The dangers of pronouncing incorrectly
If you neglect pronunciation, you're just postponing your pain.
One thing that drives me crazy about some language teachers is the way they think mastering something halfway should be enough for all their students. For this reason, some of them have told me not to emphasize correction of certain pronunciation errors, even though they know that those specific errors can cause some humiliating situations. This type of teacher has a patronizing attitude toward the students and ignores the fact that most students want to learn the language to the best level they can accomplish. You can often recognize this kind of teacher, because they talk to adult language learners — including lawyers and surgeons — as if they were children.
Pronunciation is important, and you should do your best to master it. If you have a normal vocal apparatus, you can pronounce any language intelligibly.
People have two main motivations for learning good pronunciation. One is to avoid something, such as embarrassing misunderstandings. However, another is the desire to accomplish something, such as to do better at their public contact job or even to play a game. I can’t find the TED talk anymore, but I saw one professor explain how he installed several interactive computers in walls on the street in a part of India where Telugu is spoken. Telugu speakers are notorious for speaking English with an unintelligible accent, and the kids in this neighborhood were no exception. After he had installed the computers, the professor showed the kids some games on them that responded to voice prompts. The kids couldn’t make them work, because of their accent. The professor told them that when he came back in three months, he wanted to see them operating the games. When he arrived back in town, the children were masterfully playing the computer games. They spoke beautifully and essentially had British accents. The games gave them the motivation to improve.
If you don’t think it’s a big deal whether or not you learn to pronounce well, start paying attention to foreign speakers of English who didn’t bother with correct sounds early on.
Spanish doesn’t have a v sound. It’s got the letter, but not the sound. This can lead to an English goof that a lot of people get to hear sooner or later. When I was in college, one of the Spanish professors (himself a native Italian) invited to his class a professor from Mexico to give pointers to the students. The man listened to them all, analyzed their speech thoroughly, and then stood up to make his proclamation: “You are all habing trouble wit your bowels!” He meant vowels. The class just exploded. They couldn’t help it.
☞ Before you think this story shows how funny those silly foreigners are, be aware that when English speakers are asked their age in Spanish class, they commonly respond, “I have 20 anuses,” because instead of “años” they say “anos”. And English speakers do something similar in Italian. You can’t just decide your sloppiest effort is good enough.
Ukrainian doesn’t have our th sounds. Some people replace them with t and d, saying things like, “I tink,” and, “What’s dis?” and they don’t have too many communication problems. However, some East Europeans intuitively notice that when we make th sounds we don’t stop the air, like in t and d, but we hiss it through our teeth. If they think — consciously or not — that they can’t pronounce th sounds right, they figure the next best thing is to use f and v, saying things like, “I fink,” and, “What’s vis?” After all, they’re still touching their teeth and hissing the air through, just with their lower lip instead of with their tongue. Should be better than using t and d, right? Well, one Ukrainian woman I met was going for her master’s degree and was almost done writing her thesis. Soon she would have to go before the department professors and support the claims she’d made in it. Because of the unfortunate way she substituted f and v for the th sounds, however, she kept telling people she was going before a committee to defend her feces!
Being lazy about pronunciation can also affect the way you write in a foreign language. A very smart Czech high school student — who had passed English proficiency exams that some local English teachers had failed — used f and v in the same way as the Ukrainian woman I’ve just mentioned. He wrote things like, “I have been to Germany free times, and the thirst time was the most fun.” His accent confused his writing. Spelling lessons wouldn’t help; he needed pronunciation coaching. Here’s an even worse example: A Czech banker who replaced the th sounds with t and d, once took an English test and responded to the question, “What is a toothbrush?” with the answer, “A toothbrush is a thing for cleaning teats.” I did not make this up! This is really what he wrote that he did with his toot-brush.
Habitually bad pronunciation can even affect the way you hear. My language department head in the Czech high school where I taught used to hear English with his own accent. He could not pronounce the uh in words like duh!, and he replaced it with an ah sound, even in his mind. In the Czech language, as in many others, the b sound is made voiceless at the end of the word, turning into p. This was also part of this man’s spoken accent. Now, many people who speak his way have no trouble understanding native speech, but some do. As I said, they hear with an accent. One time I used the expression pop psychology, and this department head wound up thinking I was talking about the mentality of people who hang around pubs. Here is more or less how his mental accent processed the word pop, spoken with my American accent.
Start with pop
ah = uh
b at the end > p
pop = pub
A woman attending a lecture I gave had spent a year or so in Spain, where she realized you can “hear with an accent”. The epiphany came when she bought a souvenir keychain and a Spanish friend asked her what it was called in English. When she told him it was called a keychain, he replied, “Oh! Like the room where you cook!”
Here’s another example of hearing with an accent: Many languages don’t have the vowel sound English has in words like and, but they do have the vowel in the word end. Because of this, many foreigners get that “short a” sound confused with the “short e” sound. You can see this in their writing when they mix up the words than and then, both of which they pronounce like then. (Spellcheckers won’t catch this error, by the way.) A friend of mine from Serbia evidently still had this problem a little bit, even after years in the US. One day I told her that president Harry S. Truman supposedly didn’t actually have a middle name, but simply the middle initial S. (The website for the Truman library says this idea may have been a joke, but doesn’t seem to provide an actual middle name for him.) When I mentioned that the S did not stand for anything, but that his name was simply Harry S. Truman, my friend looked startled. Because she couldn’t tell the difference between the and vowel and the end vowel, she thought I was saying that one of our great presidents was really named Hairy Ass Truman.
Don’t think it’s just “silly foreigners” speaking English who make this kind of mistake. A German friend of mine, Torsten, pointed out a common gaffe that English speakers make in his language when they cut corners in learning pronunciation. The letters ch in German can represent a sound like the one at the end of the English word blech!, or a similar one where you push your tongue a little bit more forward. (Some American kids use that second sound to imitate someone sawing wood.) Well, many Americans don’t like to learn this consonant, so they replace it with our familiar sh sound. This means that they incorrectly pronounce the German pronoun ich (“I”) as “ish”. Most of the time they are understood, but when they introduce themselves, saying, Ich heisse... (“My name is...” or, “I am called…”), they say, “Ish heisse...,” and it sounds to a German like Ich scheiße, “I am shitting,” in colloquial language. Imagine a guy walking into a business meeting, shaking the potential client’s hand, and saying, “I’m shitting Joe! What’s your name?” That one little sound is a big deal! People have to introduce themselves relatively often, so there’s a lot of opportunity for embarrassment.
You can see now that it’s absolutely vital to get your pronunciation as accurate as possible, no matter how you have to ham it up, and without regard to how undignified you temporarily look.
My unscientific observation is that many people who still pronounce horribly after a lot of good training will have other personality problems. Quite a few of them aren’t self-critical enough, can’t take constructive criticism from others, have to be right all the time, and are very concerned that they always appear superior. The result is the opposite of what they intend. Their terrible pronunciation makes them sound undignified.
Make sure your ego doesn’t get in the way of learning to make the right sounds, because the result will be incessant blows to your ego later. You’re just postponing and amplifying the pain. Don’t hesitate, don’t look around at other people with a what-about-ish attitude, don’t discourage yourself, don’t get huffy, don’t let temporary embarrassment bother you, and just plow into the task!
Remember the motto of this blog: Learning a language is a process of failing and failing and failing and failing until you fail less.