844. Improve Your Pronunciation with Luke Nicholson - Accent Coach | Luke's ENGLISH Podcast - Learn British English with Luke Thompson

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Hello listeners.

Now, before we start the episode properly, I just want to say a big thank you to all the people who wrote nice messages in response to the last episode, which was all about the birth of our son, our new baby.

Thank you very much. on various platforms and by email and stuff.

Lots of people basically said congratulations.

Some people wrote fairly long messages with their own personal reflections, memories of their own children being born and just other nice comments basically.

So thank you very much for those responses.

It was really nice to read them.

We all appreciated that you took the time to write those thoughtful messages.

So thank you very much.

It's now, I guess.

What about two and a half months after the baby was born?

Two and a with the baby in the carrier?

Now he's not.

I don't always stand around with him in the baby carrier, strapped to my chest, of course, except when I've got to go somewhere.

If I'm at home looking after the baby and I need to like, record something or do some work, I find actually the only way I can do it is to put him in the baby carrier and have him strapped to my chest.

And then he seems to be a bit more comfortable, less restless.

He doesn't cry and often he will just fall asleep.

So that's what's happening now.

I've managed to find a moment in the day to record this episode introduction.

And so that's what's happening.

I mean, I could ramble on.

I mustn't, because we've got to get straight to the point with this episode, because this episode is a conversation with a guest, Luke Nicholson.

He is an accent coach.

And we have this long conversation about pronunciation, about improving your accent in English, and about the work that he does helping other people improve their accents.

There's loads of stuff in this episode, so I must get onto that stuff.

But I did just want to say thanks and also just to kind of let you know that yeah, it's two and a half months later and normal life has not yet returned.

I mean, normal – let's face it, normal life will never return.

There is no such thing as normal life, is there, anyway?

But I suppose I mean the normal working routine that I have had over the last few years – is a little disrupted because my wife and I are taking it in turns to look after the baby while also trying to get all of our work commitments done and stuff.

And that basically what I'm trying to say is that the podcast might be disrupted a little bit.

I know I say this all the time.

Whenever something happens, I'm like, oh, the podcast is going to be disrupted.

And then I find a way to continue making the episodes.

But just a heads up if there's no episode one week or something, then you'll know that I'm essentially looking after the baby myself.

Or if there are no video versions for a while, it means I can't get to the pod room because I can't really look after the baby in the pod room and do videos at the same time.

We are trying to find childcare.

We're trying to find a place in a creche.

That's a daycare centre for kids.

We're trying to find a place.

So many kids, so many families want to get their kids into the creches and there are only a certain number of places, so it can take a while.

Sometimes you have to wait a few months for the next opportunity to happen.

So anyway, just a heads up, the podcast might be disrupted a little bit.

You might not get episodes as regularly as as normal, or maybe they'll just be audio episodes, which you don't mind about, of course, because you're an audio listener.

So that's fine with you, isn't it?

Okay.

Anyway, thanks for the messages.

The podcast should continue as normal, but let's get into this episode with Luke Nicholson, the accent coach from the UK.

Here's the jingle.

You're listening to Luke's English Podcast.

So yes, Luke Nicholson.

He's an accent coach.

He helps people to communicate more clearly with a specific focus on pronunciation.

And his name's Luke Nicholson.

So yes, another Luke on the podcast.

Luke Thompson and Luke Nicholson.

You're getting two Lukes for the price of one.

Well, actually two for the price of none, isn't it really?

Because the podcast is free, of course.

But a conversation about pronunciation, improving your accent.

Now, this should be relevant for all of you out there, right?

Learning how to improve the way that you speak, not just your grammar, your vocabulary and stuff, but the way that you sound.

I assume that this is relevant for all of you.

But as Luke and I get into the topic and as I ask him specific things about his work and the nature of it, things do get quite technical sometimes.

When you talk about pronunciation it can get a bit technical as you talk about phonology, the phonemic alphabet and also the vocal tract, like the different parts of your mouth or body that you use to make sounds, words and sounds and lots of other technical things.

So it might be a bit complex and a little bit confusing.

So what I need to do at the beginning of this episode is to really focus your attention on certain things, certain issues or ideas.

I need to focus your attention on those things first before you listen to the conversation, in order to make sure that you can really get the most from this as possible.

Okay, so what I've done is I've prepared some questions for you, questions for you to consider, or at least even questions for you to consider, or even questions for you to respond to.

You could give your answers out loud.

You could say your answers out loud in response to these questions, just to practice your expressing your ideas uh and, you know, expressing your personal situation in english in words, or you could write it down.

You know, write down your answers.

It could be a good way, good exercise, not just in expressing yourself and putting your ideas into words, but also a useful way for you to get into the right headspace to really understand this conversation fully.

So I've got questions for you.

I've also got a little summary of some of the main conclusions, insights and advice that Luke gives.

So questions first, then a little summary, and then you'll listen to the full conversation which hopefully you will be, you know, fully prepared for.

So questions.

First of all, in your learning of English, how important is pronunciation for you?

In terms of the practice that you do and just how you see your learning.

How important is pronunciation?

How much time do you put into practicing pronunciation or researching it?

How much time do you put into that, compared to other things like grammar or vocabulary or other aspects of learning English?

So how much do you prioritize pronunciation and why as well?

Thirdly, how much do you know about the physical ways that we make sounds and also the ways that we express pronunciation in writing?

That's the phonetic alphabet.

So how much do you know about those things?

Just to focus on the physical stuff, first think about your mouth, your throat, your tongue, your teeth, your nose or other parts.

Do you know which parts are responsible for making different sounds in English?

You could try saying different vowel and consonant sounds and see which parts of your mouth are involved.

It's not just your mouth, of course.

There are other parts of the body around your mouth, near your mouth.

But try saying some things and just sort of try to notice which parts of the mouth or body are engaged.

Maybe you could just do something like count to 10 or count to 20 and just notice things like the shape of your lips, where your tongue goes, which parts of your mouth your tongue might be touching, or the shape of your tongue, the shape of your lips, whether you are rounding your lips, pushing them forwards, or whether your lips are wide, your jaw, if it's high or low, and other things.

Try just counting to 10.

I think you know I'm assuming you know how to count to 10, but do it and see which parts of your mouth are engaged.

I'm going to count to 10 now.

Again, I know you know the numbers, but anyway, this is just maybe to let you focus on the physical way that words are produced.

Okay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

Now that's That's kind of incomplete as a way of assessing or identifying the physical side because you need to, to be honest, I'd need to be right there in front of you so that you could see my mouth so I can show you phonemes and connect all these things together and get you to do it and notice the way you're doing it.

But anyway, it can be worth just trying to be mindful of the physical side of English, right?

And just think about the different parts of the mouth.

OK, now does English use sounds that you don't use in your first language?

So you know, you'll probably have a number of sounds that you use in your first language which are shared with English, but then there will be differences.

So which sounds do we use in English that you don't have in your first language?

Which are the things you struggle with, basically?

Are there certain words which always seem to cause you trouble when you speak English, and which specific parts of those words cause the problem?

Okay.

And which, you know, why is that?

Why do you have problems with those specific parts, parts of those specific words, for example, if it's ed, endings of words, or certain vowel sounds, if you have trouble identifying the difference between ship and sheep, or or what, or some of the more embarrassing examples i could give at this moment.

Um, which accent would you like to have in english, And what is that accent called?

And why do you want that particular accent?

Does it matter if, when you speak, people can tell which part of the world you're from, or that they can tell that English isn't your first language?

Does it matter if people can identify that when they hear you?

Okay, what do you think is more important in pronunciation?

Is it intelligibility or is it identity or is it somehow both of them?

So intelligibility means being clear, and identity means expressing a certain identity with the way that you speak.

Is one of them more important than another one for you?

Or are they more or less the same level of importance and why?

And how can you actually go about improving your pronunciation?

What steps can you take and what resources can you use to help you do it?

What does it mean to have good pronunciation or a good accent?

What does that even mean?

And if you're an English teacher, because I do have English teachers listening to this as well.

If you're an English teacher, how do you teach pronunciation to your students?

What place does it have in your lessons?

What are your experiences of teaching it?

And do you ever have to use sort of unconventional methods, let's say, to make your pronunciation lessons work effectively?

So considering your answers to those questions should help you to use this episode a little bit better.

Now, by the way, you'll find a list of those questions on the page for this episode on my website.

So you can go there to read the questions again if you want.

You'll also find other useful things on the episode page, like some links relating to things in this episode, things that we mentioned.

So that's all on the page for this episode on my website.

And a reminder to find all the episode pages, just go to teacherluke.co.uk slash episodes.

Now, this episode is not a pronunciation course in itself.

