This is an All Ears English podcast, episode 128.
American English Pronunciation Podcast shows how to self-correct with Mandy Agle.
Welcome to the All Ears English podcast where you'll finally get real native English conversation and fluency for business and life.
We believe in connection, not perfection, when it comes to learning English.
Now here are your hosts Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer, and Aubrey Carter, the IELTS whiz, coming to you from Arizona and Boston, USA.
Learn four tips today from a college professor to improve your pronunciation in English.
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Aubrey, what is your opinion on pronunciation?
We are talking about pronunciation today, and this is my question for you.
Do you think our students listening to this show does their pronunciation have to be perfect like a native speaker?
Oh, definitely not.
Absolutely not.
In fact, I love accents.
Any accent.
And if your pronunciation is exactly like a native speaker, then you don't have this fun unique, interesting accent.
So of course you have to be understood.
And I know it can be really frustrating, even embarrassing, if the person you're Trying to talk to says what or doesn't understand.
So yes, you want to be understood.
You want to be clear.
But you can definitely have an accent.
Your pronunciation doesn't have to be exactly like natives.
Exactly.
Because, I mean, think about it, students.
Natives don't all talk the same.
I don't sound like Aubrey.
Aubrey doesn't sound like Lindsay.
None of us sound like each other, right?
And we're all Americans and we don't sound like British people, Australians.
So guys, like your accent isn't important, right?
So it's not about perfecting. your pronunciation.
Like Aubrey said, having an accent is kind of fun, but where it does become a problem is if the other person cannot understand you.
So that is why we are here today with a pronunciation expert, you guys.
She is going to give you four incredible tips to improve your accent in English.
Yes, today you're going to meet Mandy Eagle, creator of the website Pronunciation.com.
There are really fantastic pronunciation lessons there, so you guys need to check them out.
You can learn how to pronounce each sound and you can isolate individual sounds first, before you bring them together.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what I love about this guys because, depending on your first language, maybe R's and L's are a problem.
Maybe the sh, j, j, maybe those three phonemes are a problem for you guys.
So websites like Pronunciancom are really great for just pinpointing these little things that are hard.
And then you could bring it all together, because she also has lessons about linking your words, for example, for better English rhythm.
So you can check more of her stuff out on pronuncian.com.
But let's right now, without further ado, let's get to Mandy's first tip.
One of the things that I think really helps people when they're struggling with pronunciation is just learning the inventory of sounds that English has.
From that, it seems like it allows a lot more opportunity for self-correction.
If you know what the sound is and you could recognize it, then you can recognize if you're saying it a different way and then you hear somebody else say it and you think gosh, that's not the way that I think I'm doing it.
If you've got the sound inventory, you can sort of plug in the sound that you heard.
And then say, okay, yeah, I understand how that word is said now.
And then you can replicate it on your own much easier.
Okay, that makes so much sense.
Because here's the thing, guys.
Speaking and listening are connected, right?
They are directly linked to each other.
This is what Mandy is getting at here, guys.
If you cannot say a sound, for example, like the sh-sh-ch sounds or the unvoiced and voiced T-H sounds.
If you can't say those sounds correctly, then you probably can't hear them either.
You can't recognize them when other people are saying them.
And that makes it confusing, because you can't distinguish between words if you can't distinguish between sounds.
Yes.
So it's a problem on both fronts, right?
You don't realize you're pronouncing them incorrectly.
You don't hear it yourself and you can't tell when someone else.
And so you're making mistakes with comprehension and with speech.
It's a double whammy.
Exactly.
Double whammy.
I love it.
That's a great idiom.
Time out from pronunciation.
What's a double whammy, Aubrey?
Yeah, like there are two problems.
I think it comes from this old game show where there were these whammies that you get a whammy and it was like just something bad that happened.
Did you ever see that?
No.
It's like a 70s and 80s game show or something, right?
I always thought it came from baseball, but I think you're right.
I think it is from a game show because they all of a sudden say like whammy or something.
Exactly.
But it just means two bad things happening at the same time.
Exactly.
And we do use that all the time.
So back to pronunciation, guys.
First, you need to focus on the sounds, the individual sounds themselves.
How do we make them?
What does the mouth do?
What does our tongue do?
Our teeth, our voice, our lips?
Focus on that first and then focus on what they sound like.
Bring it into your ears, guys.
Recognize them.
Be able to identify them when you hear them.
