English With Michael
? HYPERLINK "" 00:03Hello and welcome to the English with Michael Podcast, the best place to come to study English as a second language as well as to practice the British accent with me, Michael Lavers, as your teacher. Hello English learners. Thank you for coming back to the second episode of the English with Michael podcast. In today's episode I thought I could talk about a question I get asked all the time and I actually wrote a blog post about this recently, but I didn't go into too much detail, so I fought the podcast would be a good place to explore this a little bit more. So this topic is how to learn British pronunciation. So let's jump right into it. HYPERLINK "" 00:59Okay. HYPERLINK "" 01:00Uh, first of all, there are countless reasons as to why you might want to learn a British accent. Um, some people prefer the British accent, you know, there's many accents, American, Australian and loads of other English speaking countries. But I think it's quite common to like the British accent, which makes me very happy. It makes me feel very proud. HYPERLINK "" 01:27Okay. HYPERLINK "" 01:28But one thing that some people don't realise is that there are so many accents just within England, so many different accents. You know, where I live, if you travel even just 20 kilometres away, you'll start to hear a slightly different accent so it can change very quickly. HYPERLINK "" 01:50Yeah. HYPERLINK "" 01:50The accent that you are probably interested in would be something like received pronunciation. HYPERLINK "" 01:57Okay. HYPERLINK "" 01:57Which is sometimes called the Queen's English is quite standard. It sounds very posh and upper class. HYPERLINK "" 02:07Okay. HYPERLINK "" 02:07So in this podcast we're going to be talking a little bit about that kind of accent, but before we begin, I want to mention that he probably don't need to worry too much about accents. HYPERLINK "" 02:23Okay. HYPERLINK "" 02:23You certainly shouldn't let it stop you from progressing in your English. So everyone, even a native speaker has an accent of some kind. And I always believe it should be, uh, like a badge, a sign of pride that shows where you're from. It, for example, if you have a Russian accent, I think that's amazing. I think the Russian accent sounds great. HYPERLINK "" 02:52But also it tells people where you're from, which is always really exciting. And it's a great conversation starter. Well, HYPERLINK "" 03:01but on the other hand, there are a few reasons to want to sound a bit more like a native speaker. Um, some of those reasons might include being more respected at your workplace. If you can talk without an accent, maybe people will take you more seriously in some cases to having an accent might mean that you are treated a bit more like an outsider. This is unfortunate. It won't of course happen everywhere you go, but some places they might treat you differently because they know you're from a different country. Whereas if you have a more standard accent, people might start treating you a bit more like how they would treat someone in their own family. Maybe. Uh, another reason is maybe just to impress your friends. So chances are maybe you and your friends are all learning English. So if you have a good accent, it will look really cool in front of your friends. So that's well, the most important reason, but I think it's a good a reason as any, as I said before, there are many different British accents and some of them vary quite a bit. They can be quite different, but there are a few things they have in common. So we'll come back to that later. But let's start with my general advice. HYPERLINK "" 04:29So a really good idea is to get the foundations of your accent before you really start learning. Say for many of you, you'll think - it's too late. I've already started, but don't worry, don't worry. Um, but if you all just beginning, it's really good to practice your pronunciation. Go over the basic sounds of English. Maybe you could find them on youtube or online. Um, and this is, uh, this is important to avoid cementing your mistakes. If you are saying the wrong pronunciation and you repeat it every day, it will be very hard to undo that later in your studies. But it's also important to realise even if you get the foundations, you won't necessarily be able to change your accent overnight. It will still take some time. Even if you've already started, you've been learning English for quite a long time. It's better to fix the problems now rather than leave it till later. So try to talk with that as early as you can HYPERLINK "" 05:45now for some more practical advice on how to improve. So one thing you could do, which you might be doing already, is of course, get as much input as you can in the accent. So you could watch lots of British TV shows, a different films of course, podcasts as well. So there are no shortage of podcasts or films that you can watch. So that would be a great resource for you. Another thing you could try, which are highly recommend is just talking to native speakers. Talking is probably the most important part of learning any language. So if you find a native speaker or a teacher that you can talk with, maybe you could try to mimic that pronunciation. So if they ask you a question or something, let's say for example, they're telling you what food is good in a menu, in a restaurant, they might say, oh, this sandwich is really good. I recommend it. Um, maybe you could try and mimic their accent