Today we’re going to go over 5 speaking mistakes to avoid to have clearer communication in English.
Number one: avoid choppiness, go for smoothness. What do I mean by this? Well, let’s take that
phrase: “What do I mean by this?”. 6 words, but each word connects to the next word. No
breaks. As if this whole phrase is one big word. We really hear this connection and this
smoothness when we slow it down. Here, I already recorded the sentence. Let me play it for you.
What do I mean by this?
Now let’s slow it down.
What do I mean by this?
You really hear how smooth it is. It doesn’t feel like 6 separate words. Sometimes my
students want each word to feel separate and clear, but that choppiness and separateness
is not a characteristic of natural spoken English, so it can actually make things more
difficult to understand, especially if some of the sounds are mixed up.
So in the phrase, “What do I mean by this?”, there are no breaks, the flow is constantly moving
forward. Sometimes I tell students to think of the sound as a tube of toothpaste. Think of it coming
out, equal pressure, one big line, one big long tube. Let’s look just at the first three words.
What do I. What do I.
The first is stressed, and the other two aren’t. What do I. Move your arm with me like that,
What do I. What do I.
Feel that smoothness. It’s just like a 3-syllable word with first syllable
stress. It’s the same feeling. What do I, harmony, pacify, happily, what do I, what do I.
We link words in American English, so always look for the connection and how
they link when you imitate native speakers. We’re not saying ‘what’
‘do’. We actually drop the T and connect to the D: wha-do. What-do.
Then the OO vowel of do, that links right into AI. do-ai, What-do-I. This is a vowel to vowel
link. This is the label for any word that ends with a vowel or diphthong linking into any word
that begins with a vowel or diphthong. These can feel the most sloppy, sometimes students
say they feel drunk or lazy when they do this kind of link. But that smoothness is what we’re
going for. Remember the tube of toothpaste. What do I. What do I mean by this. Three more words,
Again, the first one is stressed. Mean by this. Mean by. N right into B with no stop, break,
or separation. This is a consonant to consonant link. N-by. Mean-by. Mean by this. And finally,
right into the word ‘this’ with no break. Mean by this. Can you try this now? Feel the connection.
Mean by this.
So connection, forward flow, tube of toothpaste.
Be sure to download my sounds of American English Cheat Sheet. It’s free,
it’s an illustrated reference guide for you, for all the American English sounds including
the phonetic symbols you need to know. Link here and in the video description.
Another thing to avoid is speaking too fast. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “But Rachel,
Americans speak very fast.” That’s true. But there’s a particular way we do it. In
the phrase “what do I mean by this,” two of the words were still long. The stressed words. One
thing that can make people hard to understand is when they don’t lean into their longer stressed
syllables. I have noticed this with some of my Spanish-speaking students especially. Give
them length. Think of English as looking like morse code. Except not flat. Long and short,
with your long having a pitch change, usually up and down, sometimes down and up,
more like a mountain, sometimes like a valley. So the syllables look like this. Short and long,
with the short leading up to the stressed syllable or falling away from it.
What do I mean by this.
It’s different than ‘what do I mean by this’ - where they are all short.
So, avoid choppiness, and give us long stressed syllables compared to short unstressed syllables.
Next, don’t let your pitch be too flat. We want variation, that’s where we get clarity.
If I say everything on the same pitch it’s less clear.
That variation really gives us some clarity. Of course, most of my students don’t say
everything on the same pitch, but there isn’t enough variation. We don’t want to
see pitch changes like this. We want pitch changes like this. That is clear speaking.
A lot of my students feel silly when I ask for more pitch variation. It just feels like too
much. It feels fake, clownish, and that’s very uncomfortable. But, depending on your habits,
this might be the very thing you need to add to be more clear speaking English. I was working
with a student in a live class once, and I was understanding everything until she got
to the phrase ‘data analytics’. And I realized I didn’t understand right away for two reasons:
One, I needed longer stressed syllables, and two, I needed more pitch variation.
