Tips for learning to pronounce

Don't neglect these!

One of the keys to improving your pronunciation is exaggeration.

When I was first in art school, drawing human beings from life for up to six hours a day, a lot of my classmates and I were coming up with figures that looked very stiff and inaccurate. Our venerable, highly respected drawing professor — who once coughed a cigarette across the room — would tell us repeatedly, “Always exaggerate the thrust of the pose. You’ll come closer to getting it right.”

People who minded her words would dash off a line that they thought was way too slanted, curved, horizontal or vertical to really reflect the direction of the model’s body in whatever pose he or she had struck. Few people believed that this exaggerated line could possibly be right, but as the drawings took shape — miracle of miracles — we found that hyperbole led to accuracy. Our figures now looked natural. This same principle works in learning pronunciation.

At the beginning, you should exaggerate the sounds you have trouble with. You may think you sound like Sylvester the cat spraying the words, “Sufferin’ succotash!” and maybe you will, but at this point it’s more important to make your tongue, lips and breath do what they’re supposed to than it is to appear dignified. As your command of the language takes shape, your wild sounds will settle down to normal, clear, more native-sounding speech. Here too, hyperbole leads to accuracy.

Keep in mind that pronunciation does not just involve individual words. Pay attention to what your new language does at word boundaries. Some link words together, and some don’t. In many languages, like English, when a word starts with a vowel, people link the previous word up to it or stick in a new consonant at the beginning. Look at how we link things up in this sentence. We write:

Have others even asked?

But we say:

Ha vother zeve nasked?

French and many other languages link words this way too, and unless you do, your speech will sound unnatural.

Still other languages cut off the air back in the throat to create a consonant called a “glottal stop.” In English we never write this sound (or lack of sound), but it’s a real consonant. Its phonetic symbol is like a question mark with no dot under it: [ʔ]. There are two of these stops in the word “uh-oh!”, which sounds like ʔuh-ʔoh. So that word actually contains two consonants, although we don’t write them. You can also hear it in old Buddy Holly recordings, for example, when he sings, “My Peggy Suʔuʔue...” Many languages that don’t link words together, as discussed above, will stick in this glottal stop before any word that begins with a vowel. Where we would say...

Adam and Eve

“aduh mi neve”

They would separate the words with these glottal stops, as in Czech:

Adam a Eva

ʔadam ʔa ʔeva

The same thing can happen in German, Polish and other languages.

When two consonants occur together at a word boundary, one may drop, and the other one may or may not lengthen. Look at how this works in spoken English:

Is he busy?

ih zee bizzy? (We drop the h.)

He’s in there.

He’s in nere. (We drop the th and add another n.)

If your target language has something like this, you’ll need to learn it in order to sound natural.

These forms of linking, sound deletion and sound lengthening (along with other similar phenomena) are not signs of laziness or sloppy speech. They are part of the ordinary pronunciation and cadence of a language, and if you’re going to sound good in your new language, you’ll have to learn how words are said when they are put together.

Find mouth charts somewhere. If you’re having particular trouble with some sound or other, get ahold of a book, video or computer program — or even a teacher who can draw well — that will show you in diagrams how the problem sounds are formed in your mouth. You need to see exactly where your tongue goes, what your lips should be doing, and how the air should be passing through.

And tedious as they might be, study those pronunciation sections at the beginning of your textbooks. They’re a pain, but they have important details that should help you speak more clearly.

I can’t stress enough that if you are a normal person, with a healthy vocal apparatus, you can pronounce other languages much better than you probably think. Aim for a native accent, and even if you don’t achieve it, you will at least sound much better for the effort.

Place of articulation. To wrap up this post, let’s get more specific about knowing how to configure your mouth to pronounce foreign sounds convincingly. What the mouth charts, or the verbal descriptions in foreign language textbooks, are mainly showing you is the “place of articulation”, which is what linguistics experts call the part of your mouth that your tongue is touching to make the sound.

Sometimes what seems to be obviously the same sound from one language to another, and represented by the same letter, is not quite the same. For example, a T is not a T is not a T.

The letter T represents a different sound in English from the one it represents in Romance or Slavic languages, for one thing. English T is pronounced with the tip of the tongue against what’s called the “alveolar ridge”, which is that hard bony ridge behind your upper front teeth. Plus, at the beginnings of words or stressed syllables, a puff of air comes out right after the T, which is strong enough to actually move a piece of paper hung in front of your mouth.

However, in French or Italian or Russian, Polish and Czech, to name a few, T is pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the upper front teeth themselves, and there’s no puff of air. You will also hear this kind of dental T in the accents of New York tough guys on TV shows, among other characters, especially the ones who are supposed to be mafiosi.

Learners who are not being super-duper observant won’t notice this difference, but once they do, and they start pronouncing T with their tongue in the right place, it makes a huge difference in how their French, Spanish, Slovak or other adopted language sounds.

Something similar applies to other speech sounds as well, so don’t skip those pronunciation chapters in the books you learn from — and realize that most online programs don’t give you the explanations of this that books will. You have to use a mix of learning methods.