Learn to pronounce English words

by Ranjana S

Guessing can damage your pronunciation

How speaking and writing with mistakes can damage your English. Here’s how it works in the case of pronunciation:

Suppose you want to say the word determine. Only, you don’t know how to pronounce it, so you take a guess — DEE-tur-mine, to rhyme with mine. That is a mistake (the correct pronunciation is/dɪˈtɜːʳmɪn/), but you don’t know that, so you say it again and again, until it becomes natural for you. Whoops — you’ve developed a “bad habit”!

Because English pronunciation is unpredictable, guessing is a terrible strategy. It often leads to errors, which lead to bad habits. If you guess, you can teach yourself the wrong pronunciation of hundreds of words. Even if you learn the correct pronunciation later, the wrong pronunciation can be difficult to eliminate, because you’ve repeated it so many times.

You may think that when you make a mistake, somebody will correct you, so you won’t form a bad habit. But in reality, you can’t count on that. Correcting someone’s mistakes takes not only great English skills, but also time and effort. It’s really hard to find someone who would be willing to correct all your written and spoken sentences.

How to learn to pronounce English words

Learn to recognize all the English sounds 

In order to remember the pronunciation correctly, you need to realize that you just heard /dɒk/ and not /dʌk/. You can’t do this if you can’t tell the difference between /ɒ/ and /ʌ/. You can’t learn English pronunciation if you can’t tell the difference between English sounds, just like you can’t learn spelling if you can’t tell the difference between letters.

Make it a habit of checking the pronunciation of English wordsin a dictionary.

While you’re reading in English, keep asking yourself: “Do I know how this word is pronounced? Can I transcribe it with phonetic symbols?”. If you’re not sure, look it up in a dictionary. This should happen very frequently when you’re a pronunciation beginner.

Listen and notice. 

Get some spoken input: TV, podcasts, movies, audiobooks, recordings in dictionaries, etc. When listening, pay attention to how sounds and words are pronounced. Think about what sounds you hear.

Practice pronouncing English words 

Practice can take many forms. You can practice in a systematic way (e.g. a 15-minute session with a dictionary or online pronunciation exercises), or you can just repeat a couple words while you’re doing something else (e.g. watching a movie or taking a shower). The important thing is to do it regularly — that way, you will make steady progress.

It is certainly important to pronounce English sounds clearly. If you don’t, people will have difficulty understanding you. But it is far more important to “get it right in your head”.

What do I mean by “getting it right in your head”? When you say an English word, you should know how it should be pronounced, i.e. what sounds you aretrying to pronounce, even if you can’t actually pronounce them very well. For example, when you say full, you should know you are trying to say the same/ʊ/ sound that is used in put or could

So your first goal in learning English pronunciation should be to “get it right in your head”. First, learn to recognize all the English sounds. Second, learn which sounds occur in which words, even if you can’t pronounce them very well yourself. If your knowledge is right, your physical skills will surely follow.

Good Luck!!

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