this helps you separate words in your mind better than strict pauses. After I was able to repeat the
phrases she gave me to her satisfaction, hearing other foreigners speaking Portuguese and not doing it
made me immediately think that they sounded like robots with their individual word separations, in
comparison to how Portuguese should be spoken.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]