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.