the best way to improve your pronunciation

Guest   Mon Oct 13, 2008 4:21 pm GMT
In your opinion, what is the best way to improve your pronunciation?
I have used pronunciation power and I like it because it teaches you how to make each sound. Can you think of a better way?
Johnny   Mon Oct 13, 2008 5:41 pm GMT
Learn every sound, vowels and consonants. Then learn to put them together to form words. Then you need to learn how to join words and form sentences using contractions, reductions, and weak forms. You will then have to listen to a lot of the kind of English you are learning, and pick up the intonation.

It's not easy, because most material on accent reduction and pronunciation in general is incomplete and sometimes even confusing.

Example of how you should be able duh talk, provided I am correct... I am a non native speaker too, LOL!
"Whyncha getta job? Thish ear wur gonna need a lil bit more money fur are project. Wuja like to work uz a drug dealer? Thadud be kinna fun. Ok, whatever, see yuh dumorrow."

I am still struggling with fluency but after all I am not practicing. Anyway, that's what I suggest to those who want to have a more native accent.
John   Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:04 am GMT
Listen to children speak. With children you are often able to hear how sounds are formed and joined to make different words and phrases. Most adults are stuck in their ways and are not fully aware as to how sounds are actually formed so it's usually a waste of time to ask them complex questions regarding pronunciation unless they happen to be speech-therapists or linguists. Adults will not usually take the time to actually "explain" a certain pronunciation or break it down and have no idea what it is like for a non-native speaker trying to learn the language. Usually if you ask an adult to pronounce something for you they will say it fast and slur much of it, which is not very helpful. Children tend to speak slower and annunciate the sounds between vowels and consonants better so that a non-native speaker is able to hear it.

English is my native language, but I found that listening to children speak greatly helped my improve my German pronunciation. One example I can recall was how to pronounce the word "gold" which happens to be the same in both English and German. People were telling me that I was dropping the L-sound in the word making it sound like "goad" and not "Gold even though I could clearly hear my L-sound. As it turns out, the L-sound in English happens to be rather "dark" and guttural, whereas in German it is typically a sharp and palletized. This only occurred to me to me when I heard a 6 year old say the word "gold", which to me sounded more like "Goy-ald" (sorry the xsama crap confuses the hell out of me). When I brought it to other people's attention that the word sounded like it had an "oy" sound they insisted that I was mistaken even though to my English ears it was quite clear. I think this is part of the reason why most native speaking adults (other than language specialists) of a given language are often a poor resource when it comes to "accent elimination" type of things.