Data analytics. That was the first phrase that I had to really think about that I
didn’t immediately understand where my mind went wait, what did she say? and I figured it out but
um, it wasn’t immediate. And, it was sort of because, okay well a couple of things. I think
we could use a little bit more ahuhahuhahuh. This structure helps us understand it . It was
a little bit data analytics. Tatatatata. All a little bit staccato and short. And in American
English, we have like almost we have very little staccato, we have a lot of like if I was taking
a paintbrush it would be like valalalalah instead of tatatata. So, data analytics would become data
analytics. Data analytics and there’s more pitch change so data is sort of flat and I went daaata.
I’ve sometimes just uh, any old random piece of audio from a native speaker.
And when I slow it down to like 25 percent, 10 percent, it is crazy how slidey
it is. There’s just no jumpers, skip, it’s so connected. So,
let’s do that with the word data and we’re going to do it in slow motion. Data. You do it.
Data.
Okay, good. Here’s what I got. Day, I want daaay. So you gave
me this much pitch range. I want that much. Start lower. Daaaata.
Daaaata.
Yeah. Let’s do this. Duh, you copy me. Duh.
Duh.
I’m trying to take your pitch down.
Duuh.
Daay.
Yes.
Daay.
I did this thing when I compared Chinese to American by taking it into a program that analyzes
pitch and I haven’t done it with Hungarian but I noticed for Chinese, the pitch range was smaller
and higher like this is where most Chinese was and this is where most of the American English was. We
had a lot more lower pitches. It wasn’t that we had a lot more higher pitches. So you might want
to think about that. Your pitch range is here and what I actually want is not this but what I want
is this. I want you to bring in more lower pitches so instead of data, it’s daaata. Of course I’m
exaggerating right now but like let’s feel that. Duh, duh. Let me hear you do that really low.
Duh.
Day.
Data.
That’s right. Data. And of course we’re slowing it down, we’re exaggerating but
we have to do that to get away from data. You know, it helps to slow things down and
to exaggerate them and usually my students, it feels so different and weird that they never uh,
go all the way to the exaggeration right. It feels too silly, too strange. But the more
we can pull in that direction, the more comfortable we get with it in general.
My fourth tip is mouth movement. I was listening to the audio book “Inside voice” by voiceover
artist Lake Bell and she talks about studying the shape of mouths. She has done so much research
and collected so much knowledge on how to imitate people and create characters with
accents. And I heard her talking about the shape of mouths and I was like ‘Yes!’ This is something
I talk about with my students a lot. I see really minimal mouth movements. But in American English,
we have quite a lot of movement. More jaw drop, more lip rounding than my students
sometimes want to do. When you speak English with minimal mouth movements,
it can be really mumbly and hard to understand. But just like pitch variation, this is something
that students sometimes shy away from, because their native language doesn’t require as much
movement. So to really move that jaw feels uncomfortable and, again, clownish. But study
the mouth movement of native speakers. Imitate it, even if it feels exaggerated in your own mouth.
I was working on this once with a Russian student, and I said,
have you ever seen an American speaking Russian with a thick American accent? And she thought,
“Oh my gosh, yes I have, and it was so funny how much their mouths moved. That
is your clue. That movement is what you need when you speak American English.
The last tip is to lower your pitch. I’ve found that many students, when they speak English,
their pitch is just a little bit high. And I don’t notice it when I’m hearing them, but I
do notice it when I imitate them. And I’ve found that when students lower their pitch a little bit,
it helps them sound more natural and capture that American sound with their own voice. And that can,
mixed with other factors, make them easier to understand. This is a clip of me working with
a student in a live class on lowering pitch. Follow along and play with lowering yours.
So I wanted to work on smoothness but I think I actually want to work on your pitch. Monday,
I wake up at seven. And there is nothing honestly, it takes me a while to figure
out that’s part of what feels strange because Americans were so used to other people speaking
American English with that higher pitch that I think a lot of us don’t really notice it. But
then if I sit down and I really start imitating students I’m like “wait, hold on that is so high.”