but not sound too weird. So you could say, Oh, you recommend it. So you're kind of questioning what they said. Um, maybe in a more rhetorical way, but that's a good way to try and copy the accent and you'll learn it over time that way. HYPERLINK "" 07:16Um, and the benefit, if you can find a real teacher in a classroom or online, then that would be even better because they can correct your mistakes so they can make notes about the different problems you have and help you correct in real time. So that would be really useful as well. As I keep saying it does take a really long time and many people, they don't begin to develop the accent fully until they reached an advanced level. So don't give up, keep trying and don't be discouraged. I have many students who, they don't have a bad accent, but they really want black, perfect British accent. And it really takes a lot of hard work. But once they reach an advanced level, you really see the accent start to come out a bit more then. HYPERLINK "" 08:11So sometimes it does take a, a deep understanding of the language before it really shows. Okay. Now maybe we could look at some specific advice on how to improve is some specific things you can do. So this one is related back to the TV shows and the podcasts and this is called a shadowing. So just the same way that your shadow follows you wherever you go, it's quite annoying if you think about it. Shadowing is when you repeat words that you hear, say if you're watching a TV show, you can just repeat the phrases and the in the same way. Um, and pay attention to the vowel sounds as well. Those are the things that usually people make the most mistakes in the vowel sounds. A E, I. O. U. Sometimes it can be quite difficult to even realise you're saying something a bit wrong or maybe unnatural. HYPERLINK "" 09:18So to follow on from that, perhaps you could try recording your voice as well. So this has been really beneficial for me in my language learning. You can record your voice and you can hear, oh, actually that sounds a little bit unnatural. In fact, I can give you one example from English. So before I started teaching, I used to pronounce the you in up more like an oh like up. And this is very common in some dialects of English in, in England, but maybe it's a little bit confusing for students. I didn't realise this until I heard myself talking on, I think it was a youtube video. So it was quite interesting because I never heard it myself until I listened back to myself ever since that day. I've tried to change it a bit more standard English, so it's not so confusing for students. Um, so I recommend trying that. HYPERLINK "" 10:23Um, another thing you could do is to watch your mouth in a mirror. So you watched the position of your mouth and maybe you could compare it to some youtube tutorials or some videos online. So the positioning of your mouth will change the sound that you're trying to make. So make sure you get that right before you try to, you know, say some of these words, of course, very important is your tongue position as well. Um, there are lots of pieces of advice I can give for this. Two common ones that very different in maybe your language but some languages. One is the l sound, l sound said in English. When you say l l your tongue touches your top teeth L and it pulls down. So if you don't allow your tongue to touch your top teeth, it probably won't sound so natural. HYPERLINK "" 11:28Okay. HYPERLINK "" 11:28I'm a really tricky one. Quite unique in English compared to other languages is the r sound. R, the R. So unlike many languages in English, when you say this letter, your tongue moves back in your mouth. It doesn't touch anything, it doesn't touch your teeth, it doesn't touch the top of your mouth. So try it. Try practicing. Ra Ra, rope, rope, HYPERLINK "" 12:00read, read. Once again, youtube is a great place for this to see. Lots of examples of words and things like that. Another resource that I would highly, highly, highly recommend is a website could . So it's n . And I'll put all these links in my show notes. So if you can't remember, you can head over to my website and find the direct link there. So if you go to Forvo, it's kind of like a database of words in different languages and people uploads their own pronunciations. So it's really useful. You can hear different dialects, American, Australian and he how it's pronounced. And um, people can also vote for the ones that they think are good and if that quite bad, you can down vote them. So that's helpful to know as well. Um, for those are really good place to practice. Pronunciation for also the stress in a word, which is my next point. And you can also see the stress of a word in most online dictionaries. So what do I mean by stress? If we look at the word present, for example, present meaning gift at Christmas. On your birthday, maybe you have received a present. HYPERLINK "" 13:34So in the what present? The first syllable, that's the first sound is stressed. We say pre-sent pre-sent as another word is spelled the same, but the stress is in a different place and that is present, present. So this one is a verb to to present. So that means to show something, to show it to a group of people. Like you could present your idea to a class. HYPERLINK "" 14:13So let's compare those sounds. We've got the noun present and the verb present. So maybe it sounds like a small difference, but it's really important to avoid misunderstandings and it really, really makes