It's not a step-by-step pronunciation lesson.

OK, rather it is a conversation with an accent coach or pronunciation teacher, if you like.

It's a conversation about various aspects of learning and teaching pronunciation.

The idea is that listening to us talk together could give you some inspiration, perspective or insight into how you can improve your accent.

Now, as I said earlier, here's a quick summary of the main conclusions or insights or bits of advice from this conversation.

Let me just give it to you on a plate before you actually listen to us talking at length, okay?

So, improving your pronunciation.

According to Luke Nicholson, it pretty much boils down to these things.

So, first of all, English is diverse in its pronunciation and accents.

People speak it in various different ways all around the world and the written word doesn't always match how it sounds.

You've probably noticed that there are lots of different accents and also the spelling and the pronunciation don't seem to match up.

You've probably noticed that.

Now, there might be different levels of acceptance that you're at with that.

You might have decided okay okay, so the written word and spoken word don't seem to connect in some cases.

That's all right.

Maybe you've made peace with it.

Some of you might still be struggling like, why?

But, you know, ultimately you do have to kind of accept these sorts of irregularities or what might appear to be irregularities.

You have to just accept these things and then move on, right?

Those irregularities will seem relatively normal when you get familiar with the language.

Study pronunciation.

Actually study it, but don't look for one rule to explain it all.

Instead, try to find little patterns in pronunciation and other ways to help you remember English pronunciation bit by bit.

Determine your pronunciation priorities and choose a target accent which you can aim for.

You might not necessarily get there, but at least choose a sort of target accent which you are trying to go for.

Think about balancing intelligibility that's being clear with expressing your identity through your accent.

You'll probably have to strike a balance between those two things.

I would say probably prioritise being clear first and foremost.

Try to familiarise yourself with the vocal tract and the sounds of English.

Learn the phonemic chart and explore stress and intonation patterns.

Learn the phonemic chart, or at least sort of study it.

Have a go, but don't be put off by the phonemic chart.

It might look a bit confusing and complex, but don't be put off by it.

It might not be as bad as you think.

You probably have most of those sounds in your first language.

Just look out for the ones which you don't have and then prioritise working on those things.

Identify which sounds in English you find difficult or which sounds really cause people to misunderstand you.

This is the most important.

If you can, for example, say certain words, that If you say them in a slightly different way to me, for example, but people understand you, then that's kind of fine right.

For example, if you find it hard to say months...

You know, how many months in the year?

There are 12 months.

Months.

If you find it hard to say that.

But if you say months instead right, instead of saying the th sound, you add a t sound.

Months.

12 months in a year. and everyone understands you, then maybe that's fine.

And also just practice making different sounds and think outside the box to find different approaches to practicing your pronunciation that work for you.

Now it's easy to get overwhelmed by pronunciation because it is quite a complex system, But you don't have to learn it all.

The key is to work out certain priorities in your learning of pronunciation and then focus on them.

And certain online resources can help you, including the work of Luke Nicholson.

So then, after this long introduction finally, let's hear from Luke now about his work and about what is involved in improving your accent.

And let's get started.

Hello, we're talking about language.

Sit down, let's have a chat.

A bit of a chat, sir.

A bit of a chat.

Yes, doctor, just a bit of a chat.

What about, sir?

About English as a global language.

This is a conversation.

Yes.

I would like to talk to you.

Okay, let's talk.

Let's have a quick conversation.

What do you think?

That's what we're going to do.

We're going to have a good time.

We're going to have a conversation.

About language.

Luke Nicholson, hello.

Welcome onto the podcast.

Thank you very much for having me, Luke.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have another Luke on the podcast.

This is the first time this has ever happened.

Oh, the first time.

Yeah, so from one Luke to another.

Yeah, welcome.

I was actually wondering.

Since you work with learners of English like me and your name is Luke, I was wondering if learners of English ever mispronounce your name or misspell your name.

Well, my favorite pronunciation of my name is by Brazilian Portuguese speakers.

Brazilian.

Portuguese is a language that allows certain consonants at the ends of syllables, and other consonants aren't allowed unless they're followed by a vowel sound.

For instance, a K type sound needs to be followed by a vowel.

And so we get something like Lukey, which, of course, is a diminutive suffix in English.

So when we say things like, I'm not sure...

Well Teddy, for instance, right is a diminutive suffix of Ted, little Ted, which then got put onto the bear.

Yeah, my mum and dad used to call me Lukey when I was a little kid.

And you know, I've had the same thing from Brazilian students who've put up their hand and after they've, you know, realised they don't have to call me teacher.

Then they call me Lukey.

And it's kind of like, OK, this is a little bit too informal now.

Yes, or, for instance, the postman comes and, are you Lukey?

Yes, I am.

Yeah, I didn't realise that you knew me that well.

Have you been reading my letters?

Yes.

Okay, and, all right, Lukey from the Brazilians, all right.

From the Bulgarians.

You might get walk because, as you might be aware, sometimes Ls turn into W sounds throughout histories of languages.

So, for instance, in French, Ls have disappeared and have turned into the letter U.

You now see in French, in certain words, when you have a u, for instance um, and then you get uh, for instance polish, you've got that l that has the little slash through it that used to be a l sound but has since turned into a w sound.

And in bulgarian, what's happening right now is that l's are turning into w's not uh by everyone, but you'll get people that say um, a w instead of a l sound uh, and so my name becomes wook rather than Luke.

Not all Bulgarians do this, but it's something that you hear.

When I went to Sofia, I kept saying the word thank you, which has an L in, and I was listening out for other people saying that word.

So you're an accent coach.

That's your sort of job title, or that's how you describe yourself on your website.

Yeah.

So maybe the place to start here is just to ask you what that is.

So what is an accent coach?

What do you do?

Well, I primarily help learners of English speak more clearly and more confidently.

Sometimes I help actors as well.

And when you are looking to speak more clearly and confidently.

This is partly to do with intelligibility, and some people divide intelligibility into different bits, but for me essentially, it's about people understanding you, understanding what you mean, and that involves teaching not only pronunciation but also listening.

And when you're teaching pronunciation, There is no such thing as neutral pronunciation, right.

There's no thing that you can teach and say look, every single person does this in exactly the same way.

And in which case, then in my opinion the student or I can guide them.

It should choose some kind of model.

And it doesn't matter whether you get that model or not.

It might do.

But the idea is this is the direction we're going in when we're improving your intelligibility.

So, in terms of a model, do you typically suggest one model in particular?

What do you find learners of English?

What model do they want and which model do you think they should aim for?

Well, I don't think there's a should here.

It's about exploring options.

Primarily, I teach standard Southern British English.

That's my accent.

But I'm very aware that there are loads of teachers out there who don't speak like me, which is why I created a UK accent series exploring the differences between accents.

And rather than me doing all the accents, I found 150 different speakers in the UK and put them in the video and then put their names underneath and where they were from.

And this is a resource that I hope English teachers can use or students can use when they're searching for a model.

Now, of course, I didn't do it for the whole of the English speaking world, right?

That's...

I mean, this took months of my time.

But the idea is that you can go to these videos and choose a model.

Maybe there's an accent you particularly like.

Or if you're living in Liverpool or Manchester or Edinburgh.

Perhaps you want to sound like people from that area.

It's going to improve your intelligibility if you do, right?

If you live in Leeds, people are going to understand you much more clearly if you speak like someone from Leeds.

Now, of course, if you don't live in the UK, then it's a different question, right?

What accent do you aim towards?

What model?

Because if you're speaking to lots and lots of different people from all over the world, that's something else.

That's a different question.

Yeah.

So I guess my next question is, like, how?

Actually, I've tried to divide my questions into sort of sections, let's say.

My first section is, what do you do, right?

So, what do I do in my first lesson, for instance, or how do I introduce this topic?

Sure, that's good.

Good start.

If we have somebody that's never studied any kind of pronunciation before.

Well firstly, you explore how your vocal tract works and the vocal tract is from your larynx to the lips or the nose and explore about what's happening inside your mouth.

How do we create different sounds?

Because this proprioception is self-awareness is really important.

If you don't understand what's happening inside your mouth, then it's tricky to control what you're doing.

Some people find pronunciation very easy.

They can listen to something and then just repeat it.

But for most people, it doesn't work like that.

You've got to explain how you're creating sounds in the mouth.

And the first step is understanding what's happening inside your own mouth.

How are we creating sounds not only in English, but also in your native language?

Because, of course, in your native language or languages, then you might find some things interesting.

OK, here are some parallels with English.

Here are some differences.

Then we explore the relationship between spelling and sound.

And we perhaps look at the student's native language.

How are spelling and sound related in their native language?

If, of course, their native language has a spelling system, not all languages have orthographies.

