Pronunciation #2

Hey there, guys :)

How’s it going? What are you up to this weekend? Enjoying the snow? (I guess there's lots of snow in Austria right now, isn't there?)

I took a two-day break from basically everything over the Christmas holidays, but now I'm back at my desk and preparig for a job interview for an internship abroad.
A job interview by itself is already pretty intimidating (at least for me; maybe there’s someone out there who actually enjoys being interrogated like in a cross-examination, but I definitely don’t). The fact that the interview is going to be in English and via skype makes it even worse. Plus, I have no idea who the interviewer is. All I know is that it’s a native English speaker. You might think that it absolutely doesn’t matter who’s going to interview me, but for me, it does. I’d just like to know what I need to expect. An American accent? A British one? Canadian? Irish? Australian?

And then, something else struck me. In my last post, I compared pronunciation with a handshake because it’s the first impression you get of a person when talking to them. Well, obviously, I won’t be shaking hands with my interviewer – I’ll just talk to them. And when I do, my pronunciation better be good.

So here’s how I’ve been working on it lately:

Warm-up
To warm up a little, I browsed the web for useful pronunciation exercises and tried some of those we talked about in class. Here are some of my favorites:

One page I found very helpful is ESLgold which provides lots of exercises, organized into different levels of difficulty. There are minimal pairs, challenging words, phrases, dialogues and an oral reading exercise to check whether you've mastered the sound you practised. I used it to practise the v-sound because, as I mentioned in my last post, I tend to mispronounce it when I'm nervous or when I'm speaking rather fast.

If you're really into minimal pairs, you might like the website English Club. It provides plenty of minimal pairs, but what I like best about it is that it also provides the Phonemic Chart where you can listen to the various symbols used to transcribe pronunciation (for example, I never know which symbol indicates which of the two th-sounds).

I also checked out Rachel's English, and yes, her website is great. There are so many videos to watch you could spend days doing nothing else. The only downside: I was so happy to find videos for intonation practice, but, when I wanted to watch them, dear youtube told me they were not available in my country because of some stupid GEMA-problem. Yea, thanks youtube. Still, I use Rachel's website a lot, just randomly picking videos because I always discover something I didn't know.

There are many more pages I find really useful, but since I only use them for warming up, I won't talk about them all right now. What I really wanted to practise is the following:

Intonation and fluency

No matter how good your pronunciation is, you can still easily be identified as a non-native speaker by your intonation. English intonation is just so different from, for example, the German staccato (I always wonder what it sounds like to foreigners? Does it really sound like we're constantly arguing?). I think it's really hard to get intonation right. I've also read that being musically gifted helps a lot, but unfortunately, you can't choose to be gifted or not, so it's more or less a matter of luck.

However, I guess you can practise intonation as you can practise pronunciation. I tried doing this using TED (my all-time favorite!). On the TED website, I looked for talks that met two criteria: they had to be given by a native speaker (because there isn’t really a point in relying on non-natives when what you’re trying to do is not to sound like one yourself) and, since I’m aiming for an American accent, I only chose Americans.

Next, I started playing a video I had randomly chosen out of interest, and stopped it after each sentence in order to parrot what the speaker had said, trying to get pronunciation and intonation as close as possible to the original. What’s important for me is that I always record myself with my phone when working on pronunciation so I can listen to the results afterwards. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t help much because I can’t concentrate on my own pronunciation and assess it at the same time. The records help me to find out what's particularly difficult for me and needs some more practice.

Of course, there are many good websites to practice pronunciation. The reason why I prefer for example TED talks when it comes to intonation is that these pronunciation websites are artificially generated in order to help language learners. They are great to practice specific aspects such as the pronunciation of a particular sound. However, when I’m trying to make my pronunciation sound more natural I think authentic talks will help me a lot to get the hang of it. (Maybe Rachel's English is an exception, but since I can't access her intonation videos, I can't really tell.) 

I'm a little teed off right now because I actually challenged myself and tried to read Gerard Nolst Trenité's poem The Chaos. I wanted to upload my best attempt here for you to assess it, but the upload has failed three times by now and I'm about to lose my patience. Maybe I'll try again later.

For now, I wish you a great snowy Sunday!

See you soon, bye-bye :)