And then, guys...
That's when you can mimic those sounds yourself.
That's when you try to produce the same phonemes, okay?
Mandy says she teaches the sounds to students in a similar way that she teaches literacy to elementary students, which she has also done.
She likes to break apart these skills into individual abilities, right?
And that's how she teaches both reading and pronunciation.
I really love that.
That's so smart to break it down like that so that you understand the individual things that are happening and then you can actually produce it like you need to.
Exactly.
I love it.
All right.
Let's get to Mandy's second tip.
Yeah, another thing that I see people do a lot of is they've been taught how to overproduce sounds and make them really dramatic.
And what I have found is that a lot of students who've come from that background, we can't do it.
You can't actually move your mouth that much to overproduce the sound.
And so they just end up going back to what they were doing before anyway, because they feel they look ridiculous if they were actually doing these very dramatic shapes of their mouth.
And also, once they get into conversation, it's just too much effort to go into all of it.
And so yeah, when we're working with students, we really teach them the basics, most minimalistic way of making a sound and having it still come out correctly, so that it's much easier to actually produce and continue doing.
Okay, so I've actually never thought about this side of it.
I've never thought about students' pronunciation from this perspective, but I find this idea very interesting because I do think a lot of teachers do this.
They show students how to form difficult sounds in dramatic ways, right?
They make it almost too big.
And then you're not learning the real sound, right?
You're learning this like overproduced thing that we don't actually say.
Yes, this happened to me learning French, where my teacher would be like this, like super loud noise in the back of your throat trying to make that R, And so then we could do that, but we couldn't actually make it sound like a word in French.
Right?
Totally.
Totally.
That's so funny.
And I know like just personally, when I used to teach especially lower level classes, lower level fluency or speaking classes, and we would be going through vowel sounds and minimal pairs, right.
Mm-hmm.
And we would be talking about the long E sound.
And I would always describe it as the smile sound, right?
Because I would make students smile when they said the sounds.
They would produce it correctly.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess in real life it's not like we're actually – You don't actually smile.
Smile.
Yeah.
We're not actually doing that every time we say long E. So this is opening my teacher eyes as well.
So I think we agree with Mandy on this point, guys.
You should be learning –
Not the big, overdramatic way of producing these sounds.
You should be learning the sounds as we actually use them in real life.
All right, let's move on to her third tip.
Sure.
Well, there's kind of two that are... Sure.
One that's another, here's a technical tip, and then another one that's sort of an emotional tip.
Feel free.
Feel free.
So another thing is regarding the rhythm of English and how to notice the rhythm of English.
And again this sort of goes with the don't overproduce sounds.
But learning how to reduce sounds that should be reduced and how to make our function words smaller and how to reduce syllables of words that should be reduced in order to help your English have the rhythm of a native speaker or more native-like, is really important.
And if that's not done, then everything again is overproduced and that can lead to that sounding more choppy or staccato because the small syllables aren't made small enough.
Yeah, so that makes sense.
I think students often learn to make the stressed words and syllables louder, but then they don't learn how to reduce these other syllables or words.
That's such a good point, right?
Because yeah, if you look at any pronunciation materials talking about sentence stress, it's always the same thing, right?
It's stressed words are longer and louder. but then they don't talk about the rest of the words.
So I love this.
This is such a great insight into the gaps in our pronunciation learning.
And also this is a good point because I know students worry more often about mispronouncing individual words or mispronouncing individual sounds even.
But actually, guys, here is the honest truth.
Having the wrong rhythm having zero rhythm first of all, or having the wrong rhythm and stress in English can cause just as many or more miscommunications than just getting an individual sound wrong.
If a student from a tonal language background is learning English with zero rhythm and zero stress, zero intonation.
Even if their grammar and vocab are perfect, it's still really hard to understand them.
Especially if you're talking to someone who's not used to speaking to people with accents, right?
Then it's really difficult.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think this comes up often in the business world.
If you're working with lots of international coworkers people from everywhere and then it's vital that you make yourself understood for an important presentation.
This can cause a lot of miscommunications.
You probably have people in the room who aren't used to hearing that.
And this is where it's so vital that you make yourself understood and make sure that your tone, your rhythm is understandable.
Exactly.
This is something we work with over on the IELTS side of All Ears English as well is that sometimes like I'll be working with a student and they'll have such amazing vocabulary but I'm missing some of the words because their pronunciation is so unnatural?