Um, for me so, Monday, I wake up at seven. Monday, let’s bring it down.
Monday
Right. And part of I think bringing it down is sort of thinking of like a wide
open heaviness to the body, to the neck, to the throat. It’s going to help bring
that down and have that more natural feeling. Monday I wake up at seven.
Monday I wake up at seven.
Okay, hold on. Monday, Monday. That’s not bad. Monday but Monday,
Monday. Can we bring it down a little bit? Monday. Monday I wake up at seven.
Yeah. Monday I wake up at seven.
Let’s do the whole phrase without a break. Instead
of Monday, we’re just going to do ‘Monday I wake up at seven.’
Monday I wake up at seven.
Yeah, good. Now, hold on. Monday I wake up at, wake up at. Wake up at. Wake up at.
Wake up at. Okay. Monday I wake up at seven.
Okay, that was good. I still would say ‘wake up at’ I like that. I liked
the sounds you gave them but I would like them even faster so wake up at.
Wake up at.
Wake up at becomes wake-up-at. It’s so funny, it sounds like way, I’m just going to type it
so other people can think about it this way. kuh-pit'. Right, it’s like that linking,
makes it feel like the ending consonant is beginning the next uhm, syllable way-kuh-pit.
way-kuh-pit. Uhmm.
Wake up at seven.
Hmmhm, exactly. Let’s get a little bit more volume, wake up at seven.
Wake up at seven. Hmmhm.
Okay, I’m lowering my voice again.
Wake up at seven.
Yeah, good. And I can see how lowering your voice is going to make you lower
your volume too, try not to do that. Try do find a place where you can
bring your pitch down a little bit but now bring your volume all the way back.
I’m going to put in another clip from my lesson with the first student you
saw. Earlier in this video you saw us working on ‘data’. Now we’ll work
on ‘analytics’. And you’ll see us talking about many of these 5 factors: smoothness,
mouth movement, pitch variation, longer stressed syllables. They just make such a difference.
So now we’re going to take the next word. So, data has first syllable stress. Now we’re going to do
‘Analytics’. So it’s okay for ‘ana’ to be flap but I don’t want ana. I want ana, ana.
Ana, ana.
Right. Smooth. Ana
Right. Now let’s do ‘analy’
Analy
Right, right.
Analy
A little bit more space between to tongue, ih, ih.
Analy, ih, ih, analy.
So I see that your teeth are not parting at all. Analy, I think I want analy, ih.
Analy, ih
Yeah. There’s just a little bit more space.
Hmhm, that’s it
Analy
Hmmhm. And now we’re going to have a flap T, analytics.
Analytics.
Okay, that was a true T. Analytics. Also true Ts feel more staccato and this is one
of the reasons on my YouTube channel in a couple of weeks I’m posting how
uncommon the true T is. It’s like one third of the time, the other times we’re doing flaps,
we’re doing stops that feel a little bit less staccato so analytics,
that tttt fits right into tatatata. But the flap T, that fits right into uhuhuh. So analytics.
Analytics.
Okay, it’s a little bit uhl, analytics, ih, ih. I’m just
going to take the last two syllable, lytics.
Lytics.
Yeah, lytics. Okay.
Lytics.
Yes, exactly. So the flap doesn’t stop the feeling of forward motion of connection at
all and I think that you know, to change your mind from the dadada to the uhuhhuh,
just the constant flow forward. I think just that one mind change is going to make things clearer
and then adding in this more pitch modulation is also going to make things way clearer.
Five things to try: avoid choppiness, longer stressed syllables, more pitch variation,
more mouth movement, lower overall pitch. Which of these five do you
think will help you the most? Let me know in the comments. Pick just one topic to
work on. Maybe starting your phrases lower, and see where that gets you.
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hundreds of videos to help you speak clearer, more natural English. Also, to watch all the
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check out Rachel’s English Academy. That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English