Improve your English pronunciation

How can you improve your pronunciation?

When we are learning other language, sometimes it is difficult to speak in public, maybe because we are afraid we don’t have the enough vocabulary, we make some mistakes in the grammar structure or sometimes it is just because our public make fun of our pronunciation. One of the problems is that while Spanish language only has 5 sounds, in English language we can foun
d more than 20 sounds, yes it is a lot! And it is not just that, one more issue is that we cannot read and articulate at the same.

Let’s do an exercise: think in the word “change” in this moment your brain is thinking and articulating in your mother language, but now you have to modify it and force it to think in the second language . In English “change” sounds like / cheinch/or for example” always” you could say /alwis/ instead of say /olgüis/.That is a big problem but don’t be panic, there are some tips to avoid this kind of problems and take that rock out of your shoe. Here we go!

First, try to listen before you read or speak. If you don’t have idea of how a word sounds, you probably invent the sound and you’ll continue making the same wrong pronunciation according to that, my recommendations are:

Listen to music with lyrics and try to follow the articulation. Be aware of what you are listening and what you are singing.
Watch TV programs , movies or series but do it with English subtitles. In this link you can find interesting speeches with subtitles in many languages: www.ted.com
Audiobooks are a good idea because you can read and learn at the same time the perfect pronunciation. This is a website that maybe you will adore as I do to practice : Bed time stories collection
Try to imitate and repeat movies’ dialogues or whatever you prefer till you gain fluency and get a natural speech. You can also use programs that help you with the pronunciation www.ivona.com or imtranslator.net those are translators that offers a natural sounding text-to-speech system with translation capabilities that quickly translates text and reads it aloud at one click of a button.

Those tips could be useful for you, but remember: it is about practice, patience and never surrender, keep trying and love English.

By Diana Piñeros