Pronunciation

One of the richest opportunities for failure, and progress

Every time I go to a nightclub they give me the wrong beer. I ask them for Killian’s and they give me Guinness! I hate that Guinness, but no matter how hard I try to say Killian’s clearly, they always give me Guinness!

— an engineer from Brazil

At least our Brazilian friend asked for beer and got beer. A Japanese student of mine asked for water and got cola!

The importance of pronouncing well should not be underestimated. It’s not just a matter of sounding good to people. Poor pronunciation can make your life complicated in a lot of ways:

Bad pronunciation can cost you money.

Once I was having lunch with a Czech lawyer who’d had good English teachers back home, but back then she was so overconfident that she thought pronunciation practice was a waste of her time. Not long after she told me that, the waiter came to collect the bill. Hers was $10.85, and she thought paying $13.00 would give the waiter a rather hefty tip, so she handed him $15.00 and said, “Make it fearrr-teen,” the waiter gave her a delighted look, thanked her and walked away with all fifteen bucks. Her way of saying 13 sounded to Americans like 15. “See?” she said, “This bad accent is expensive.”

Bad pronunciation can get you undeserved discounts.

The same day of that lunch, a Buddhist monk from Thailand who was in one of my classes told me that three times already he had pumped $20.00 worth of gas into his tank, taken a $20.00 bill in to the gas station clerk, and said in his best English pronunciation, “Twenty dollars.” With this, the clerk smiled, handed him $3.00 change and said, “Have a nice day.” The monk’s pronunciation of 20 sounds like 17, so he gets a deal. The clerk’s register comes up short at the end of the day.

And these problems are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a tough life when you don’t pronounce understandably. I’ll get into more of the reasons as we go on.

The mystery of accents

In learning a new language, most people wind up with a foreign accent no matter how hard they try, but some are such good mimics that they come out sounding completely native. Some people sound native when they pay attention to how they are talking, but they get a foreign accent when they concentrate on what they are saying. Some people sound fine if they’re fresh, awake and alert, but they sound foreign when they’re dead tired. And even a native-sounding accent won’t save you from sounding like a foreigner, because mistakes in grammar and vocabulary can give you away.

The accuracy of learners’ accents can vary, but the general agreement is that if you start learning a language much after puberty, you’re probably going to end up with a foreign accent. Nobody knows exactly why this is. There are theories, but no conclusive proof.

One idea is that after a certain age the muscles in one’s vocal apparatus get so used to a certain range of movement that they have trouble moving into new positions. I don’t know if this is the major reason, but I suspect there might be something to it. When I was in 10th grade, my buddy Chris, who had lived in Germany for several years, pointed out to me that you can tell from a magazine photo if someone is probably German, just by the position of his mouth. His lips look a little tighter than an American’s and they hang differently even when relaxed, and even when he is laughing. In class, when Chris and I should have been working on our design projects, we sat flipping through a copy of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and he’d stop every so often, point to somebody’s Teutonic kisser, say, “See? Look-a-that!” and double over laughing. I had to admit he might have been right.

Then I started looking at many people’s faces and noticing that I often could tell whether they were American or not just by their mouth position. I’d see someone’s lips, think, “She’s gonna have an accent,” and darned if she didn’t! It wasn’t foolproof, but I was right a lot. In line to board a plane to London one year, I was batting almost a thousand as I guessed who was British and who was American just by looking at their mouths. When I got to the United Kingdom, I told friends about this, and they didn’t believe me. Even after they made me imitate the mouth positions, they still didn’t buy it, but I’d see an Englishman on a train and think, “No American could hold his lips like that.”

Enough of my crackpot theories (for now), and back to the bread and butter of pronunciation.

Who to imitate

If you’re in a class, there’s a good chance you’ll have to ignore your teacher’s accent. If the teacher is not a native speaker of the language you are learning, his or her accent may be impeccable, but it also may be very bad. Monitor your teacher’s speech very carefully against recorded material — maybe your teacher can’t roll a Spanish double r and uses an American one instead, or maybe he or she obviously can’t pronounce the vowels in the language.

