There are three aspects to a language: knowing the words (vocabulary), putting these words together to frame sentences (grammar) and finally, saying them out loud (pronunciation). The first two aspects can be learnt from books, but the third one requires practice and is the most difficult to perfect.
Incorrect pronunciation and mother tongue influence can pose a problem even for experts.
So many English learners feel embarrassed of speaking English only because they do not know the correct pronunciation. Speaking English becomes a task when you are not confident of yourself. The solution is to improve your spoken English skills, of which pronunciation is a major part.
The Ultimate Way to Learn English Pronunciation
It is said that people learn from their mistakes, but how can you improve your English speaking skills if you do not know what mistakes you make? The best way to find out where you go wrong is to record yourself speaking English.
How Will Recording My Own Voice Help?
Recording your own voice will help you find out what words you pronounce incorrectly. Repeated efforts will help you discover a pattern, for example, some people mispronounce a certain alphabet and hence mess up the entire word. Once you know the problem, you will be able to focus on it and improve faster!
Here are some more reasons:
- Until you hear yourself speak, you will not know how you sound when you speak English. If you do not know how you sound, how will you improve?
- Recordings will help you keep a check on how much you have improved. Just go back to the first recording to see the change!
- Realising your mistakes yourself is more impactful than someone else telling you about them.
- Some of us speak in an accent, this is because we imply the sounds from our mother tongue to English. English has different pronunciation than other languages. The recordings will help understand and eliminate this accent.
How to Record Yourself
Ours is an era of technology and Smartphones can come in handy as far as recording our voice is concerned. Look for interesting videos in English with subtitles. Mute the video and record yourself reading the subtitles. The next step is to listen to the recording and then compare it with the original video.
Answer the following questions:
- How well did I speak?
- Was I better/worse than I thought I was?
- Where did I go wrong?
- Which words did I mispronounce the most?
Your answers will help you get a picture of how much you need to work on your pronunciation. Keep practicing to improve faster!