2024-05-10
16 分钟This is an all ears english episode the three quickest ways to improve your english pronunciation.
Welcome to the all ears english podcast downloaded more than 200 million times are you feeling stuck with your english we'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection not perfection with your american host aubrey carter the ielts wiz and lindsay mcmahon the english adventurer coming to you from arizona and colorado usa.
You can learn all of the vocabulary in the world and you can use perfect grammar but if you don't use correct pronunciation you won't be able to achieve connection today listen in and get our three tips to improve your pronunciation hello aubrey how you doing today i'm great how are you lindsey i'm fantastic i'm excited to be here but i have a key question for you today you ready yeah so how do you improve your pronunciation in a new language it's a broad question but i think a lot of our listeners still want to know how.
Yes we get this question a lot and i've thought about this myself because for the most part i'm self taught right i don't have a teacher there giving me pronunciation feedback usually whoever i'm talking about i'm just trying to connect in spanish or in french i'm not asking them to correct my pronunciation that would sort of hurt the connection so i've struggled with this i'm like how do i improve my pronunciation i would either need i think to find a teacher or maybe an app that could help me it's tricky that's a good.
Point if your goal is connection which that is what we recommend especially really for any level right any level it goes across all levels but especially at this b two to c one level you want to connect cause you want to get that positive feedback in your own mind to want to go and do it again right we create this positive feedback loop so connection is the goal but how then do we dedicate time to making sure our pronunciation is.
Correct right exactly yeah i've struggled with this and we get a lot of questions we're answering one today from juan antonio santa cruz who just said how do i improve my pronunciation i get it i can feel the frustration in this question like this is a struggle how do we do this we've thought about this we've looked into it and i'm excited to answer this question today.
Yeah so juan antonio asked this question in spotify if you don't know you have the opportunity to ask a question over in spotify and we do see all those questions so go and add your question there to have your name and question on the show so aubrey today we have three kind of tips right for juan antonio yeah yep exactly.
And for everyone out there who wants to improve their pronunciation i have a feeling that's basically everyone listening it's me right and the languages i'm learning so our first tip here is all about mimicking or shadowing do you do this lindsey when you are learning a language do you do some mimicking i definitely.
Do i should do it more i tend to go right to speaking but if i were dedicating more time to my spanish i would i absolutely would to up my game but i have i do know a lot of our listeners do do this with our show right with all there's english they do mimic transcripts and mimic and read and listen and repeat back yeah yeah so.
We have a few sort of sub tips here because more and more you're going to be hearing ai audio i've i found i have this like book summaries app and i thought it i didn't realize for a while that it was ai audio wow until there started to be some sort of pronunciation errors i'm like oh goodness someone could be mimicking this and making mistakes so first of all choose a native speaker who speaks clearly right not too fast you do have to be sort of thoughtful about what you're mimicking our show is great our youtube videos are great but sometimes if it's like a ted talk who's sort of monotone or speaks too fast that's not what you want to.
Be shadowing i think also the context of what you're listening to a ted talk you know is different right because someone is on the stage and they're making a presentation they're speaking to a group they're delivering a message whereas conversation back and forth is what we probably want to look for because that's most of what we're going to do exactly.
Right you need to be sort of thoughtful about i should be shadowing i should be mimicking someone who is using the same type of speech that i want to use so think about that right what situations are you speaking in are you preparing to be ready to speak in and that's the type of language of speech that you should mimic.
Interesting i like that point and what about how much time should we take how long are the chunks that we're taking that we're mimicking from yeah we.
Recommend just 10 seconds at a time and this is going to help you really target individual phonemes you want to repeat back that 10 seconds of audio and record yourself and listen to it compare to the native speaker and there's a lot to think about here the pronunciation of individual sounds as well as your intonation your word stress your syllable stress right compare what's different what could you change yeah i love that so.
It sounds like it's not about quantity it's about quality right exactly yeah you.
Don'T want to listen to a full hour and then try to i mean think of you first of all the time right you can target very small chunks and save time and make it still very meaningful and useful yeah i.
Love that and as we said earlier i like that point about keeping it within the context of what's going on it's a conversation is there laughter going on is there a different energy level or vibration happening or are we getting into sensitive topics and someone's voice is lowering or you're hearing more empathy in the voice you're hearing different things maybe you compare two clips that way we're getting into range right yes good point.
Because if you do want to make sure that you are showing empathy in your intonation then you're going to be picking very specific clips where the native speaker is showing that so that you can mimic that as well interesting so.
Then we're going to record ourself and listen as we said right aubrey exactly.
Yeah right then you can compare you can compare the original clip to the recording of your voice because as it's just sort of coming out of your mouth it's impossible for you to gauge how you're doing but it will help some to have a recording to listen.