And some orthographies are more true to the pronunciation than others.

Yeah.

English has a more etymological spelling system where we can work out relationships between words and where they came from.

And of course, it's a reflection to some extent of how we pronounced words in the past, but not necessarily today.

Is there a key to helping learners understand that connection between pronunciation and spelling, or that lack of connection perhaps?

Well, I think one great advantage in terms of...

One great advantage of our spelling system is that we can see words written down and notice the relationship between them.

For instance, even though the pronunciation is very different.

For instance, we've got photograph, but photographer.

Well, they have a different stress pattern.

They have some different vowel sounds.

Photo has an O in the stressed syllable, whereas photo has an O vowel, photographer.

If you said those two words somebody who wasn't familiar with English, they might not realize there's a connection between them.

But the spelling shows there's a clear relationship.

That's one advantage.

Some people might not see it as an advantage, of course.

People don't see it as an advantage.

In fact you know just from teaching students.

That is definitely not an advantage because you know having done all those classes about word stress.

Where you have the table of here are the different word stress patterns.

Let's put these words in the right categories across the different parts of speech.

And yeah, it's all photograph, first syllable, but photography and photographer.

Okay, so does that mean that in the noun form every time it's in the second syllable?

Is that the you know?

This is what my learners are kind of thinking.

Oh, so they're trying to find the rule.

So in the noun form, it's the second syllable, is it?

Well no, because in lots of, plenty of other words, when you go into the noun form, the stress will be on the first syllable or somewhere else.

So I don't know what would you say in that situation to my learners who were like oh, teacher Lukey, what's the rule here?

Well I would say look, if we spelled it exactly how we pronounce it, then it would be trickier to comprehend when you're reading.

So either it's trickier to comprehend when you're reading, or it's trickier to pronounce and maybe comprehend when you're listening.

If you want to spell them in a similar way, then you need to make compromises.

There's no way to escape the fact that Yeah, there's an irregularity, I guess.

Is that the right way to put it?

I mean, you're a phonetician, is that right?

Or am I right in saying that?

So you're deep into the rabbit hole of phonetics and phonology and so on.

So, you know, I've got to make sure I'm using the right terminology.

But yeah, so there is an irregularity there.

And unfortunately, there's just kind of no way of getting around that.

But is there a key to remembering which words are stressed in which ways, you know, do you think?

Well, what I often teach are patterns, right?

And they're always patterns rather than rules because we have exceptions.

And one commonly...

One common issue is that many learners of English always stress the -ise suffix or the -ate suffix.

And when I say stress, I mean place the primary stress on it, like in communicate or internalise, whereas we don't do that.

And there are loads of words that have an "-ate or an "-ise suffix.

And not only that, but we can add suffixes on.

So we have internalising or communicated, whereas L1 speakers of English, people who grew up in England, speaking English are likely to say communicated and internalising.

Right.

So we find these patterns that are okay.

Well, if I find myself stressing eight or I's, it's probably not the right stress pattern.

Yeah.

However, saying that I'm not sure how much intelligibility problems this causes in terms of the ate or the eyes suffix.

So you've said there maybe a little rule of thumb is to look for suffixes and to notice the way that suffixes will affect the stress pattern.

So, we don't usually stress the suffix.

In fact, that's these suffixes you've just mentioned.

I'm trying to think if there are other suffixes that we do stress, but anyway.

Volunteer.

Volunteer, okay.

Refugee.

Uh-huh.

All right.

So, it's the I-Z-E and the A-T-E suffixes are the ones you just mentioned.

Is that right?

Yeah.

And with ATE, there's a simple rule.

The rule is that you stress two syllables before the ATE.

So we have decorate.

The de is stressed because it's two syllables before ATE.

Communicate is the same thing.

So rather than, well, here it's the first, here it's the second.

Well, it's two syllables before ATE.

Is there a similar one with I-Z-E?

No.

It's essentially on the root, the stem of the word.

So, if you add I's, it doesn't change the stress pattern.

Okay.

So, internal.

It's internal, a second syllable.

And if you add I's, it doesn't do anything to the word.

Yes, exactly.

Okay.

All right.

But A-T-E, if you add that, then the stress will always be always.

Don't like that word.

But it will be two syllables before that suffix.

So anyway, I guess for my listeners here, you know notice the way that certain suffixes will have an impact on the stress of a word when you change it across different parts of speech.

Yeah.

Yes.

And of course that pattern of two syllables before only applies to words of three syllables or more.

When you have two syllable words, it's different.

Oh, my gosh.

This I'm laughing because this to me seems like so complicated.

It does.

But it's all about developing an instinct that perhaps you never feel yourself stressing that ATE suffix.

If you're saying things like communicate, then that just doesn't feel like this accent.

And yes, I'm saying... appropriate for this accent or right for this accent.

But of course, I'm not sure how much intelligibility issues this particular suffix creates.

And also there are lots of accents in the English speaking world, some of which will stress that ATE suffix, most likely.

Really?

Well, I'm putting you on the spot here a lot.

You are, and probably I'm going to get this wrong, but I'm thinking maybe Nigerian English might stress ATE.

And then in Irish and Scottish English, you have certain words where the I's is stressed.

So in Irish English, you have realise.

People don't say realise.

Some people do, but it's very common to say realise.

Just want to say to my listeners now I feel your pain everyone, in the face of all these exceptions.

So we jumped away from the very first class, which was about exploring, and then inside your mouth, and then exploring the relationship between spelling and sound.

But I wouldn't jump into complicated things like this.

The idea is to find topics and patterns that are hindering intelligibility and prioritizing them.

Um so, for instance, um the difference between things like seat and sit, um that that vowel contrast has what we call a high functional load, as in there are lots of words in english that are distinguished by these vowel sounds, And if you mix them up, it's more likely to lead to intelligibility issues, more likely to lead to misunderstandings.

Whereas if somebody was mixing up a TH and an F well, that's not really a problem at all, because plenty of English speakers do that.

And it causes very few intelligibility issues in general, because the sounds are very similar acoustically and also because there are very few minimal pairs.

So there's a very low functional load.

A little word of encouragement there for learners of English out there who struggle with TH.

Sounds right.

So, for example, all my French students who struggle with that.

It's not the end of the world if you don't pronounce you know, if you're saying you know 30 or 30 or something like that.

So I would always advise to go to F and V because that's what lots of people do throughout the UK.

So it's not a London thing, it's everywhere.

But saying S and Z for the two, that can cause more intelligibility issues.

So I would...

I would probably move people towards F and V. And similarly with T and D, those are the other two.

So I would advise someone not to do a T, so don't say tanks.

I would advise them to go to F, thanks, if they find that really easy.

Yeah.

It's difficult not to get completely caught up in very, very minute details in this conversation.

I hope that everyone is able to follow everything we are saying here, Luke.

So, yeah, I mean, going back to a bigger question, I mean, what is a good accent?

Well, in my opinion there's Well.

I mean, I think you'd only use the term good accent if you were judging an actor, maybe.

Taking on a role and putting on a particular accent and judging whether they met that criteria or not.

You're moving towards that and that will help you improve your intelligibility, improve people understanding you.

But for some people, they want to sound as close to a particular accent as possible.

And they may have their own reasons for this.

So it's not up to the teacher to say, well, no, you're not allowed to.

It's about saying hey well, have you thought about these alternative viewpoints?

That one it's very, very tricky to sound exactly like a so-called native speaker of this accent.

And two, is it really that important?

You could explore that.

But regardless, somebody might have their own reasons and that's okay.

Yeah.

I spoke to David Crystal about this subject, amongst others, and he said it was really just two things intelligibility and identity right.

And so, you know, this might help people to think about the subject.

What's the priority?

Maybe both, but certainly intelligibility strikes me as being the...

Probably the first one that you have to make sure that people can understand everything you say and that there's no room for misunderstanding.

And identity, as you mentioned, is you know, if you decide that you want to, you know, have a certain accent from a certain place, then you know, for whatever reason because, as you said, because if you live there, if you live in Leeds, you want to sound like someone from Leeds.

That's the identity part.

They sort of merge as well a bit, I guess.

The people in Leeds are probably going to understand people who speak like them, right?

So the two things do merge together.

But it's a question of being understood, being clear.

And then the identity stuff is up to everyone.

They can just choose whatever they want to sound like.

You know, that's their choice.

Okay.

So...

What do you think should be the objective for a learner of English when considering their pronunciation?

Well, the objective is always to be understood.

So if there are people listening who aren't always understood, then that's your ultimate priority.

And learning about pronunciation, as we've mentioned before, helps your listening skills, because you know what sounds to listen out for.

You know what word stress patterns to listen out for.

If you are expecting internalize... and then you hear internalize, then you might be a bit confused.