Right.
And just like Aubrey is saying, like this can happen in the business world too.
You may have amazing information you're trying to deliver.
The people won't receive that information if they can't understand you.
Okay.
So let's get on to Mandy's fourth tip.
And this is an emotional one.
So this is really cool.
All right.
Let's get into her fourth tip.
Yeah.
You know, a lot of people are really afraid of sounding fake.
And when they they'll say something and it just really sounded perfect.
And I'll say, gosh, that was that was fantastic.
And they'll say, yeah, but it didn't sound like me.
And then they start to say well, now people are going to think that I'm pretending, that I'm being somebody else.
And so that's a really important barrier to get past is that, one, your listeners don't notice it.
They don't really notice you're improving.
Which is a little bit disheartening sometimes.
But they don't say, gosh, all of a sudden you sound so different.
And it really does seem like it's sort of a head game for the learner to step back and say you know, it's okay that this doesn't sound like I sounded like before.
It is accurate.
And with that, they can get the confidence to keep doing it.
But otherwise people once they start to really improve, they'll back off a little bit because they'll say it just doesn't sound like me.
Okay, this is another eye-opener for me, because I've never thought about pronunciation from this standpoint before.
Like this is another perspective I'm very grateful to Mandy for bringing in front of us today.
So students are – afraid to not sound like themselves.
And so they are trying to sound different in speaking another language, but then they feel like it's not authentic.
It feels like they're being fake, right?
It's hard for them to connect to what they sound like.
And so then they end up reversing this and, And then they don't even try to have natural pronunciation anymore.
What do you think about this?
Like, have you experienced this in your language learning?
Yeah, this definitely happened to me in French because it felt like...
Such a beautiful sort of more formal language than my English growing up in Idaho.
So I would, my personality would sort of change when I was trying to speak French and I couldn't be funny.
I couldn't, you know, really be myself, especially when I first moved to Belgium.
It took me a little while to figure out how to let my personality shine and still be kind of informal in French.
Totally.
And it's just, you know, I don't think it's just from this standpoint, this sort of fear of trying to sound different in another language.
It's just that it's hard and we feel silly and we feel ridiculous when you're trying to take on like a French accent or Spanish accent.
And so you hear so many Americans speaking Spanish like, hola, como estas?
And like they're saying everything with an American accent.
And like and I get that.
It's just it's easier.
Right.
Well, and there's so many things you're having to think of at once.
You're trying to think of the vocabulary.
And yes, you're also trying to make sure your grammar is right.
And so to also be able to have your intonation and rhythm and sound like yourself, that's a lot.
It's a lot to do all at once.
I know.
It is.
And we recognize that, you guys.
Here is a last idea before we summarize Mandy's points today.
This is something that – well, it's actually a language learning method called – it's part of Suggestopedia, actually.
But anyways, it's this idea of like taking on another personality in the target language.
So for example, maybe your name is Apple and you're from Taiwan.
And so when you speak English, it's like in your head you're just saying I'm a Taiwanese person speaking English, and it doesn't sound right.
It's weird.
What if we just get rid of all of those thoughts?
And what if we change that thought to inventing a new person who actually is an English speaker right?
You don't have to be Apple from Taiwan English student anymore.
You could be Rebecca from California who loves surfing and plays the drums.
And then you don't have to be embarrassed when you speak English anymore.
You're just an English speaker now.
Right.
Rebecca does not feel silly. by her pronunciation.
Rebecca's rad.
Are you kidding?
She has dreadlocks and feather earrings.
Okay.
So let's summarize Mandy's tips today.
I'll do the first two.
So her first tip guys learn to recognize the individual sounds when you listen, before you try to say them out loud yourself.
And the second tip is Don't overdo it.
Don't make the sounds too big.
Try to do the same movements with your mouth as a native speaker to make the sounds.
Yes, her third tip is to work on rhythm, to realize that stressed words and syllables are longer and louder, but you also have to think about unstressed ones that are quieter and smaller.
And then fourth, create an identity for yourself in this new language to gain confidence and really try to sound more native, so that you don't feel silly.
Feel excited instead.
I love it.
So great.
So to get going on those first couple tips, guys, check out Mandy's website, Pronuncian.com.
That's P-R-O-N-U-N-C-I-A-N.com.
All right.
Awesome.
Aubrey, thanks for chatting today.
Yes.
So fun.
See you later.
Bye.
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