Areader from Tuticorin has emailed me this query: “When I was a student I didn’t have an opportunity to learn the pronunciation of English words correctly. Now I want to improve my pronunciation. Please suggest ways to improve.”
Good pronunciation is essential to make ourselves understood. It is more than just pronouncing individual words correctly as English pronunciation has various components such as sounds, stress, and intonation. So, it is important to understand the rise and fall of the voice, the syllable stress and the word stress.
It is said that a good listener is a good speaker. It implies that one has to improve their listening skills in order to become an effective speaker who speaks clearly, pronounces words properly and articulates words and phrases correctly. It is important to listen to people who speak English intelligibly and not necessarily stylishly. It is not necessary to imitate native speakers of English. Listen to and watch news and debate programmes on television.
It is important to speak slowly so that others can understand our message. It is wrong to think that to speak fluently one should speak fast. When we speak slowly we feel more relaxed and tend to pronounce words correctly. It is a good practice to record our conversations, speeches, loud reading and play the recordings to check whether we have pronounced the words correctly.
Pronunciation is a physical skill. It is important to practise pronunciation. There are many YouTube videos on English pronunciation available on the internet. We can download and play the videos and see how words with different sounds are pronounced. There are also mobile apps on pronunciation. Some apps teach users how to pronounce words with different sounds, allow them to practise the pronunciation of the words, and tell them whether their pronunciation is correct.
English pronunciation has many peculiarities. For example, there are many words that have silent letters which the listener can’t hear when we pronounce the words. Here are examples: write, knee, knock, lamb, wrist, plumber, psychology, aisle, daughter. Here, the letters in bold are silent. Here are more words with silent letters.
Silent B: limb, dumb, comb, bomb, thumb, climb, tomb
Silent C: muscle, scissors, ascent, fascinate, scenario
Silent D: handkerchief, Wednesday, sandwich
Silent G: foreign, sign, feign, design, align
Silent K: knife, knee, know, knock, knowledge,
What is the difference between a lawyer and a liar? The pronunciation.