What can I do to improve my speaking?
Why don’t native speakers understand me?
Where should I start when working on my speaking skills?
What should I do to try to get rid of my accent?
Hey everybody! Thanks for joining me for this
video! If you’re new here then welcome! I’m Anna!
I get these types of questions literally every
other day. Speaking is important,
it’s this unique way for people
to communicate with each other and get their point across.
Speaking another language is hard.
Nonetheless speaking another language, specifically
English, because it’s an
international language, can open many doors for you.
It can help you with your career and your personal
life. We all know this. Then what we also
know is that we have to practice. We
actually have to get those words and sentences
out of our mouths every single day,
as much as possible. It’s key.
The thing that distinguishes a professional from an amateur
is that a professional never stops learning
and working to improve their skills.
Some people just don’t do this and complain that they can’t
speak. Some people are very
resistant to this whole idea of
practicing, because it is hard work and it has to be consistent.
But we’re not talking about those people
right now because and thankfully there are
those and you are one of them if you’re watching this video, that
do practice and learn. But sometimes you just hit
a plateau. It’s when you reach a certain level
and then you’re stuck, it’s like there’s no progress anymore.
Well based on my personal experience
and my experience working with my students
I’ll tell you - one thing that is
frequently overlooked and underestimated
but has a large impact on your speech is
stress - word stress and sentence stress.
I want to say a huge thanks
to SkillShare for sponsoring this video.
Stick around to hear what they have to offer.
Not getting the stress right messes with people’s pronunciation
big time. Maybe you have heard
that English is a stress-timed language,
which means some syllables will be longer
stressed ones and some shorter
unstressed ones, compared to syllable-timed
languages where each syllable takes
approximately the same amount of time. Putting the
in the wrong place makes it very difficult for native speakers
to understand that word let alone the whole sentence.
And it can even change the meaning of the word. However,
putting the stress in the right place usually helps us
with knowing where a true vowel has to be pronounced
and that all the rest of the syllables have to be
reduced, meaning those other
vowels have to be pronounced as a schwa.
And I said usually because we also
have words with a secondary stress
but it is weaker than the primary stress.
It will make your speech a lot more clearer.
I’ll give you a couple of examples.
but not
then we have
In Compound nouns for example the stress usually goes on the first word
Now consider these word pairs where changing the stress changes the meaning of a word.
I have the whole video with these words compared.
You can click the link above head to watch it. And I'll link it in the description.
The same goes for sentences. In a sentence,
we stress content words that are
important for a message, therefore we need them to
stick out. And we reduce function words,
those that serve their purpose of course
but we don’t need to pay our listeners attention directly
to them. That is what creates this nice
rhythm to the American pronunciation, that
contrast that non-native speakers really struggle with.
So when a native speaker is
listening to someone their ear hears those
important words and that’s how they get the gist of a message.
But when people stress
every single word, thinking that they are being
very clear or when they stress a wrong word
in a question or sentence it will
take a native speaker a second to think
and try to make out what those people are trying to say.
Consider these examples that I took from an accent
reduction introduction lecture from the University
of South Carolina. They will give you an idea
of stressed and reduced words.
When you say them you can clap to feel the rhythm.
It’s a great illustration of a stress-timed language.
Even though each sentence has a different amount of words,
it takes the same amount of time to say them
because of this contrast between stressed
and reduced words.
The cows have been eating the grass. Nobody talks like that
Now, listen to this example.
In this case we add one more descriptive word
that needs to be emphasized- one more content word.
And now the rhythm has changed.
And people oftentimes call this “fast speech”.
When this is just natural speech that is created
by this beautiful contrast between
stressed and reduced words. Now a very
effective method that I personally swear by
is shadowing or imitation.
It’s when you copy a native speaker’s speech.
Exactly what they say and how they say it,
stressing the words they stress, using the
intonation they use. You can click the link above my
head to watch a video on how to know that you’re imitating correctly.
And now, I want you to take a
look at a very good example of shadowing
Although there are certain guidelines
for word stressing and I don’t call them rules because
there are too many exceptions. Although
we have them and I’ll get to them in a second. I
personally recommend to listen a lot,
and pay attention to the way native speakers speak
and shadow them of course. When you come across
a word that you don’t know or are not sure how to pronounce
look it up! Check it’s meaning and check
it’s pronunciation. I like Dictionary.com
and Youglish. That’s a great resource.
You can type a word you need in the search box,
choose an accent and listen to that word being said by native speakers.
Now lets take a little break to talk about the sponsor of this video Skillshare.
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Now lets get back to our topic and lets talk about the rules.
these first two guidelines have many
exceptions to them and are applicable only to two-syllable words.
Now these following rules are more reliable.
Put the stress one syllable before the suffix if a word ends in these suffixes
Put the stress two syllables before the suffix if a words end in these suffixes
When you see these suffixes – stress the suffix
Well that was a lot of information to digest.
But, it’s a good thing that you can always watch it again if
you forget something. Hope you found it useful.
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and I’ll see in the next video.