So this helps with that.

And then your objective is really up to you as a learner.

You can...

It simply depends whether you want to sound closer to a particular accent or not.

But bear in mind that there's no such thing as neutral pronunciation.

If you look up a word in a dictionary, it's transcribed according to a certain accent, not some magical neutral pronunciation.

And some people would argue, ah, but they are phonemic transcriptions.

So we've got a difference between phonemes and...

And phonemes are these abstract categories of sounds.

So we've got the E vowel like in seat and the I vowel like in kit.

Those two are two abstract phonemes and different accents might pronounce them in slightly different ways.

But those categories will still exist.

But unfortunately, not all accents have the same categories.

So going back to our names in Scotland, our names and the verb, to look well, they have the same pronunciation because those two phoneme categories don't exist.

They're just one category um so, so dictionaries and and resources textbooks are transcribing things in a particular way and that's a particular accent.

Um, and yes i, i think not all learners are aware that it's not just the pronunciation but also the, the grammar that you're learning.

It's a so-called standard grammar.

There's no such thing as a neutral language, and so when you're learning english, you're learning the standard forms.

They aren't necessarily the correct forms.

They are the forms of a particular variety of English that have been chosen as the standard.

So if you go to Leeds, you might find slightly different grammar.

You might find slightly different vocabulary in use.

Now it's not going to vary as much as pronunciation, but I just want to drive home that there's no such thing as neutral.

Yeah.

Do you find that when learners come to you, there are certain sort of preconceptions or preconceptions that you need to kind of change?

Well, it's usually I want to speak correct.

And in my view, there's no such thing as correct.

It's wrong.

It's simply wrong.

Different forms and we can pronounce things in different ways and still be understood, but we need to perhaps separate categories like seat and sit to be understood by the vast majority of English speakers.

Because when we say a certain type of English is correct, that is suggesting that other varieties of English are somehow not correct, which is just, you know, not true or fair.

Yes, or substandard.

Yeah.

Do you think that people should prioritise pronunciation more in their learning?

I think it should be the first thing that people do before they learn any words or anything.

Yeah.

Because if you learn a word for the first time and you're unaware of how it sounds, then you're going to start pronouncing it in a certain way and that's going to potentially lead to problems down the line in terms of intelligibility.

It might not.

It depends on your native language or languages and...

And your ability to listen.

If you're listening to a lot of English, you might start learning these words in a more English way.

Doing air quotes for people who can't see.

And it just makes listening so much easier.

If you learn pronunciation straight away, you can just understand people more easily, because you know how the words are usually pronounced.

You know which categories to listen out for.

Yes, in your native sound system you don't have a contrast between the s and c and the sh and shi.

You're not going to be listening out for it in English words?

You'll just think, oh, well, S and SH, those letters, they're just pronounced the same.

And it's just weird English spelling that, you know, spells them differently.

Like there's a B in debt that we don't pronounce.

It's just weird English spelling.

Well, actually these are two categories that do have minimal pairs and can change the meanings of words.

And so they are important to listen out for.

If you're doing that from the very first lesson, then great.

Yeah.

There's no such thing as weird English spelling then for you.

There are reasons behind all of those sort of what appear to be irregular forms of spelling.

There are reasons for them.

And actually, there is a system.

It's just rather complicated and not noticeable from the very beginning.

Well, I mean, I think some of the reasons for English spelling are weird, but there are reasons.

Yes.

There are reasons.

It's just you might not agree with the reason why people did it.

You know, like the scholars, adding certain letters in to make it closer or show the Latin origin of words.

Yeah.

But do you think that English spelling is weird?

Because like people do say that quite a lot, don't they?

They come across, they come face to face with the language and the conclusion is English spelling.

English spelling is crazy.

English spelling is weird.

You see lots of sort of memes and things online about how crazy and mad the English language is.

What do you think as a linguist, phonetician, accent person?

Well, I mean, to some extent, it just hasn't been updated, whereas other languages have updated their spelling systems.

It hasn't, We haven't had, We don't have something like there is in France and a few other countries.

There's an association that apparently maintain standards again, air quotes.

But they would be people who, in terms of english spelling, would have perhaps got rid of some of the irregularities, and you probably know, in american english they have got rid of some of those letters that uh, that aren't necessary um, but you know, it is, i think weird, is just unfamiliar, It's just unfamiliar.

And to somebody who grew up in England learning English, then, yes, it's hard to begin with.

But then all of these spellings just become very familiar.

They're just the usual, normal way of representing the spoken word on a piece of paper or on a computer screen.

So, you know, from...

From an average English person living in England's point of view.

It's simply the way that you represent it visually.

Yes, it is a question of familiarity.

And for learners of English.

Yeah, of course, when you first encounter a different language, it's going to seem strange and illogical.

And so a lot of people will conclude that it's weird, as a way of sort of like dealing with that challenge, as it were.

But it's just familiarity, which again sort of goes back to that other thing which is you've got to try and become as familiar with the language as you can and build up a relationship with it so that when you, you know you've read enough of it and heard enough of it, that it doesn't all seem totally crazy and illogical and mad anymore.

In fact you've kind of become friends with it in a way.

Um, What was your experience with French?

French has a fairly etymological spelling system.

Maybe it's a little clearer in French, but I still think it's not entirely clear, because there are lots of letters in French that you see in words that aren't pronounced.

I mean, like you know, E-N-T endings of verb conjugations, just like never mind, just don't pronounce it at all.

And lots of others as well, you know.

So my yeah, as a person trying to speak French and coming face to face with those what appear to be irregularities or illogical things yeah, it can be a little bit frustrating.

So I understand how it is for learners of English to be trying to get to grips with the language and find these things which are not easy to remember or they can cause them to stumble.

And yeah, it can be very frustrating and a bit annoying.

But, you know, you got to just keep going.

You got to carry on and try and be positive about it.

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Let's talk about listening.

So how can studying pronunciation help other areas of someone's English, especially listening?

Do you think?

Well, it improves comprehension, so your ability to understand the words and the meaning that somebody is saying.

Going back to spelling that we were talking about earlier today, you may have heard me say something like the idea of i caught myself doing it, um.

I added in a sound where there isn't one in the spelling and that might be confusing to somebody um, the idea of it, the idea of it um, but it's something very normal that lots of people in england do um, and it's not something you need to replicate.

It's not obligatory.

It's just something that people do.

And some people, some people do it and some people don't.

Um, but it's, um, you know, something that's perhaps interesting to talk about.

If you are listening to an English person speaking in an English class, you say Oh, there's an extra R here.

Uh, You could explore why that happens, but it's probably not a priority, or it isn't, but it's something that might confuse an English learner.

And other things.

How do we divide the differences between sounds?

Well, I talked about certain sh before.

So there's really a continuum of sibilant type sounds that we have and that we can create in the mouth.

There's no one right way to create a s or a sh.

And you can try this now at home if you make a s sound and you'll feel your tongue is more forward in your mouth.

And then, if you slowly bring it back in your mouth, you'll slowly go into some kind of sh type sound.

Now, if you live in Spain or in Greece, maybe you're...

Type sound is somewhere on that continuum.

And sometimes it might be closer to RS sound and closer to our sound.

It might vary depending on the word.

And that's because that continuum is just divided into one category in in, in Greece, for instance, in Greek.

Whereas in England it's divided into two, and those are two phonemes, two abstract categories that can contrast meaning, like in see and she.

Whereas when you go into then it starts to get deeper, lower frequencies, lower pitched.

And if you can perceive that in your own vocal tracks and as you're doing it and keep switching between the two, then you're going to find perceiving certain really easy.

After some time you're going to notice it and if you become a bit obsessed with it, then you can go on to Youglish, which I'm sure your listeners know about already, and search for words like see and she and keep listening to lots of people do it, notice how the frequency changes, and that's just going to help you so much.

Yeah, sort of like learning how the sounds are made in your own vocal tract can then just help you understand how other people are doing it.

Your website, you've got two.

You've got your improveyouraccent.co.uk and also funetics.com.

I mean it's very impressive Luke, because you've found a very clear way of presenting what I think is a very complicated system.

So what about funetics.com?

Can you tell me about that?

It came out of my self-imposed mission to help people speak more clearly, be understood, and when I studied languages at university and I lived abroad and then, after all of this time, I suddenly found out about phonetics and pronunciation and people.

I just simply hadn't been taught that there were certain vowel sounds that I could have been listening out for, that I could have been pronouncing.

And that's really frustrating as a language learner.

And so what I did is essentially create the platform that I want for myself.