If you find any serious discrepancies, sneakily find out if there’s a reason for them. Maybe your teacher picked up a native sounding accent in Barcelona, Spain, and the speakers on your recordings are from Mexico. In a case like that, don’t worry, and imitate whichever accent you prefer. There are other cases, though, where the teacher simply has a rotten accent and is not to be imitated under any circumstances. Even though a teacher may have a master’s degree in a foreign language, it’s still possible that maybe he “don’t talk too good” in it.

During your investigation, do not grill, harass or criticize your teacher. Teachers have a hard job, and most of them do not deserve to be picked on.

When deciding whether or not to imitate a teacher’s accent, you need to avoid some false assumptions. What if your teacher is a native speaker not of English, and not of the language he is teaching you, but of a third language? In this situation, there is a temptation to judge your teacher’s proficiency in the target language based on how well he speaks English. This is a big mistake. A teacher may speak English poorly but be excellent in the language he is teaching you. At a Czech high school, I taught with an English teacher from Russia. She must have had absolutely the best possible English instruction in Moscow, because she knew the grammar of the language backwards and forwards in the same way it is taught in English-speaking countries. Besides that, she had an excellent, crystal-clear accent in English. You could still tell she was from Russia, but she spoke so well that she nonetheless could have done the voiceover for TV commercials in the US. Her English was probably the best of anyone’s in the town where we lived, at least anyone who was not British or American.

However, she never did learn to pronounce Czech very well. There were a few sounds she pronounced so badly that many people thought her Czech sounded awful. Unfortunately, some students assumed that if her Czech sounded offensive, then her English must sound terrible, and they wouldn’t take correction from her in English class. This was a huge mistake on their part, because in the English language she really knew what she was doing.

So, keep in mind that if, for example, your Spanish teacher is from Poland, and you don’t like her accent in English, that doesn’t mean that her Spanish sounds bad. Judge by the sound of her Spanish, not that of her English.

Consider also that even if your teacher is a non-native speaker of the language you are learning, and has a foreign accent in it, his accent may still be so much better than yours that you can benefit from his correction. In that case, take coaching from the teacher and imitate the recordings.

If you don’t have any access to a good native speaker, or a clear-speaking foreign one, you need to rely on the recordings as your only model for pronunciation. I learned this the hard way. In 9th grade, my teacher for first-year German was from Holland. (Her surname literally meant “of the sheep,” and no kidding, during morning classes she occasionally burped up a cud, quickly chewed it and swallowed it again!)

This lady had a heavy Dutch accent in both English and German, which she evidently couldn’t hear herself. She would insist we imitate her faulty German pronunciation, but the better you imitated her, the more you got detention. You had to sit in a little cubicle with headphones on, practicing into a microphone, with her cutting in on the recordings every so often to say, “I see you still neet a lot of prektice!”

Well, in 7th grade I’d had weeks of detention to force me to learn to swim, and I knew that the only way out was to gain competence quickly. I fiercely struggled to reconcile my rendition of her accent with what I heard on the recordings, when suddenly it hit me: “This lady doesn’t sound anything LIKE the recordings!” Eureka!

Since imitating her only got me more detention, I started to imitate the people on the tapes, and voila! My ability to mimic people, which has nearly gotten me beaten up on occasion, enabled me to arrive at an accent that many Germans described as no accent. People said I sounded like a native speaker from somewhere in the north of Germany. This got me into more trouble, since the teacher began thinking my family spoke German at home, and she’d drag me into the hallway to yell at me for not getting A’s. But at least I didn’t talk like her anymore, and I didn’t get detention (for that).

Well, that’s the start of our discussion of pronunciation. We’ll get more instructive about it over the next few weeks.

Don’t forget to comment! What have your pronunciation struggles been?