Hello, how's it going? Welcome to Go Natural English. I'm
your English teacher, Gabby and in today's episode
I would like to say "Marhaban" to our Arabic
speakers. This is a special episode focusing
on three things that Arabic speakers can do
to focus on, to improve their
English pronunciation. Now if you're not an Arabic
speaker, you can still benefit from this episode.
Don't get upset. I may do
a focus episode your native language, too.
But I base these special focus lessons
on the biggest groups
of people watching my videos. So if
you want to be sure that I do a focus
video for your language then ask your friends
to watch Go Natural English, share Go Natural English
so that I can see there's a lot of people watching from
your country or from your native languages.
Arabic speakers. You guys do a great job with speaking.
Usually your speaking skills are really
good for your level. That's my experience with my
English learners when I was teaching in a classroom. I've worked
a lot with Arabic speakers in university classes
in the US. Through my experience I notice
that there are three areas that you can focus on
and if you focus on these three
challenging sounds, you'll be able to improve your English a lot.
The idea is to put your
energy, put your effort, put your time into
what will give you the maximum results. Quick
fast results. Let me share
three sounds with you that you can focus on to improve
quickly and I want to tell you that in the Go
Natural English Premium Courses on my website
you can learn even more. If you
want to learn more sounds to help you
improve your English pronunciation, strategies
for speaking without hesitation, improving your fluency
then join a premium course at GoNaturalEnglish.com/premiumgne
GoNaturalEnglish.com/premiumgne
It's a great way to connect with me more if you want to practice
and get some help with your English
writing and speaking. There's different options there.
We have three sounds. Number one. This is
the biggest issue for Arabic speakers. The
P vs the B.
The good news is most of the time
we're going to understand you based on the context.
Take a word like "paper."
There is no word "baber."
That word doesn't exist. But
if we mix these sounds up it's just not
very clear. The problem is that it's going to take
your conversation partner a little bit longer to understand
you, a little bit more mental effort for them to
understand you if you have a strong accent or if you're mixing
the P and the B sounds. Let's take a look
at two words that both exist
in English and the only difference is the P and the B. The first
word, "pet" with a P.
You can repeat after me. Pet.
And with a B "bet."
Try it with me. Bet. The difference between
the P and the B sound is that with
the P sound you're releasing air.
One way that you can test yourself is if
you have a piece of paper, which I don't have one right now next to me but if you have
a piece of paper you can hold it in front of your mouth
and when you say the P sound it should
move. So hand on, let me just grab a piece of paper. I'll show you
what I mean.
I found a piece of scrap paper to show you. So here we go.
Oops.
Paper.
Paper. Let me show you with the two
words that I showed you before. Hold the paper out in front of you
and say "pet"
Do you see the paper moving? Now with a B.
Bet. You shouldn't see the paper moving.
Be careful if you're doing this just to make the paper move
and you say "pet." That's
not really normal either. What we want to do is
just to release a little bit of air. Ok I don't need this paper anymore
I'm just going to throw it over there. Now
another sound, number two. The R sound.
The R in English is really unique and for
pretty much all English learners from all different language backgrounds
it presents a challenge. The R kind of sounds
like a pirate. It sounds like you're chewing on something.
It's not rolled. It's not trilled.
It's "err." Look at what my mouth is doing.
Err. My lips are actually kind of rounded.
And my tongue is not touching anything in my mouth. It's just in the middle.
Err. Ok. So let's try
a word like "write."
You can repeat after me. Write. Ok.
Good. And the last one is the I N G
sound. Now this is an ending
for a lot of words in English when we make a gerund
or we have the present continuous we use the I N G
ending. Sometimes Arabic speakers
make the G sound very hard and we don't want to do that.
It's really soft in English for the I N G. It sounds
like this "writing." You really
don't hear the G. Reading.
Studying.
Ing. Ing. Ok it's not a hard
sound. It's very soft and a lot of people
just completely omit the G sound and even when
we're writing, if we're writing in a casual way
we'll leave the G off, but that's not really
academic or proper. But it's because we don't say the G.
It's just, it's like it's almost not there. So don't put too much emphasis
on the G. Alright, awesome! So I think if you can
work on these three points your pronunciation is going to get
so much better and there's some other things you can do to improve
like stress and intonation, vocabulary
grammar, but you know what, I want to stop there for this
video and if you'd like to learn more you can join a premium course
at GoNaturalEnglish.com/PremiumGNE
Thanks so much for watching. I hope this was helpful for you.
I'll hope to see you in another lesson soon. Bye for now.