I mean, for the English one, which is the improveyouraccent.co.uk, that's... that that's just for ssbe standard southern british english but my phonetic site is an ever-growing site to help people understand the sound systems of different languages and not just different languages but the different for the different varieties that they will hear in that language um you'll see i've got parisian french nasalized vowels on there Obviously, in different areas of France and in Belgium and in Canada, those nasalized vowels are pronounced differently.

And there are different categories.

In Paris, there's usually three nasalized vowels, whereas in Canada, you'll find four.

And the vowels are pronounced differently.

I haven't yet got my Quebecois speaker, but at some point it will be on there.

And this is the kind of stuff that I wanted when I was learning French at school.

I clearly remember asking my teacher, well, how do you pronounce this?

And she just said it and expected me to just do it.

Now, some people can do it and other people can't.

And if they can't, it's your job as a teacher to find a new way of explaining.

And if you don't have that training, which is...

OK, because this is complicated stuff and not everyone is going to learn about pronunciation when they train as a teacher, or phonetics or go into this much detail.

But if you have a learner or you yourself are a learner and you're looking for resources for languages other than English, then check back regularly at phoneticscom.

And it's spelled phonetics, F-U-N.

Because there is fun in there.

Yeah, absolutely there is.

I like the way that you do take a very clear step-by-step approach to doing it.

It's a nicely uncluttered website which really helpfully portions out the information in such a way as not to overwhelm people with pronunciation.

I think that's maybe one of the problems is that it can be a bit overwhelming, especially when you look at the, you know, like for my learners of English in a classroom, when we get into pronunciation and I then refer to the phonemic chart, which is on the board, on the wall, then I get the impression that a lot of them are like, oh God, what, I've got to learn another alphabet. yeah and something to be aware of is that that phonemic alphabet system is of course of a particular accent also that you don't have to learn it it's just a tool that you might find helpful and I suggest well on my website there is a free tool you can go on and you've got an interactive chart with those symbols and you can click and listen and you can listen to example words and I've got minimal pairs on there And a great thing to do is to go on to, not Google anymore, but to go on to Bing.com, the search engine that very few people use or have heard of, and type in define plus the word.

So if you type in define plus the word debt, you'll probably get some debt advertisement.

But you'll also see some data from the Oxford Dictionary.

And it will show you the word, the definition, and the phonemic transcription.

And then there's an audio button.

So every time you look up a word in and i suggest always doing it online so you can listen then look at the phonemic transcription.

So if you play the word debt, you'll you won't hear a, b and you'll see three symbols and over time you'll start to get a bit more familiar with those symbols and then you'll come across a word and you don't recognize the symbol and you realize that sound is actually you can't make it.

So then perhaps you go to my website or a different site that has a chart and you can listen to it and then you think ah okay, that's what the sound is.

These are the words it appears in.

Maybe i'll ask my teacher how to pronounce it or or how i can move from my current pronunciation to to the new one.

So, listeners, that's funetics.com, F-U-N-E-T-I-C-S.com.

And then improveyouraccent.co.uk, which is for learning English.

Yes.

And that one.

If you go to learning resources on my site, you'll find the vowel and consonant chart, among other resources.

I see.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

And I should just say something else about the phonemic chart is that most learners to improve their communication.

They don't need to learn all of these symbols or all of these sounds, because probably they're pronouncing a lot of them correctly or appropriately already.

It's not that... A lot of speakers can already pronounce an M sound.

So you don't need to learn how to make it if you can already pronounce it at the beginning, in the middle, at the end of a syllable.

Obviously, some speakers will find it tricky at the ends of syllables, but How would someone I mean, how do you go about improving your accent if you're learning another language?

So, are you working on a particular language at the moment?

Yes.

So I have done this step by step in phonetics.com about how to go about it.

It's essentially, well, checking you understand how things work in your mouth.

Then I would strongly advise that you do learn some IPA symbols, so International Phonetic Alphabet symbols, because that's going to really help you.

And then go on to a site like Wikipedia, which is usually very good for linguistic stuff, and search for, for instance, French phonology or Portuguese phonology, and you'll go down and you'll see a table with the IPA sounds and some of them you'll recognise, some of them not, and then you can click on them and you can listen to them and listen to example words and work out how they're pronounced.

Now i, i'm very aware, i'm very aware that we've only talked about sounds and pronunciation is is more than sounds.

Right we've, we've got the segmentals, vowels and consonants, but we also have the super segmentals, um and so you, you might also be interested in rhythm intonation, all of that stuff um and uh that's yeah, that's.

That's a whole other minefield.

I mean, you've talked about sort of identifying where you're actually having issues, rather than deciding to learn all of the pronunciation of a particular language, but sort of identifying the bits that you have trouble with and working on those.

How do you find out the bits that you're having trouble with?

Well, I'll just take you through Vietnamese.

So Vietnamese I chose because it has loads of really interesting sounds.

That's the primary reason it sounds really cool.

It's a great reason to try and learn it.

It's also written using the Roman alphabet with modifications, which makes it very easy to read.

It's got quite a fairly transparent spelling to sound relationship.

So once you've learned what those, what sounds, those letters represent, then it's fairly easy to pronounce it.

You've also got reasonably good resources online which tell you about the different varieties of vietnamese and how sounds.

Vowels consonants, but also tones are pronounced differently in different accents, so that's great.

And then i know that english doesn't have tones, So that's something to work on.

I know from reading and listening that Vietnamese tones aren't just about pitch.

It's also about the quality of your voice.

So in English, it doesn't really matter if we make a sound like this, if it's breathy or if we make sounds like this, which is creaky.

But if in Vietnamese, those are kind of linked with tones, with pitch movements.

So you also need to listen out for these voice qualities as well.

So just having all that information and...

I guess I already know how to change pitch and do different voice qualities, but that gave me an instant head start in learning the language because I could parse words.

I could understand what these words were and write them down.

I could pronounce words.

Now, I can't speak very fluently at all.

I don't have a very good knowledge, but that's simply due to lack of practice and motivation.

But my pronunciation isn't bad.

So when I go to a Vietnamese restaurant and I order in Vietnamese, the waiter is somewhat surprised that the tones are in the right place.

And one time I went to a Vietnamese restaurant and asked for the bill, and I can't remember how I say it now, but the Vietnamese waiter turned to me and said you know, I can speak English right.

If they switch to English, they're like you know.

I don't want to carry on doing this in this bad version of my language.

Yes.

But it just means that whenever you learn a new word, you're learning it with the speakers, the usual pronunciation in your mind, rather than your own pronunciation, which is influenced by your own sound system.

Yeah.

So if I learned the word...

If I learned I don't know the word tent as something like ta, because I was following the spelling to sound rules of French.

I'm going to find it quite tricky to recognise tent.

Yeah.

When you're listening to, you know me having a conversation with someone who's just come back from a festival and I said how was the festival?

And they said, it was awful.

I had to stay in a tent the whole time.

And the French person said, il y a quoi?

You know, they don't understand because this would never happen, because tent is such a well-known word.

But yeah, that's right.

Learning the pronunciation.

Yeah.

Basically, I guess for the listeners.

Yeah.

Don't forget about the pronunciation.

It's so important.

Yeah.

Be aware that the way things are spelled in your language isn't necessarily reflective of the pronunciation in another language.

In French, when you have an N followed by a vowel, it often nasalises the vowel beforehand and you don't pronounce the N or the M if it's word final, for instance.

Whereas in English you do.

So when you see words like ten and tent, that N has to be pronounced and the vowel doesn't have the same nasalised quality as it does in French.

You have a very sort of technical understanding of all of this, right?

Which, of course, can be a disadvantage for the person listening to me.

Well, yeah, I mean, because we are getting an insight into all the things you know in your head.

And for the uninitiated, it's like wandering into Aladdin's cave.

And it's like, wow, so many things, you know, and we can't really make head nor tail of it.

For you, it's all ordered.

It's like a very very, very well-ordered office with all the shelves and the office furniture all ordered and all these things categorised.

But for us, we're like, where do we start?

And what I say is exactly like learning English vocabulary or grammar.

It's really confusing.

You're completely overwhelmed at the beginning.

What are these irregular tenses, tense endings we have to learn?

Why is it sing, sang, sung and not singed, for instance?

That's really confusing.

I can't get my head around it.

And then suddenly you become a bit more familiar with it and everything becomes easier.

And it's exactly the same with pronunciation.

Anytime you approach a new topic, a new area, a new field, it's going to be overwhelming.

There are going to be new terms.

There are going to be new things that you have to learn.

It doesn't mean it's more complicated than other things you've learned in your life.

To me, everything seems fairly simple.

You're pronouncing this in this way.

It makes complete sense.

You're just following a pattern.

Perhaps it's a pattern from your native language or another language you speak.

