Reasons people don’t learn good pronunciation

Some people really don’t want to

Let’s continue our journey through pronunciation issues.

Some people don’t learn to pronounce well because they’re scared to.

You see this a lot in school kids. All their classmates speak the new language with thick American accents, and they figure if they develop a really good accent, they’ll sound like they’re hamming it up. Maybe people will think they sound like Pépé La Pew, or like an Italian chef on a commercial, or like a funny guy in a badly dubbed kung fu movie. Or maybe they just won’t sound like the other kids.

When a relative of mine was in high school, he got good grades in three years of Spanish, but he ended up with an accent so bad that he could barely be understood. If I pressed him, he could say his otherwise unintelligible Spanish sentences with an almost perfect accent, but then he’d just slide into the same horrible pronunciation again. It seemed he just didn’t want to sound “too Spanish.”

I have heard of another case (which I can’t verify, but is plausible) in which the boys in a middle-school French class had much more trouble pronouncing correctly than the girls did. As the story goes, a little investigation revealed that the boys thought that correctly pronouncing certain French vowels made them sound effeminate. (It might have something to do with that picture of King Louis XIV in a wig and tights that’s in every French textbook.)

Even some adults fall into traps like this. But remember that if you try too hard not to sound stupid in front of people from your own country, you’re liable to sound stupid in front of the people in the country where your new language is spoken. So, think ahead! Mentally put yourself in future contact situations with native speakers, and try as hard as you possibly can to sound good.

Some people don’t want to learn to pronounce well because they object to sounds in the new language.

This seems awfully goofy, but it’s true! A lot of Slavic languages, like Russian, Polish and Slovak have palatal t and d sounds. To make them, you take the front to middle part of your tongue, pack it up into the roof of your mouth (your hard palate) and stop the air. They sound something like the consonants you hear when a drunk American party boy wants to keep his car keys: “Styop it! Give ’em back! Ah kin dzyrahv!” Some English speakers don’t like these sounds, and they want to replace them with our ordinary t and d, even though that can seriously — and embarrassingly — change the meanings of words. If you find a sound bothering you like this, just think of the unpleasant impression some foreigners may get from English sounds. When I was first learning Czech, I had trouble making the aforementioned palatal t and d sounds. When I got to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, a friend tried to correct me, but I said, “I don’t like those consonants, because they sound like a drunk talking.” She shot back, “Well, what do you think your English th sounds like to me!” Don’t bring your personal objections into something as morally neutral as a language’s sound system. You might as well bawl out dogs for having puppies out of wedlock.

Some people don’t learn to pronounce well because they’re grapholators.

You’ve heard of an idolator, right? That’s a person who worships idols. A grapholator is someone who worships writing. In 20 years of teaching English and other languages, I found that the hardest people to teach a language to are often lawyers and professors. Many of them are intelligent and completely boneheaded at the same time. There seem to be two reasons for this:

1. They’re used to thinking of themselves as the smartest person in the room, and many of them won’t stoop to complying with your instruction, even if they’re out of their depth and you’re the expert in the situation. After all, they finished law school, and you merely studied language and linguistics. (I should say that some lawyers, on the other hand, are fascinated by all aspects of language and really want to learn from experts. After all, language is their job.)

2. The duller lawyers and professors are largely grapholators, so they pay no attention to how they hear the teacher or the recordings pronouncing and insist on giving each letter of the text the value they think it should have. These are the kinds of people who pronounce “fruit” as “froo-it”, and “education” as “ed-oo-kay-shee-on”. The teacher can try to help them until doomsday, but these people will never believe the teacher, because they can see the text and they’ve got their own rigid, inaccurate idea of how it should sound.

Some people don’t learn to pronounce well because they’ve found an excuse.

Linguistic science tells us that most adults who start a new language after puberty cannot learn to pronounce it with a perfect accent. This gives many people a phony reason not to try. They’ll tolerate coaching for a while, but after a little frustration they just say “forget it” and trot out the past-puberty excuse.

The problem with this is that if adults persist, they can pronounce much better than they think they can. It took me a month or so to learn to pronounce the Czech consonant ř, which sounds like a Scottish trilled r and the zh sound in pleasure both made at the same time. It’s called a palatal trill and is a bizarre sound that hardly any language on earth has. (I think one Australian aborigine language has it.) I envied my friend Mike who produced this sound on the second try, despite having no intention of learning Czech. A lot of native born Czech kids can’t even make it when they start second grade! I worked and worked at it, in the car, on walks down deserted streets at night, and finally one day it blurted out while I was taking a shower. For a while, I couldn’t pronounce it in a word without popping my eyeballs out — very entertaining for the natives — but eventually the sound settled comfortably into my speech, and I no longer had to make faces.

Difficult sounds can be like the guitar lick or saxophone fingering that you practice constantly for days and just don’t get, but then suddenly you play it flawlessly after a day of not practicing. Your mind and muscles may take their time as you learn to pronounce, but eventually you can come close to the sound, and you might even get it perfect.

My point in all that is that, in pronunciation, most people can do more than they say they can.

Here’s more proof of that. A lot of foreigners (Albanians and Arabs excluded) can’t pronounce the two sounds that are represented by the letters th in English. (There’s no one th sound. There are two. Hold out the first sound in the word think, and then the one in the word this, and you’ll hear the difference.) In my ESL classes, a good half of the students might have claimed they couldn’t produce those sounds. So, I’d write these two sentences on the board:

I have another.

I have an udder.

The only way you can hear the difference between these two sentences is by the contrast between th and d. I’d tell the students to say the first of the two sentences. Those who claim they can’t pronounce th will at first tell me, “I have an udder,” but if I moo enough, nearly all of them get their tongues between their teeth and say another. Still, there will be a few — especially the really macho dudes — who insist they can’t do it. For them I write this on the board:

I am the third.

I am the turd.

Again, only one sound distinguishes one of these sentences from the other. I’d ask the refuseniks to say, “I am the third.” When given a choice between getting their tongues in the right place or announcing to the class that they are a mound of poo, nearly 100% of the resistors can say third. So much for the “I can’t do it” excuse. These people may not be able to make the right sound every time they try, but at least we have established that they can do it, and we can work from there.

Need more evidence? A lot of native Spanish speakers say they can’t pronounce the sh sound. I gave a Puerto Rican woman these four words to pronounce.

chip     cheap  ship     sheep

She said:

chip     chip     chip     chip

After working on her vowels a little, she got to...

chip     cheap  chip     cheap

But she still insisted she couldn’t make the sh sound. I got a brainstorm. I wrote down the Spanish words pollo (pronounced “PO-yo”) and llegar (pronounced “ye-GAHR”). Then I told her to pronounce them like people from Argentina. She said:

“posho”          “shegar”

Aha! She CAN pronounce the sh sound! So I wrote this down...

llip       llíp

...and I told her to read it as if she were from Argentina. She said “ship” and “sheep”. Lo, she could pronounce two English words that she swore she couldn’t. Now, this was not a miracle cure for her pronunciation. Like the third/turd people, she would need a huge amount of practice and effort, and for a long time she would almost always miss the mark, but at least it was now clear she could make the sound that she claimed was impossible, and she could go to work on it.

After this revelation, I showed her the four words again:

chip     cheap  ship     sheep

She said:

chip     chip     chip     chip

Better luck next time!

We’ll get into more about pronunciation in the next installment.