Pronunciation II - Tongue Twisters

It’s been a while, but I’m back with another post about pronunciation. In my last post I mostly talked about how I try to improve my English pronunciation with youtube videos, this time I want to talk about something completely different.

My biggest weaknesses when it comes to English pronunciation are still the th-sounds. It’s a typical problem for German speakers because we don’t have equivalents of these sounds in our own language, so the pronunciation doesn’t come natural to us. While practicing with some of the videos I’ve presented last time I’ve noticed that when I pronounce the sounds isolated I’m actually able to pronounce then correctly. However, sometimes when I talk with others and don’t concentrate on pronunciation that much I still mess them up. Which means that it would be important for me to practice th-sounds in different contexts and not only the sounds isolated.

I’ve started reading random texts out loud to improve on that, but reading out loud can get a bit tedious and also exhausting after some time. I also figured I needed some texts that concentrated a bit more on the specific sounds I wanted to improve. That’s why I eventually thought tongue twisters would be an interesting way of practicing. 

A simple search on the internet and I found a few great sites with English tongue twisters that concentrate on different sounds. One of my favorites was this site because not only does it provide tongue twisters, but also when you click on the sentence you can listen to a recording of the tongue twister so you know what it actually should sound like. Other sites that provide some good tongue twister can be found here, here and here.

I think tongue twisters can be a great way to practice pronunciation because often these sentences are a bit of a challenge and many similar sounds follow close to each other. Not only did I find the th-sounds challenging, but also the v-, w- and f-sounds can be a bit tricky when they stand close to each other in one sentence. In addition, it’s a bit more entertaining to read these ridiculous sentences as opposed to reading random articles to improve pronunciation. It also doesn’t require as much of an attention span and you can practice in small doses.