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.

Improving my pronunciation

I have been learning English for over ten years now and I feel pretty confident when I’m talking to native speakers. However, even though I know that I can hold a conversation without stuttering and my vocabulary is improving on a daily basis, I know that my pronunciation isn’t perfect and I’m not completely fluid yet. I’m studying English, so obviously my goal is to get as close to a natural English accent as possible.

To start off, I need to ‘pick’ the English I want to speak. It’s not very authentic if I’m pronouncing a few words the British way but speak an American accent the rest of the time. To sound a little more like a native speaker I have to settle on one accent I want to use and then I can start to perfect it. I’m aiming for an American accent because quite frankly I think it’ll be easier for me to learn. Most of the English I’m confronted with in daily life (first and foremost TV-series and most English books I read) is American English and that’s why it seems more natural for me to use it as well.

Now, to actively improve my pronunciation I have to know where to start. If I encounter a certain word I don’t know how to pronounce I’ll just look it up in a monolingual dictionary or websites that focus on pronunciation like howjsay.com. However, it’s not only important to look up the pronunciation of words I randomly come across, but also to practice the rest of the time. It’s essential to listen to native speakers in order to hear their way of speaking: not only their pronunciation, but also their intonation and how they stress certain words and parts of sentences. That means that videos and other audio sources are the best ways to improve pronunciation.

And that’s why in my opinion youtube is a great source to improve all these different parts. First of all youtube offers millions of videos of native speakers talking about random stuff in a casual environment, which means that I can listen to them talk like they usually talk in daily life. But even more important are the videos of natives that talk specifically about how to get an authentic English accent, or the differences between various English accents.

Obviously there are thousands of these videos online, so it can be a bit difficult to find the ones that are really helpful and trustworthy or focus on academic and more formal vocabulary – many British vs. American English videos focus on slang and even though they are funny to watch, they aren’t the kind of videos I’m looking for when I want to improve my pronunciation. So at the beginning I looked over the pronunciation page from our English course and I watched a few of the videos that were linked there.

One youtube channel I immediately liked was Rachel’s English. First of all she teaches American pronunciation which I want to focus on and second of all her videos are very detailed. For starters she has videos that concentrate on all the basic English sounds, others are about the pronunciation of important words such as ‘them’ or ‘that’, and there is a section about idioms and one about conversational American English.

I find her videos entertaining and at the same time very useful to improve my pronunciation. I especially like the section that explains detailed how to pronounce certain sounds, for example different ‘t’ and ‘th’ sounds. I know that I still have some problems with these sounds, so this section helps me a lot. 

Besides Rachel’s videos, I also watched a few of Amy Walker’s youtube videos and really liked them. I enjoy listening to her and think she explains essential parts of the American accent easily understandable.

Usually I watch videos and repeat after the speakers. I try to hear the difference between my pronunciation and theirs and to repeat as often as possible until I’m close to the right way of pronouncing the sound. I also revise the sounds I have more problems with after a few days again.

How I plan on studying for my vocabulary exam

As I mentioned in my last blog post about vocabulary, learning vocabulary isn’t really my favorite way of spending my free time. However, seeing as I’ll have a massive vocabulary exam in January for which I’ll have to learn over 700 words, I know that I’ll probably have to spend much more time on studying words than I did before. Because if I’m honest, I have to admit that I’ve spent way too little time studying vocabulary this semester and I know I have to step up my game if I want to pass this exam. I also know I have to become more organized in order to get everything done in this short time.

When facing such a huge number of words to learn, I can’t just randomly start without a system. I need some kind of strategy otherwise I’d probably be confused after a short time. The first step of my strategy is to make a glossary of all the words I have to learn. Vocabulary.com is a great website to look up the meaning of a word, but for this exam it is required to know much more. Additionally to the meaning of the word, we’ll have to know collocations, synonyms, antonyms, how to pronounce it, etc. Basically we’ll have to know pretty much everything about the word and that means that even though I enjoy doing the quizzes on vocabulary.com or other online apps, it won’t be enough for this exam.