We just need to change this pattern and then, once you're aware of it and you can replicate it, then you will hopefully develop an instinct and you will replicate that pattern, that changed pattern, in every word you say that has that particular sound like.

For instance, at one point in time you learned the verb look and his past tense looked.

And you had to really remember it for your English tests.

Now, you probably don't need to think about it.

Well, it's the same with pronunciation.

You just need to become familiar with it.

And in class, yes, I do talk about these technical things, but not everyone responds to it.

And your job as a teacher is to work out the learning style and to work out what they respond to.

And so if they don't respond to any of that stuff, then you just need to find a different way.

So it's not that I insist on my system, because of course it's a system that doesn't work for everyone.

Yeah.

So for those people who I mean, you know I'm sort of like, you know herding, I'm shepherding my listeners here.

And there's like some of my flock, let's say.

I don't know if it's fair to compare them to sheep.

But anyway, let's just go with the metaphor.

So some of my flock are there.

They're in the pen.

They're with you.

They're like, yes, he's speaking my language.

I love. all of this science and the categorising and the patterns.

They love the vowel alternation between sheep and shepherd.

Exactly, yeah.

This is wonderful and I could just, yum, yum, yum, I could just eat this all day.

And they're categorising it already and they're thinking in the same way as you.

And then there's other people in my flock, other sheep, who are just wandering off, and they're just like I can't deal with this.

I'm just going to go and eat some grass over here.

This is too much.

And so how do you, what are the ways in which we can corral those other people?

The metaphor, I'm breaking them, I'm stretching the metaphor.

How can we deal with those people who don't think in the same way as you and struggle to deal with the different?

You know with the complexity of it.

Well, I mean you could also use metaphor that how does it feel when you speak in your native language?

And now try speaking in your native language, but with a really strong English accent, because you're not going to feel very self-conscious if you're speaking in your own native language.

So, for instance, you might say where is the bus station in your native language and then in an English accent in your native language.

How does that feel different?

What adjectives can we use to describe that difference in feeling?

How does it sound different?

Can we replicate that?

Some people like... It's not just about feelings, but also maybe metaphors of movement.

Which accents seem like...

Someone is kind of going like this.

I need to describe it now for the podcast listeners, like slashing, essentially.

Slashing, as if they've got a sword in their hand and they are fighting against a pirate that's attacking them.

And you would slash diagonally in front of you with the sword.

Which one, which accents feel like they move like that, or what?

What languages feel that they move like that in terms of their rhythm?

I'm talking about here, really.

And then, which accents feel like you're on um, on a boat on a very calm sea, that there's a gentle rock?

Which accents feel like you're sprinting 100 meters?

And which accents feel like you're having a leisurely walk in the park?

So these metaphors can help unlock things and lead to things.

By giving visual, visual sort of connecting them to visual things or to connecting them to, as you said proprioception, like physical feelings and movements and things like that.

Yeah, really interesting thinking outside the box.

And whenever I'm teaching a sound, it's always about using your senses.

But if you're learning my type of R sound like in Carrie, for instance then you might we might feel what's happening in the mouth.

How does it feel different from your R type sound?

And then we might get a mirror and open up the jaw, hold it open with your hand, look in the mirror.

What's happening with your tongue?

How is it moving?

Can you see what it's doing?

And how is it different from the R in your native language?

If you have an R-type sound, of course.

And then how does it sound?

So how does it sound different to your native R-type sound?

Because if you're not using all of your senses, it's going to be quite tricky because you need to physically produce it, right?

It's not something that we can just put on a piece of paper like grammar tables.

This is something that we need to embody in order to use it in spontaneous speech.

And using our senses... helps us do that.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

It's fascinating.

Absolutely fascinating, Luke.

And again putting myself in the position of this shepherd character who's kind of like, trying to help all of my listeners keep up with us and benefit from this.

Do you have any sort of, how can I put it, sort of bite-sized, digestible, quick tips?

And I have to say that most...

What I want to drive home, I know I've used this idiom multiple times today.

Go ahead.

What I want to drive home is that you don't need to learn all the sounds of English.

You might not need to learn all the intonation patterns of English or the rhythm of English.

You might be doing it already.

You probably are.

So it's about finding the sounds that cause issues in intelligibility.

That's what your priority is.

So whenever somebody asks you to repeat, then maybe write that word down in your phone.

And then, when you get home, look on Bingcom and listen to it and look at the phonetic transcription.

Are there any sounds there that perhaps you're finding tricky?

And ask your teacher, am I pronouncing this word in a way that other people would understand?

I should just add a caveat to that is that when somebody doesn't understand you and asks you to repeat, it might not be you.

It might be that they are hungry and thinking about their lunch.

It might be that it's a noisy environment.

There are loads of issues that affect comprehensibility.

Yes.

So it might not be you.

But if you're finding a pattern, every time you say a word with a V in, somebody doesn't understand.

Well hey, that's something to work on, and ask your teacher, or take a look at my website and work out how it's created.

Or like me, when I order water, I order my lunch without any problem.

But then, when it comes to asking for the water or a jug of water that the waiter or waitress always goes, huh what?

Then, yeah, like me, I need to work out how to pronounce the O sound in water.

How do you... Do you speak French?

Very badly.

But that vowel in O is a monophthong.

So a lot of... Not you, but a lot of...

People from England, when they're learning French, will just say oh, oh, oh.

And that's a moving sound.

It's a diphthong.

It moves from one point and glides towards another point.

Oh, oh.

And if you can't feel it, do another diphthong like aye, aye.

And if you look at that in the mirror, you'll see your tongue moving or your jaw moving from down to up.

Whereas in French that vowel, at least in standard Northern Metropolitan French, is just a monophthong.

And also it's fairly centralised, which means it's made more central in the mouth.

So it's not quite like the vowel sound that we have in the word thought, which is something like which is further back.

Yeah.

Ooh, ooh, yeah.

So identify the... For me, I need to identify that vowel sound and just practice it, work on it.

Maybe go on to funetics.com and have some fun with that.

Or just drink beer every time.

Yes, i'm not sure actually, if that is the solution.

Um genuinely, it's been really, really interesting talking to you.

I hope that my listeners are okay.

Um well, but we can do a section uh, that of like fairly simple things sure go ahead, just in case you, when you're editing, it just becomes really complicated and you think we need to cut a load of this.

Yeah, but you know, I don't know if you've heard my podcast.

You know a lot of episodes but I quite regularly will.

I don't know if it's imposed, but present complicated, probably quite confusing, fairly long conversations for my audience to listen to.

Some people can't do it.

Other people love it.

And so I might not edit that much.

You know, I might just kind of leave it natural to an extent.

I mean, I don't mean just not bother editing.

I'll definitely do that if it's needed.

But I think that you know I do often present my audience with conversations like this that might leave them a bit confused.

I don't know.

There must be some method to my madness.

And I think there is maybe a gap for people talking about pronunciation at a slightly more complicated level.

Yeah.

And maybe teachers as well, right?

I imagine that a lot of people that listen to your podcast are English teachers, right?

Absolutely, yes.

I do have a lot of English teachers and a lot of advanced listeners as well, who are probably interested in this whole world.

And then another thing that I try to do is, in the midst of these potentially confusing conversations, add a human element that hopefully, sort of is the spoonful of sugar that allows the medicine to go down.

So hopefully listeners, that you've managed to carry on with those little spoonfuls of sugar, and I don't know if there have been that many.

But I don't mean to kind of take anything away from you Luke, because I'm incredibly impressed by the depth of your knowledge.

That's the job of every teacher.

I don't think it's something.

It's just what every teacher should do, or what makes somebody a reasonably good teacher.

As teachers, we are dealing with a fairly complicated thing.

Helping other people learn a language is a seriously complex thing.

We both have experience of trying to think outside the box in order to make that as easy as possible.

But you know.

But having said that, you know yeah, it is.

It's nevertheless, it is very impressive that you have amassed such detailed understanding of pronunciation, not just in English, but clearly internationally and across many different languages and so on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you, what about your Vietnamese then?

Where are you with that?

Oh yeah, I took a year of Vietnamese lessons regularly and it was great fun.

It's just tricky when you don't live within a Vietnamese community.

The motivation is hard to get that up right, because I don't need it for my job, I don't need it for my day to day communication and therefore it's a luxury that I really enjoy, and sometimes life events happen and then you just let it slip.

So I absolutely want to get back to it and I think it's.

It's almost like I'm a kid in a sweet shop that there are so many cool languages that I want to spend time learning that.

What's the, what's the idiom?

Master of none?

Yeah yeah, yeah.

It's jack of all trades, master of none.

Yeah, yeah, you can't bite off more than you can chew.

So I can talk about the sounds of most major languages.

Well, I was actually going to ask you.

