Pronunciation software

Hi,

I want to discard my German accent while talking English... So I've been thinking of buying pronunciation software but that's a lot money for a pupil like me... and so I'd appreciate your opinions on such programs and if they're really worth the money.

D-fens, if you can not buy any software, just listen to lots of english audio, you will probably never lose all the german accent but most of it.. just practice and imitate what you hear from the english audio..

Hey daveboy,

thanks for your answer, I'm already doing that what you wrote, but i don't think I'll make further progress by doing only that.

My teachers were all quite incompetent when it comes to things as pronunciation... they didn't really care about good pronunciation (they weren't native English speakers themselves). And they certainly didn't taught IPA at school.

I remember when i was in my first English class, it was like this: The teachers said a word or a sentence, e.g. "the" and then the students had to repeat it all together...

Btw here's a sample of my English (trying to imitate AE...):
http://www20.zippyshare.com/v/85122095/file.html

D-fens, you have problems with the vowel in "sounds" in that clip.
Software like "Perfect Pronunciation" might help you pronounce some sounds, but in my opinion such programs are worth nothing. If you learn the phonemes, you can just check the transcriptions in a good dictionary. You don't need any special software.
Instead, I recommend an accent reduction course, book plus CD's.
The biggest problem is not pronouncing the sounds, that's easy. The real problem is learning to connect the words like native speakers do and speak fluently.
What + are + you + talking + about? = Wud uh ya talkin abou(t)?
I asked him = Ah astim

English is cursed because you need to learn how to pronounce every word, and that is not enough because you also need to learn how some words change in connected speech, and once you think you know everything, you just need to pay attention to how someone else speaks and you'll realize it's all different.
People will be saying "You can't use a flap /t/ in penalty, that's unnatural!", and then you hear Barak Obama say "death penaldy". Right Tom? ;-)

@it's me

So you're saying there was a point when you knew all the sounds, but could not connect them into natural speech? I'm genuinely interested in your experiences.

I'm Johnny, I still come here every once in a while...
I would say there was a point when I knew the difference between BED and BAD, or between SHIP and SHEEP, but I still had trouble listening because I heard "a lot of noise".

Wh ...uh ... talking about?

If you don't know what weak forms are, you just expect "what" to sound like /wɑt/, you like /juː/, and so on. But that's not what you'll hear: you'll hear "what" pronounced like /wət/ and "you" like /jə/, for example. And then the /t/ at the end turns into a flap /t/. Another example is assimilation like T + Y = CH (doncha) and similar features.

I didn't know anything about that, and all that stuff was just confusing "noise" because it wasn't what my ears were expecting.
An accent reduction course helped me improve my listening skills, because I learned about weak forms.

Didn't you learn about that at school? Teachers (esp. natives) love to give examples like "Djeetjet?" and "Why doncha wanna lemme go to the movies witchas?" A lot of these shortened forms also show in spelling, e.g. "ya", "gonna", "whaddayawant?", etc.

It's interesting to me because I've never had that problem. Maybe I should write more about weak forms and assimilation on Antimoon. Even learners with a natural ear for languages could benefit from some background. I remember I was shocked when I learned that "of" is pronounced /əv/... It's not that I pronounced it incorrectly before, I just never realized the sound is a /v/...

<<Didn't you learn about that at school? Teachers (esp. natives) love to give examples like "Djeetjet?" and "Why doncha wanna lemme go to the movies witchas?" A lot of these shortened forms also show in spelling, e.g. "ya", "gonna", "whaddayawant?", etc. >>

Here good pronunciation is generally not taught. No one here seems to know the difference between "ship" and "sheep", let alone anything about assimilation or weak forms.
Now I might be able to figure out several phonetic features on my own, but when you are a beginner and know nothing at all about English you don't even know that weak forms are supposed to exist. There are no weak forms in my first language.

I think that most of your accent is simply being just barely off, and it would probably take a lot of work, such as hiring a voice coach, to take of that. There are a few simple things that you could work on. For instance, you seem to be mixing up t and d, pronouncing "word" as "wort". Also, you are pronouncing "pronunciation" as "pronounciation". And at the end, you dropped the word "are": "...learning the proper pronunciation of every word that you [are] going to use".

I also have some issues with your syntax, but much of that could be categorized as my personal taste rather than non-native wording. For instance, you say "English uses different sounds than other languages" rather than "English uses sounds different from those in other languages".

I was Jonny said:
<<If you don't know what weak forms are, you just expect "what" to sound like /wɑt/, you like /juː/, and so on. >>

Huh? /wət/ is not the weak form of "what", it is the standard form.

Hey Another Guest,
I appreciate your comment on my speech sample and you're right about "pronunciation", I did pronounce it like "pronounciation".
Thanks for that, I wasn't aware of this mistake.
But I don't have the money to afford a professional voice coach, so I'll rather carry on listening to American movies and American news in order to improve my accent and pronunciation.