Hello and welcome to LetThemTalk and what I want to talk to you about today
is a very common question that I get as an English teacher and that is how good
does my English pronunciation need to be? This is a very interesting question.
How can I lose my accent? I hear that a lot and I've
had students who tell me "my accent is too strong I want to sound more
British"... or American more Australian whatever and this is my reply.
Your English pronunciation needs to be good enough yes that's right good enough
and that's all. Now we learn English or any foreign language to communicate and
once your pronunciation is good enough to communicate without misunderstandings
without hindrance you've done it! Your choice of words is much, much more
important than the way you pronounce them. So what do I need mean by good
enough? Of course you need to be understood clearly by those around you
if people are constantly asking you to repeat what you say because your accent
is too strong then, yes, try to reduce your accent and we have, by the way, many
pronunciation videos on this channel that will help you and you should
definitely check them out. Just to give you an example make sure that you are
aware of silent letters in English words such as SWORD, ANSWER, CLIMBING be
aware of common mispronunciations the plural of woman is women [WIMMIN] not WO-MEN. IRON [I-YEN]
is pronounced like that not I RON it's MAYOR is pronounced [MEIRE]
don't say [MY-OR] I wrote a letter to the [MY-OR]
no it's MAYOR [MEIRE] try and have good intonation that's also very important
and as I said I'm all in favor of having good pronunciation however don't get
obsessed by it. I say this because I've seen this happen many times students
desperately trying to sound like a native speaker and spending vast amounts
of time looking at diagrams training muscles, looking at mouth shapes, just
trying to sell like a native speaker and if you do it if you do it's bloody
difficult but bravo ok but really it doesn't matter and at the end of the day
in a sense you if you lose your accent you're losing some of your
identity it's nice to have a slight accent. So if you're spending too
much time on perfecting your accent to remember time is not free it means that
you're not spending time on something else. Now I want to talk to you about
something called the 80/20 rule. It's used in different fields in science in
business but in terms of your output it says that 80% of your performance, 80% of
your success will come from 20% of the work and another way of looking at it is
that you will spend 80 percent of your time on the least important tasks and 20
percent of your time on the most important tasks and this is a lesson
just not just for learning English pronunciation but for everything you do.
So have you ever worked on a project maybe a painting, a writing
project, editing a video and it's all going pretty smoothly until you've
completed about roughly 80% but then but then the last part
last part you can't seem to finish you want to get it perfect so you spend so
much time on it more time than on anything else you work late don't eat
don't sleep you sacrifice other projects you sacrifice your social life time
with friends and family just to finish it perfectly. I know I certainly
have done that and you think yourself afterwards - "you know what maybe I think I
shouldn't have spent so much time on that part" and you're probably right that part
of the end that 20% that you spend so much time on probably nobody would have
noticed the difference anyway. So that's the 80/20 rule and you can read
more about that on Wikipedia. So perfection is the enemy of productivity
get things done make sure it's good make sure it's good enough and then move on
and yes that's true with pronunciation if everyone understands you and you've
got good but not perfect but good pronunciation that's amazing
now do something else go to the park smell the flowers I know meet your
friends, bake a cake, read a book, climb a mountain whatever and congratulations
you've done it you've got good pronunciation now move on to the next
project. well that's it. I hope you found that
useful but do you agree with me do you think you should try and sound like a
native speaker or is it okay to have a slight accent?
let me know in the comments as and as always stay mellow and see you in the
next video