Actually, you mentioned maybe we can just maybe we can finish with this and some sort of simple, specific things.

What are some of the most common things that you deal with?

What are the most common things that come up in your lessons that you spend a bit of time on?

Do you think?

Sorry, I guess living in London, you have multinational groups, don't you?

So it's harder to find such common things.

I mean, living in France, obviously I get the same old things again and again.

But yeah, your students come from all over the world.

So yeah, it may be harder to find those regular things that always come up.

But I don't know.

Do you have anything in mind?

Well, the things are... having no idea how the mouth works and how we create sounds.

Everyone needs to go through that process of understanding what your tongue is doing when you're creating new sounds.

And the other thing is the relationship between spelling and sound in English.

You just need to forget that writing... You just need to...

Writing is writing.

Speaking is speaking.

And they are different things.

They're used for different purposes.

And so when you see something written down, don't assume that's the way it's pronounced.

It's not a very helpful guide.

And as soon as you start divorcing that relationship, as soon as you realize that the way words are spelled aren't always the way they are pronounced, then you start listening differently and you can pick up on certain things.

Ah okay, I didn't realize that they said compartment rather than compartment, things like this, or okay, there's some stress on that syllable in photographer and the vowel is R, but in photograph it's stressed on the first and there's an O vowel, but from the spelling they're both the letter O.

So I wouldn't guess from the spelling.

No, you wouldn't.

But as soon as you make peace with the fact that English spelling isn't exactly how we pronounce, as soon as you're happy with that idea, then you won't get frustrated.

You'll just accept it and start to improve.

Okay.

All right.

Do you want to talk to me a little bit, just as I said just before we finish about I mean again, you could go on about this for many hours, but about the different parts of the mouth.

How many different parts of the mouth are involved in speaking English?

Let's say, in speaking the version of English, that I think we both speak.

Well, rather than the number of different parts, maybe I'll just mention some parts that are involved, because I suppose there's kind of so many different muscles and other bits that we could talk about.

But in general, the bits that we use to create sounds, the simple bits, the tongue.

So if you make a T sound at home, like in Tom or ten, and then you make a k sound, like in can or kent the place in england if you keep doing those two sounds, maybe you can feel that one part of the tongue is used for one sound and another part is used for the other sound.

And you might realise you can pause the podcast now if you haven't worked it out but that the t sound is made with the very front of the tongue, whereas the k is made with the back of the tongue.

And if you look in a mirror, you'll need to hold your jaw open as you do this.

If you look in a mirror, then you can... I'm just saying, Luke, find a mirror.

T, t, t.

You'll need to hold your jaw open.

So literally take your hand and hold this open.

Yeah.

Okay.

What am I doing?

Yeah.

Yeah, you can see that difference.

And so that's showing you, it's giving you a visual image in your mind of what's actually happening in your mouth.

Just be aware that not everyone makes these sounds in the same way.

So you will get lots of French speakers, for instance, who will make a T sound with the tongue tip down, but it will still be the kind of the front of the tongue going up.

So the tip of the tongue will be behind the teeth.

Yeah.

Then, of course, we use the lips.

So when we make a W sound in English, the lips are rounded and pushed forwards.

When we say things like when, why?

The lips are pushed forwards and it's like you're saying an OO type sound like in the word school.

Then we have nasal consonants.

So if you make a long M sound, M, And then you close your nose.

So you use your fingers to close off your nostrils.

You'll find out that it's quite challenging to make an M with your nostrils closed.

It feels like your head is inflating.

Yeah, because the air has nowhere to go.

Because normally the air goes through the nose for that M sound.

And the bit that controls that is called the velum or the soft palate at the back of your mouth.

And it's like a valve and it opens to let air through the nose and it closes for when sounds are just made through the mouth.

Mm-hmm.

Very interesting.

Very interesting indeed.

And then, of course, the other major one is the larynx, which is also known as the voice box.

And that's the bump in your neck.

So you'll feel a bump regardless of whether you're male or female.

But if you are born male, then your larynx might be slightly larger.

And if you make a zzzz sound, you'll feel vibrations, and if you make a sound, you won't.

Yeah okay it's it's, it's very interesting.

Thank you so much for talking to me and my audience all about this stuff and uh well yeah, what can people do?

If they want to kind of find out more and delve deeper, You can go to my website improveyouraccentcouk, where you'll find free learning resources.

If you want to delve into phonetics and this conversation was far too easy for you then you'll find a list of recommended books.

But if you're looking simply to improve your pronunciation, then I have an online course which is designed according to your native language.

So things are prioritised according to language. to what you need to learn and there are also classes with me and the course got to the final of the british council elton's awards and then if you're interested in phonetics in general then go to phonetics.com that's phonetics with fun at the beginning Okay, fantastic.

Great.

Well, lunchtime now.

I'm going to try and order some water with my lunch.

We'll see what happens.

Okay, great.

Well, yeah, have a lovely day.

Great to speak to you.

Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me.

Yeah, pleasure.

All right.

Thanks so much.

I wanted to say I didn't ask you anything about your pronunciation, teaching and what you find works and doesn't work.

It was a lot of me talking.

It's fine.

Having been out of the classroom now for two and a half months, it's hard for me to just instantly recall those moments.

And pronunciation for me is always mixed in with the other bits of teaching and stuff.

But...

Yeah, I mean, what happens with me is that it always ends up devolving into comedy when I do pronunciation teaching, which actually works really, really well.

And it's actually one of my most favourite things to do in the classroom.

On the other hand, doing this podcasting, it's so much harder to teach pronunciation through my podcast, which perhaps is not what people might expect, because this is all about the spoken word.

But in fact I find that in order to really help my students, they've got to be right there in front of me and I've got to be with them.

I've got to be listening to them, reacting to them all the time.

And yeah, that's fantastic fun. and extremely engaging for the students.

My experience of teaching pronunciation is it's very fun and extremely funny as well, especially when you're trying to work on a specific thing and it starts to get a bit abstract, where you take this thing away from the normal mechanics and normal social dynamics of a conversation you know, and you end up in this weird world of pronunciation and people feel awkward, people feel embarrassed about it, but it can be terrifically funny.

For example, you know, You're making them make funny sounds.

You're making them stick their tongue out or feel different parts of their face or their throat or something.

You're making them put a pen in their mouth.

And that can be really great in the classroom.

So, without being as specific as you, just talking about the experience of it, I would say that it's a wonderful thing to teach.

And you're absolutely right, though.

You need to lower inhibitions to get people to pronounce weird and wonderful sounds.

And, as you mentioned before, sometimes it's linked to identity that they feel if they pronounce this weird sound, people are going to judge them or think of them as someone different to who they are.

But once you give yourself permission, as a learner, to sound different, because you're already sounding different.

If you're using words that are English, words that you didn't say when you were a child, then you already sound different.

And in my view, speaking another language is part of your identity.

You are somebody who can communicate with lots of different people.

You've put in that time to learn a new language.

I think that's amazing.

And that is something to be proud of and is part of your identity.

Now, whether you want to sound exactly like a native speaker native in air quotes speaker that's another thing.

But creating new sounds, you'll probably have to do this if you want people to understand you.

I've said on this show before that everyone has the right to have English.

You know, just talking to people learning English, it's not necessarily like this other thing that you don't necessarily it's not yours.

And so you don't want to get it wrong.

You don't want to offend the people who own this language.

Well, you know, everyone has English.

You're welcome to it.

You know, and thinking of it in that way may help to get over certain mental barriers about.

You know that trepidation that you have about oh, I don't want to get it wrong.

I don't want to pronounce it wrong.

You know, just go for it.

It's all right.

You know, just own it.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

There's no right or wrong in my view.

It's simply about can everyone understand you?

And if you have some phonetic training, you can also adjust the way you speak.

I sometimes adjust the way I speak to make things easier for people to understand me.

And that's using English in an international context, which is, you know, sometimes I will add an R into a word so that people who are expecting to hear an R will understand me.

Yeah.

Do you like to do accents yourself for fun?

I mean, obviously you love the linguistics of it and decoding everything.

But I mean for me personally.

I'm also a comedian and I like to fool around a lot and I like to do impressions and voices and things.

And that's great fun.

I mean, you know, I like to do accents in English, English accents.

Do you take that approach too?

Do you like to kind of, do you have fun doing, let's say, impressions of different accents?

Yeah, I guess.

I find it really fun to play around in my own vocal tract and create new sounds and imitate different accents.

I think whether you do that publicly or not depends on power structures and depends on what your role is at that time.

So if you're a comedian, you've kind of got a bit of free reign.

If you're someone else, well...

It depends.

You need to read the room.

You can't just be at a party just doing different accents, because that's just not the right time or place for it.

