Hey guys welcome to FIngtam languages this video is about five ways that you can improve your pronunciation
In a foreign language. Now last week
I did a video about why you should never feel ashamed of your accent, and that's true
I still stand by that. If your accent is not preventing you from being understood, then you should never feel self-conscious about it
But if people are having a hard time understanding what you're saying to them, now we have a problem. And fortunately,
It's a problem that can be solved. So that's what we're going to talk about in this video today.
My first tip is to watch what native speakers do with their tongues their lips and their mouths when they're speaking.
Then look in the mirror and try to reproduce that yourself.
Now, if you don't have a ton of access to native speakers that you can watch and creep on all day
YouTube is a great resource for that and it's arguably even better than talking to native speakers in real life because on
YouTube you can slow it down.
For example in Spanish T's and D's are not pronounced exactly the same way that they are in English.
In English, you put your tongue against your alveolar Ridge, which is a little further back in your mouth.
But in Spanish you put your tongue all the way against your teeth when you're pronouncing T's and D's.
So I want to show you a YouTube video of someone that I watched a lot when I was learning how to pronounce these sounds
in Spanish.
I want to show you guys this video that I watched when I was trying to figure out exactly how to
Pronounce T's and D's in Spanish, and I'm going to show you this video of this girl talking
Alright now I want you to pay attention
To what's going on right here in her mouth with her tongue as
It comes against her teeth and I'm gonna play it at full speed first
Then I'll slow it down as we go forward and we'll see what information we can glean from this
(Speaking Spanish)
Alright now that was pretty fast. Let me see if I can back it up here a little bit
That was pretty fast, but if you were paying attention you might have been able to notice her tongue
Popping out of her teeth right here
When she was doing her T's and D's. Now like I said
The really beautiful thing about YouTube is that you can go over here to the settings, and you can slow it down
I actually have my YouTube in Spanish right now
but this says speed. Now we're gonna slow it down to 75% at first, and we'll see how this goes and
We'll see if there's a big difference here
So you can probably tell if you speak any Spanish this was much easier to
Understand than the first time that she spoke, and we only slowed it down to 75% now
It's still kind of difficult to see exactly what she's doing with her tongue. You can see there
She's sticking her tongue out quite a bit
Let's watch another clip of it
So the tongue when we're speaking move so fast that even a 75% speed
it's still kind of difficult to see what's going on, so we're gonna slow it down even further to
50% and we'll go back to maybe right here
Alright now see if you can pay attention and pay close attention to what's going on with her tongue right in this region around her
teeth and it'll be even more clear
So
This was just really useful for trying to figure out exactly
What is going on in the mouth of a native speaker and you can even slow it down even further to
25% if you really want to hone in on that
See her D's there
That was a C there. There's a D. Let's go back to that D. Right here cuz that's really interesting
Now she's in the process of saying a D right here. She was saying "La cantidad de veces que decimos"
and this is the D of "que decimos". And you can see how far
She's sticking her tongue out when she's pronouncing this D.
And that's very different from what we do when we're speaking English.
So this is a great
example of how you can use native speakers to try to figure out exactly what they're doing and sound more like them and
YouTube is just a great resource because you can slow it down and really
Pinpoint what the native speakers are doing. After you spent a lot of time watching what native speakers do with their tongues and their mouths
And their lips and their whole vocal tract then you go to the mirror and you try to reproduce that same thing yourself
My next tip is to listen to your target language a lot without reading it.
I am a huge advocate of reading in your foreign language
I think you should do it all the time
but there's also something to be said for listening without reading and the reason for that is you don't want the
spelling of your native language to influence the way you're perceiving
Your target language. This can be a really big issue because in a lot of languages spelling does not reflect the proper pronunciation
Not to mention in the language that you grew up reading a given letter may have a very different
Pronunciation in your target language. For example, the R in Spanish is not pronounced anything like the English R
They just happen to be spelt with the same letter. R's in Spanish are actually pronounced a lot closer to the way
Americans pronounce the letter T when it comes between two vowels like in water or butter or later.
Now if you're just listening to your target language
There's a good chance you'll pick up on some of these subtleties
But if you spend more time reading it, then there's a good chance that your perception of these letters might be
Affected by the way these letters are pronounced in your native language. The second step will be
Marginally effective by itself, but it will become really effective if you combine it with the third step
And that is repeating the words out loud. You can't learn to play the piano
Just by thinking about it in your brain.
You have to actually move your fingers to get that muscle memory down and it's the same thing with your tongue and your mouth
You have to practice doing it out loud in order to really develop that muscle memory. A great time to do
This is when you're using Duolingo or Memrise. When I use these apps
I actually pronounce every sentence and every a vocabulary word out
Loud after I hear the computer speaking. And the key is trying to reproduce those sounds as closely as
Possible to what you're hearing and not letting your perception of the spelling
Affect the way that you're thinking about it. Another great option is following along in Pimsleur courses
These are audio courses that are either on CD or mp3 format
And they have native speakers speak a full sentence
And then they pause and give you the opportunity to repeat that sentence.
