A few weeks ago, I dissected the spoken English skills of different world leaders.
And today, it’s YOUR turn!
Some brave MosaLingua users sent in audio clips of themselves speaking English.
We’ve picked a few lucky users, and today I’m going to evaluate YOUR spoken English
so that the rest of our viewers can learn something from you.
If you, too, are learning English, be sure to watch until the end
because you'll learn a bunch of common mistakes and useful tricks for avoiding them.
Let’s see what you’ve got!
Hi everyone! I’m Abbe, an English teacher here at MosaLingua.
Unless you have a conversation partner—and by the way, I highly recommend getting one if you don’t already—
but unless you have a conversation partner or a private tutor,
you probably don’t get much specific feedback from native speakers
about your foreign language skills, especially your speaking.
And if you don’t know you’re making mistakes, it’s really hard to correct them and improve!
So that’s my goal today:
point out what these English learners did great so that they can keep doing it,
and also identify a few things they can work on.
My tips might even apply to your own spoken English, so feel free to take notes.
Let's jump right in with an audio clip that came to us from Rita, in Italy.
Have a listen!
"Hi. My name is Rita.
I'm 56 years old and I'd like to improve my spoken English.
I come from Italy and I live in Turin."
"That car is incredibly expensive. My cousin bought the same one some months ago."
Awesome job, Rita! You articulate really well, so your speech is nice and clear.
I can also tell you’ve been working on your English R sound...
I guess you don’t really have a choice when your name is Rita!
The R sound in the word Turin, for example, was especially good.
Italian speakers, and Spanish speakers too, tend to carry over the trilled R
from their native language, where your tongue taps the roof of your mouth.
In English, on the other hand, your tongue stays in midair in the middle of your mouth,
close to but never actually touching the palate. So well done on that.
One tip I have for you Rita is to focus on minimal pairs
with the short I and long E (/ɪ/ and /i:/) vowel sounds.
As a reminder, minimal pairs are words that are the same except for one sound.
A common minimal pair with these two sounds is “ship” and “sheep.”
So many learners struggle with differentiating between these two sounds in particular,
including famous presidents.
By the way, if you haven’t seen my previous video
about how well world leaders speak English, I’ll link to it so you can watch it next!
Luckily, we have a lot of examples in these few sentences Rita recorded,
even her name!
By the way, if you’ve been wondering
what those symbols are,
they are part of something called
the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Each different symbol represents a sound,
and you can use this one set of symbols
to describe the pronunciation of any word in any language,
even languages that don’t use a Latin alphabet.
It’s a super handy tool for learners,
because if you can’t hear the difference (yet),
when you read these words in IPA notation,
you’ll know that they are supposed to be pronounced differently.
The long E sound—eeeeee—
can be written nine different ways in English.
Usually you’ll see it written E-A as in “cheap”
or E-E as in “cheese.”
And if you’ve ever wondered why English speakers say “cheese” when getting their photograph taken,
it’s because it makes a nice smile!
Sometimes that long E sound will be “disguised” as an I, like it is in “Rita.”
Most learners get this sound pretty easily.
The short I sound /ɪ/, on the other hand, gives many English learners a hard time.
When you make this sound, you want to relax your lips and be sure you’re NOT smiling!
/i/
/ɪ/
/i/
/ɪ/
Here’s a clip from someone who does a really nice job with that short I sound in particular:
"Hi, my name is Peter. I'd like to improve my spoken English.
I live in Augsburg."
"That car is incredibly expensive."
Great job, Peter.
Next up we have Carole, who sent us a clip from France.
"Hi, my name is Carole.
I'm 51 years old and I'd like to improve my spoken English.
I come from France, and I live close to Paris."
"That car is incredibly expensive. My cousin bought the same one some months ago."
Very nicely done!
The rhythm of your speech sounds very close to that of a native speaker.
And what creates that natural-sounding rhythm?
Part of it is knowing which words to stress,
or accentuate, and which words to put less emphasis on.