you sound much more natural in any dialect of English. It's usually the same. There are thousands of different words with different types of stress, so it's not possible to learn the more than one place. But when you learn a new word or maybe you see it when you're reading, be sure to head over to a dictionary. Yeah, I, I really like Merriam Webster as like a dictionary and that you can listen to the audio and see the stress. More examples, you've got a suspect, a suspect, which is a noun and to suspect which is the verb suspect and suspect to see in a noun. The first syllable "sus" is stressed and then the verb, it's the last syllable suspect. HYPERLINK "" 15:29And my final piece of specific advice that you could try is to learn the specific sounds in British English. And these can be completely different to American. This is a really big thing. You might have heard it before. Um, and this is something that I spoke about in my youtube video as well. I posted recently a really common example is the t sound. So British English and standard British English. The t sound is quite strong. We like our tea strong. So that's the drink tea and also the letter t in the word butter. For example, butter Americans would probably pronounce the t a little bit more like a d but in English - British English. We would say butter. Um, there are some exceptions. You know, some dialects in Britain we wouldn't even pronounce the t and is really confusing for students, but those people might say butter. But it's important to be aware that there are some variations in pronunciation. I would recommend not learning that one. Don't learn to say butter or better cause it's a little bit too casual and it can be confusing. So try butter better. What's like that? Those two words. Awesome. And in an r sound, all sound is also very different compared to American English. So while, while Americans would pronounce the R quite strongly like car in British English, we almost don't promise the Ah, it kind of stretches the vowel sound. So try to repeat after me if you can. We would say car, car park. Hair HYPERLINK "" 17:47hard Ear so that's ear. Like the things that you're using to hit to hear my voice, the listen to me ear. So that can be quite difficult and it's a little bit harder to, to understand what they're saying sometimes. Okay. I've got one more piece of advice for you. Um, again, relating to stress, the difference between American and British can sometimes change as well. There are some patterns that you can notice where Americans will say it slightly differently. So one pattern would be words that end in I l e this is usually different. So Americans would say mobile, mobile, like a mobile phones maybe, except they don't call it that. In England we would say mobile, mobile phone. So it's ILE an ILE. Another example is the stress. For example, in the word advertisement, advertisement, Americans would say advertisement. And one more example would be what's the end in ATION. HYPERLINK "" 19:09So that's TION for example, in England we would probably say organisation, organisation. In America they might say organization. The difference here is not so clear maybe, but you'll notice the vowel sound before Asian is a little bit shorter. And American, another example would be in British English, civilisation and American civilization. So that's the difference between kind of I and I. So there's another sound for you to practice and there's many more examples. PDO, a quick Google search for American versus British stress maybe. And actually I want to share with you a really interesting poem. So the poems name is called the chaos and it's by someone called Gerald Nolst, Trinite I believe. And this poem shows the irregularities in English pronunciation. And once again, I'll put a link to this in the show notes, which you can find on my website. So it kind of has words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently. And even for native speakers, it's very difficult to say this poem correctly. So I wouldn't expect you to understand the poem necessarily, but have a look. It might be quite fun. It might be a good way to practice your pronunciation and see how well you that'd be show off to HYPERLINK "" 20:48your friends. Okay, so I think that's just about all the advice I have for you today. I really just want to echo what I said earlier, which is having the perfect accent is not the end of the world. If you feel like you've got some way to go, please don't be discouraged. In my opinion, all accents are amazing. I love different accents and we really should be proud of that. Yeah, of course. Trying to improve your accent is not a bad thing. It's why I made this episode. I really hope I've been of some help to you today and maybe even just listening to this podcast might be good practice to get used to the British accent or used to my accent anyway. And Yeah, keep listening, keep practicing and yeah, thank you very much for stopping by once again and checking out the first full episode of the English with Michael podcast. If you liked it, let me know. Reach out to me. I'm always happy to get your emails, but have a great week and I will see you next Wednesday for episode two of the podcast. See you later. HYPERLINK "" 22:02You have been listening to the English with Michael Podcast to view the podcast notes for this episode and to listen to previous episodes head over to podcast. ................
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