Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls. Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com,
and in this video, I'm going to talk about why you may find it hard to learn the pronunciation
of English. I'm coming to you today from not particularly sunny Dublin. It is a typical
Irish day. It's cloudy. It's chilly. And it's drizzling on and off. Not particularly amazing,
but hey, since I'm in quarantine and can't leave the apartment anyway, it doesn't really make a
difference to me. Why do some people find it hard to master the pronunciation of English?
This is a good question. First, before we get into the main three reasons why this happens, we need
to understand that we have to make a distinction between the pronunciation of a language and the
accent. Often people tend to mix these two things together, and sometimes that does make sense, but
as somebody learning English as a second language, thinking of pronunciation and accent together
isn't always very productive because there's a lot of variation in terms of accent, neither
does being able to speak with, say a stereotypical British accent mean you necessarily pronounce the
language properly. Also, you can pronounce the language perfectly, but speak with your native
accent. And that usually is my preference, to be honest. And it's what I talk about in my book,
Awesome Accent, awesomeaccentbook.com. Check the link in the description.
Just as an example, and of course it's true of native speaker groups as well.
There are 56 accent categories in the UK alone. I believe America has about 24 and of course,
within each category there are many accents. Take something like at the end of the day, the way a
British person says that and with the accent they use, it's going to be quite different to the way
an American person says that with the accent that they use. Both have perfect pronunciation. It just
sounds slightly different. So in this video, we're really focusing on the pronunciation. And when
we talk about pronunciation, what we are really talking about is knowledge of the way that words
and chunks and blocks in English should sound and that combined with good motor skills. Now, the
first reason people find it hard is quite simply and quite obviously, because their native language
has a different palette of sounds and they are now having to relearn how to move the mouth.
Different languages have different quantities and different types of sounds. So different people
from different languages will find pronunciation more or less difficult. This is purely anecdotal
and you shouldn't quote me on this, but it's a good example. I have a friend from Sweden who
speaks, I believe it's seven or eight languages at a very, very high proficiency level. And whilst I
can't speak about most of those languages, I can attest to the fact that his English
pronunciation and his Japanese pronunciation is spot on. He says that his native language
Swedish has a lot of sounds, a very wide palette of sounds, meaning that to him it's not really
about having to relearn or retrain the motor skills, rather he just takes the languages,
the sounds that are already there in his native language and just reapplies them. How true that
is, I do not know. Again, it's an anecdotal example, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Somebody from say, Japanese, for example, will struggle a lot more because Japanese has a more
limited, tighter range of sounds, therefore they have to retrain themselves a lot more than
somebody from say, Sweden or a different language. You can think of this as like, if you've learned
to write and you'd learned by holding your pen in a weird way, I use this example because I
did as a kid, I wouldn't hold the pen properly. It's almost like I was gripping it like this.
I learned to write quite well like that. But then later when I wanted to retrain myself to actually
hold the pen properly, it was quite hard to do. Another analogy that I've seen elsewhere, and
I forget where I actually read this, but it's a good one. If you get a black belt in say, karate,
you practice a karate kick or a karate punch for many, many years and then you switch to say,
I don't know, Kung Fu, while the form and the way of doing it might be slightly different and
you're having to then retrain the motor skills to move in a slightly different kind of way.
This is exactly the same for English. And what it really means is it just means you've got to
train your mouth and the muscles in the tongue and all the bits and pieces that are moving to
move in the right kind of way. Another reason why people struggle is because they learn an
idealized version of English. And this is very, very similar to say, the grammar in English. One
of my [inaudible 00:05:10] clients was recently asking me about very synonymous expressions,
things like, "Would you like some water?" Which is the technically correct expression. And then,
"Would you like any water?" Which is just as common, and you go to a restaurant here
in Ireland and people are going to say, "Hey, do you want any water?" Technically,
it's not correct but people say it. Well, it's actually only technically not correct
if you prescribe to, listen to textbook, grammar book, prescriptive grammar rules,
descriptively that is what people actually use in the real world. Yep, lots of people say,
"Would you like any water?" "Do you want any water?" And it's the same kind of idea.
You learn a certain idealized pronunciation and then people in the real world often don't actually
do that. And that's then going to confuse you and it's going to make comprehension harder and it's
going to make modeling your own pronunciation harder. Really, you've just got to understand
that variation is the key in all languages, but especially in English. Another reason,
a very, very important one that people struggle with pronunciation and kind of related to the
previous point is that the way that they have been taught really isn't very good for actually
speaking in a smooth, natural, awesome sounding kind of way. People get taught grammar rules and
individual words, and you learn the words as words, you learn the meanings as words,
you practice the pronunciation as words, and one of the main marks of a non-native and English as a
second language speaker is that they actually tend to over pronounce the words when they're speaking.
So instead of saying something like, "The end of the day," which is spoken as a single unit,
they all tend to say, "At the end of the day," which sounds quite odd and awkward for native
speakers. A lot of the becomes a lot of the. It's not really how native speakers say it.
They over enunciate, over pronounce the words. It should actually be a lot of the, a lot of the,
a lot of the. It's a single smooth unit. So if you're struggling to pronounce English well,
you've got to ask yourself, is it because I'm over-focused on the pronunciation of individual
words and I'm ignoring the chunked nature of language? You've also got to learn the rhythm,
the intonation, the flow of English and how we chunk things, we put the pauses into things,
all of that is going to contribute to the quality of your speech and the way that you sound,
make your pronunciation much, much smoother and much, much easier for people to listen to.
Now, if you are struggling to do that, I wrote a free guide that you might find helpful. It's
called The Good Shadowing Guide and what shadowing really excels at is helping people to build this
rhythm and intonation, good chunking skills of language. I've got videos about shadowing on
my YouTube channel. Over the years I've noticed the way people use the exercise really actually
isn't quite right and they struggle and they don't get the results from it that they expect
because the way they are doing it and using it is wrong; hence, The Good Shadowing Guide. If you
head over to doingenglish.com/shadowing, you can download the free guide for free. Check that out,
give it a go and start working on those chunking and rhythm and intonation skills. And that is
going to help you to speak and sound a lot smoother and pronounce the language a lot
better. That exercise is all about motor skills and that's what we really need to nail down to,
again, nail down the pronunciation if you're struggling with that.
Right, this is me, Julian Northbrook signing out from another video. Do you struggle with
pronunciation? Is it easier or less easy for people with your first language? Does
your first language have a wide range of sounds or a limited range of sounds? Leave
a comment. I'm certainly interested to know, and I'm sure other people will be too. See
you in the next video, guys. This is me, Julian Northbrook signing out. Bye-bye.