And this is great because it's entirely audio with no reading or writing whatsoever and I think that's a big help and really starting to
Internalize these sounds this option will be free if you have a library nearby that stacks Pimsleur CDs
Another option that I really like is if you can find a song in your target language that is sung very slowly and clearly
Then this is gonna
be really good practice to sing along with that. And this is really interesting if you're
Relatively new to the language, and you don't understand a lot of the words in the song because then you're just practicing pure
pronunciation, and you don't have any preconceived notions about spelling or about how vocabulary words sound you're just listening to the
sounds of the languages and trying to reproduce them my next tip is to learn about the
international phonetic alphabet and to look up the phonology of your language the IPA is a
scientific way of transcribing words in any language that removes almost all
ambiguity about how they're supposed to be
Pronounced remember earlier when I said that ours in Spanish are pronounced almost exactly the same way as certain T's in English there's a symbol
In the IPA that kind of looks like a weird little R
And that symbol is used for this sound no matter what language you're talking about
Remember when I said that DS and T's Spanish are pronounced with the tongue at the teeth whereas in English
They're pronounced with the tongue a little further back
We have a way of marking this in the IPA as well for the Spanish ones you put a little mark underneath and to me
It kind of looks like a little tooth and this reminds me that in Spanish DS
And T's are pronounced with the tongue at the teeth
When you start to see all this stuff spelled out on paper. It really does start to make a lot more sense
I've done several videos about the IPA in the past and so I'll link to some of them up here
And I plan on making more because this is a really interesting topic and I do think it has a lot of
Potential to help you learn pronunciation
In your language if you're not sure where to start learning about the IPA in your language just go to
Wikipedia and type in the language that you're learning followed by the word
phonology and that will take you to a page that has all kinds of charts and all kinds of information
About the language that you're learning
I'll also put some IPA resources in the description below
So you can check those out if you're still confused
In my last tip which kind of pulls all of the rest of these tips together is to practice tongue twisters in your target language
And this really goes back to my tip about speaking out loud because tongue twisters are going to give you a lot of
Repetition and they're really gonna get that muscle memory
forming quickly think of tongue twisters kind of as going to the gym and getting a lot of reps and your bicep curls or
Whatever exercise you prefer to do well repetitions and pronunciation are just as important
I remember when I first learned that T's and DS and Spanish are pronounced differently than they are in English it does you no good
To have the head knowledge that T's are pronounced differently in Spanish from in English if you don't put that into
Practice and develop the habit of actually pronouncing them that way
So what I did was I got a lot of practice pronouncing those words like came up with a nonsense tongue twister
They had a lot of T's and E's in it and I practiced pronouncing them over and over and over
intentionally pronouncing them the Spanish way and not the English Way and this coming twister was todos los toros de Davin de Soto's all of
The Bulls give you treasures, and it means nothing
But that's not the point the point is that I was practicing pronunciation of Spanish T's instead of my usual
English
Now with all these pronunciation tips laid out. I have a few footnotes for you first of all you will never eliminate your accents
100% and I know this sounds kind of pessimistic
But this is just what the science is telling us if you're an adult who starts learning a language as an adult
You never will perfect the phonology of that language to a native-like degree now
You can get really good at pronunciation in that language
But you will never perfect your accents to sound exactly like a native speaker
But that's okay my second note is that you should worry about being understood. Don't worry about speaking perfectly
We've already established that it's impossible to speak exactly like a native speaker
And that shouldn't be your goal your goal should be to improve your pronunciation
So the points that everyone can understand what you're saying and that's totally
Satisfactory to me after you reach that level if you're really interested in phonology
And you want to keep trying to improve yourself
Then by all means go for it the difference between the Spanish tea and the English tea is not
Significant enough that a lot of people are gonna misunderstand what I'm saying because I use the English tea, but I love phonology
It's interesting to me
And I just want to keep learning and I want to keep improving and I do want to sound closer to a native speaker
So I have no problem with spending a little bit of time learning that but once you've reached the level that
99% of the people are able to understand everything that you say with no problem
You don't need to worry too much about that last 1% because we've already established that
Becoming perfect in your accent is not gonna happen
It's not possible and it's really not even that useful and my last note on the subject is never
apologize for your accent this goes back to the video
I made last week about spongebob, but as long as people are understanding what you say it's much better to speak with an accent
Confidently than to have really good pronunciation and be too afraid to speak we should want to improve our accents
But don't let that tear you up inside
There are much worse things than speaking with a slight accent, so that's all I have for you guys today
Thanks for watching my video, and we'll see you guys next