But if you're on stage as part of a comedy show and you've found a way to incorporate different accents into humour and you've got actual jokes involved and stuff like that, then that's probably more appropriate.

Although, having said that, there are comedians that we know who have, in the past, done different accents on stage and it's been considered completely socially unacceptable.

That's another story, the politics of which accents.

You know if like, certain people do certain accents, that this is really an incorrect thing to do um, but yeah, so i guess maybe what you're saying is that in private you, you will kind of maybe have fun with different accents.

Yeah yeah yeah, me too.

Yeah yeah okay uh, are you good at doing different accents?

Uh, i would say i'm better than a lot of people um, but i wouldn't say i was the best at it.

Dead Ringers was my favourite show growing up, on the radio and then also on TV.

For those that don't know, it's an impressions show with some excellent comedians, like John Coleshaw, I think was in Dead Ringers.

He's still in it.

He's still in it, really.

An English impressionist.

Amazing, right?

I mean, impressionists... are incredible.

And something I mentioned before about different movements.

Well, they've done brain scans of impressionists and they've shown that the movement part of your brain lights up when you're doing an impression.

And I'm not talking about the movement of the tongue, etc., but kind of whole body movements.

And this makes complete sense to me when I embody another accent.

I am doing that.

I am getting into a different zone.

And that's what I talk about with my students.

You need to find that English zone, whatever that is for you.

And it's going to feel different.

But again, it's about how far do you want to go?

It's up to you.

That's very interesting.

So you're saying that when impressionists do different accents, the parts of the brain responsible for body movement are active, which suggests that?

I mean again.

This is actually very reassuring for me, because I've said this to my learners a lot as well which is that speaking English is not just about your mouth, in fact.

It's about your whole body.

And you've got to try and do it with your whole body.

And that doesn't mean jumping up and down and stuff, but more just, you know, feeling like the language.

You're expressing the language with everything.

Again, that's a hard thing to perhaps get across to some people, but whenever I'm modelling English and asking them to repeat sentences after me, to work on sentence stress or something like that, I do find that I start moving my shoulders.

I maybe move forwards for certain things, my arms, my hands come into play.

That doesn't mean gesticulating madly like a crazy person when you speak, but it means that English is not just like this abstract thing, just these words that just come out of the front of your face, but you kind of express them with everything, with your whole body, like an actor would.

Yeah.

And, of course, in terms of just jumping into a specific thing, if you find that you are moving your body on unstressed syllables, then it's probably you haven't quite embodied it yet.

If you're trying to say a word and you can't get the stress right, then you need to move your whole body or your arm on the stressed syllable and actually look to see if you're moving on the right one.

Because I do this exercise all the time and you'll find people moving on the unstressed one And they think they've stressed it right.

Just look at yourself and see where you're moving.

You're moving on a different one.

Yeah, you can sort of like encourage learners to move the bodies up or down for intonation patterns, you know.

So, but, you know, that sort of thing.

And yeah, I find, when I'm doing those let's call them drills, those pronunciation, listen and repeat exercises.

That, as I exaggerate, to try and you know, help them that I end up with these exaggerated physical movements.

And it's like moving my body up and down and moving my eyebrows up and down.

A lot of eyebrow stuff.

I don't know if you've noticed that, but I find there's like eyebrows for some reason come into it.

So if it's like, you know, polite requests and...

You know, for some reason the eyebrows go up and down as well.

And I really think that if learners can unlock the physical side, it can really help them get into the way the sounds happen as well.

So yeah, think about the whole attitude.

And that's interesting, you know, like when you're speaking Japanese.

I used to live in Japan and I learned some Japanese and I found that when I spoke Japanese yeah, I would move like a Japanese person.

You know, it's like different sort of totally different kind of movement.

And French people, when French people speak, there's a sort of a French body language as well.

And there's also the paralinguistic sounds, the sounds that aren't words but that you make when engaging in conversation.

Yes.

And often Japanese ladies will make something like...

And that is something like, ah, in English.

Yeah.

Oh, the Japanese are incredible.

The different noises they make.

There's like, you know, the he and and ho as well, which is a personal favorite of mine.

And so you're demonstrating excellent voice quality changes in your larynx.

Yeah that's, that's the.

If only I could somehow convert my ability to make sounds and do impressions into effective learning of a second language.

I think you know, I feel like I'm only like one or two steps away from combining these things and pow, suddenly you know, realising all of this latent language learning ability.

And, yeah, what did you call those things, those sounds that are made that aren't words again?

Paralinguistic, kind of away from the linguistic bit.

Right.

In French.

They have those things too, like you know bah, for example, is one of those which I think.

What?

You became a sheep for a second.

What's going on?

The sheep are back, Luke.

I told you I was a shepherd.

And in English as well, obviously we have a, which is a big one.

Do we have others?

Mm-hmm.

Oh, yeah.

All you need to do is listen to lots of podcasts and you'll hear them.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. you know all those noises yeah and there's a difference between oh and woo so we use these different vowels for yeah yeah oh and oh as well which is like disappointment yeah and then in different parts of the country those different those sounds are slightly different like if you go to Liverpool it'll be which is interesting is it just Liverpool or are there other places that have different ones Yeah, so these are called hesitation sounds, and they're a great way to get into the zone of a different language or language variety, a different accent, because this is where your mouth is when it's at rest.

When my mouth is at rest, my settings in my mouth, they're in a certain place.

And when I vocalise, it sounds like... Whereas when you're in Liverpool, it's...

And this can help you find that zone, that shape of the accent you're going for in your mouth.

Yes, other people will have different ones.

It depends.

Well, you can tell me what the French one is.

I'm sure you... And also... Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

Interesting, Liverpool, air, Spain, air.

Like, what happened?

It's just a coincidence, I suppose.

Yeah, it's basically loads of languages that have air as their, it's either air or ah.

But English is a bit strange in that it has an er sound for it, because not many languages have er.

Hmm well, there are languages, but not loads.

Yeah yeah okay, i think we should probably end the conversation now, because we sort of tried to end it earlier and then you were like no, i need to.

I need to uh ask luke about his teaching experiences too, which was good um, but i think it's probably time to uh to to call it a day, call it quits now, But great Luke.

Thanks a lot again.

Yeah, thanks for the chat.

Yeah, indeed.

And all the best and, you know, hope to speak to you again sometime.

Yes, definitely.

Okay.

Cheers.

Take care.

Bye.

Okay, so that was Luke Nicholson there.

How are you doing?

Are you all right?

Did you manage to follow all of that?

Let me know in the comments section.

Did you understand all of that?

What are your takeaways from this conversation?

What thoughts are going through your brain right now?

Even if it's like, oh, I'm quite hungry.

I think I'd like a sandwich.

Even that, I don't mind.

Express yourself in English, preferably in relation to the topic of this episode.

But as always, I'm curious to know what you think.

Thanks again to Luke Nicholson for his contribution.

You can check out his various websites, improveyouraccent.co.uk and funetics.com.

That's F-U-N, not P-H-O-N, right?

See what he did?

You see what he did there?

You can find those links on the episode page for this episode on my website.

That's it then.

I'm going to stop now.

I'm still standing here, currently in my daughter's bedroom, which is soon to be my daughter and son's bedroom.

She's going to have to share this room with him.

I hope she realises.

I think she does.

We do keep telling her, you know, you're going to have to share that room and she's fine with it.

But when the reality of actually sharing her stuff with her younger brother, when that reality, sets in, I wonder how she'll feel.

I think it's going to be all right.

I hope so anyway.

So I'm still here, standing here in the bedroom, because this just happens to be the quietest place at this point in time, on this particular Tuesday afternoon.

And yeah, the little boy is in the carrier asleep for the moment.

So that's where I'm going to end this episode.

All right.

Thanks so much for listening.

I'll speak to you again on the podcast soon.

But for now, it's just time to say goodbye.

Bye.

Thanks for listening to Luke's English Podcast.

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[Mastering English Pronunciation: Insights from Accent Coach Luke Nicholson]-[844. Improve Your Pronunciation with Luke Nicholson - Accent Coach]

📋 Summary

Mastering English Pronunciation: A Comprehensive Guide

The Philosophy of Pronunciation

Understanding the Vocal Tract

Spelling vs. Sound

Practical Strategies for Improvement

Conclusion: The Journey of a Learner

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Mastering English Pronunciation: Insights from Accent Coach Luke Nicholson]-[844. Improve Your Pronunciation with Luke Nicholson - Accent Coach]

📋 Summary

Mastering English Pronunciation: A Comprehensive Guide

The Philosophy of Pronunciation

Understanding the Vocal Tract

Spelling vs. Sound

Practical Strategies for Improvement

Conclusion: The Journey of a Learner

Deep Learning with ListenLeap

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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