I love the way you put the stress on the content words...
words like verbs, nouns, and adjectives, which carry the meaning of the sentence
—and not the function words—words like articles, prepositions, and conjunctions.
I also like how you use word stress and your tone of voice to add color to these sentences.
For instance, instead of saying, “That car is incredibly expensive,”
you said, “That car is inCREdibly expensive,”
which gives the listener a hint about how you feel about the price of the car!
It seems as though you think the purchase was somewhat extravagant!
Speaking of the word “incredibly,” when I was going through the audio submissions,
I noticed that a lot of people made the same mistake that Carole did.
They said the word “incredible” instead of “incredibly.”
Here are a few other people who did that:
Almost always, when you see an e at the end of a word, it’s silent.
(My name, Abbe, is an exception—sorry!)
“Incredible.”
But when you see a Y at the end, it usually makes a sound!
The letter Y can be tricky for learners because it can make 3 different sounds.
First, it can make the /y/ sound, like “you” or “young.”
At the end of a word, it can either make the long I sound, like “my” or “try”
or it can make the long E sound—the same one we just talked about.
For example, “happy” or “baby.”
Here’s a little trick if you’re having trouble remembering which pronunciation to use.
If the word is one syllable, it’s probably a long I.
“Pry,” “cry,” “sly.”
If it has two or more syllables, it’s probably a long E.
"Closely,” “lonely,” “extraordinarily”!
Of course, there are a couple of exceptions,
so be sure to look up and learn the correct pronunciation
any time you learn a new vocabulary word.
I want to finish off with a clip sent to us by Toshiro.
Toshiro has been a MosaLingua user for several years now and has actually
taken our Speak English with Confidence MasterClass!
Let’s check his progress:
"Hi. My name is Toshiro.
I'm 21 years old and I'd like to improve my spoken English.
I come from Mexico, and I live in Spain."
"That car is incredibly expensive. My cousin bought the same one some months ago."
I have to say, I’m really impressed!
You sound sure of yourself, very confident, and I understood every word.
Toshiro’s speech flows quite naturally, in my opinion.
And part of that comes from the way he strings his words together.
Listen to the way he says his age:
“I’m 21 years old.”
Did you hear how he joins the end of “years” to the beginning of “old”?
The /s/ sound becomes more of a /z/.
"Yearzold."
Here are some clips from people who didn’t make that connection, for comparison:
Now, that’s not wrong, per se.
But if you want your speech to flow and sound really natural,
especially if you’re trying to overcome that intermediate plateau,
pay attention to how native speakers join their words together.
It really makes a huge difference in how your fluency is perceived.
English learners often struggle when they start out doing a lot of reading practice
and not a lot of listening, because written and spoken English are quite different!
Watching English TV shows with English closed captions is a good exercise
if you want to practice associating the way sentences are written with the way people actually speak them.
Learning more about linking in English can also help prevent you
from making another common mistake I heard in some of the recordings.
Some people, mostly French speakers, tend to add an /h/ sound where there is not one.
For instance, this was from another clip I received:
This is probably a hypercorrection, or overcorrection.
But here’s why improving your linking can help you break this habit:
English speakers usually drop H’s when they link words anyway.
For instance, “Is he nice?” becomes “Is_he nice?” - izzy.
Or, “I’ve seen her twice today” becomes “I’ve seen_her twice today” - seener.
So, if you keep that in mind if you have a tendency to add H’s where there shouldn't be.
So, that’s all I have for you today.
Thank you again to everyone who sent us their audio clips!
If you missed our call for submissions, be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel
and sign up for our newsletter in case we do another video like this in the future!
And if you want an in-depth evaluation of your own English pronunciation,
with personalized feedback on what to work on and lessons to help you do it,
check out our Speak English with Confidence MasterClass.
Click the link in the video description, and you can start
improving your spoken English skills right away!
Thanks for watching, and happy learning!
If you learned something new from this video, give it a thumbs up.
Then, hit subscribe and turn on your notifications.
Have a look around our channel for more hacks and tips.
And if you're watching on another social media platform,
like or follow our page.
See you next time!