So making a glossary it is. Even though I can’t solely use vocabulary.com to prepare myself for this exam, it’s still a good place to start. The website gives really good explanations and meanings of the words, so it’s still going to be useful for my glossary. Other than vocabulary.com I will use monolingual dictionaries such as the Cambridge dictionary to determine all the meanings for a word.

To understand the meaning of the word better I’ll also look for example sentences in these dictionaries. For me, knowing a word means to be able to use it in the right context and the best way of understanding how to use a word in the right context is to look up example sentences.

Monolingual dictionaries are also a great way to check my pronunciation. Most of the dictionaries – and also vocabulary.com – offer audio files of the words where native speakers pronounce it the right way. It’s also great that most offer both, the American and British pronunciation, because I want to get a more authentic American accent.

Corpora, for example the Corpus of Contemporary American English, are really useful for finding collocations. They usually give a list with the most common collocations and sometimes also how frequently they are used.

To find synonyms and antonyms, thesaurus.com is a very useful websites. Here all synonyms and antonyms of a word are listed, sorted by how close they are to the meaning of the original word.  Additionally to that I can also use monolingual dictionaries.

Looking at all these criteria, it’s hard to believe that I’ll be able to finish my list in a month. That’s why I skimmed through the list of words before starting my glossary and I picked out the words I didn’t know at all or have never used before. These are the words I have to focus on first and after that I’ll concentrate on the rest. However, in the end I will have to study all words, because even though I know how to use quite a few on the list, I’m not completely sure I know every single aspect of the word.

On top of all these points above, one factor is the most important: that I learn daily. Considering the huge amount of words, I won’t be able to write that glossary a week before the exam. I need to sit down every day and learn at least a few words. Because even if one month sounds like much time at first, in reality it isn’t. I think it’s doable to learn all these words until the end of January, but only if I put as much time and effort as possible in it.

Vocabulary Learning

Learning languages has always been a passion of mine and something I was quite good at. However, one of my least favorite aspects about learning a foreign language used to be vocabulary learning. I’ve never been a person who liked the ordinary way of learning vocabulary: in my opinion sitting down and learning random words without actual context by heart isn’t a good way to memorize them for a long time. Sure, they are saved in the short-term memory and you’ll pass your vocabulary test, but two weeks later half of them are forgotten. That’s why I now use different methods to memorize vocabulary.

For me it’s very important to learn words in the right context. Most of the time I don’t think it actually makes sense to know the meaning of an isolated word, but not how to use it in a sentence. If I look up a word, I always do so in a monolingual dictionary to learn synonyms and I make sure that I find a few example sentences to really understand the meaning of the word. A big part of my English vocabulary knowledge also stems from reading English books. Over and over again I read commonly used words and phrases in the right context and after some time I automatically memorize them. I usually try to guess words I don’t know based on the context they occur in and if I don’t understand something I will look it up. 

However, reading books, watching television series or movies and listening to radio programs is fun and easy to do, but it’s obviously not enough. No matter how much I surround myself with English in my daily life, I won’t get around studying and learning vocabulary – it’s inevitable. That’s why I use other ways to memorize vocabulary and not the boring method of learning everything by heart and forgetting it a week later. My favorite method so far is using interactive websites like vocabulary.com. I like doing quizzes, filling in words in example sentences or match words with their synonyms because I think that way I remember them in the right context and don’t forget them as fast. In my opinion the key to remember stuff in general – not only vocabulary – is to understand it and be able to connect it to other related topics. So for me it’s important to know possible collocations of a word and when and how to use it.   

Of course, sometimes there is no way around the good old method of learning a list of words by heart. If I absolutely have to do so, I always make sure to write the list by hand because somehow I have the feeling that I remember words better if I have written them down myself and not just printed them out and read them through. Still, I probably won’t ever be a big fan of learning things by heart and definitely favor other methods of memorizing vocabulary.