Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
English is not my native language and while I’m good at reading and writing it I lack good pronunciation. Other non-native speakers, what did help you get better at speaking English?
24 comments
You should do lots of listening to get your pronunciation right. Listen to news, podcast etc. Also when you are reading something, read it aloud, that way you get to hear the words and how you are pronouncing it. Read aloud and active listening are very important techniques. With these two things you will be able to improve your pronunciation drastically.
You should do lots of listening to get your pronunciation right. Listen to news, podcast etc. When you are reading something, read it aloud. That way, you get to hear the words and how you are pronouncing it. Read aloud and active listening are very important techniques. With these two things you will be able to improve your pronunciation drastically.
I'm a native English speaker but have a linguistics degree and have been a tutor. My mental model is that there are three broad things you need.
Knowing what it's supposed to sound like: for this I recommend radio and TV. This will help with aural comprehension as well.
Knowing how to make the sounds: for this, learning the IPA and looking at IPA pronunciation guides is very useful.
Putting it into practice: Find a native speaker who is learning your native language. Get coffee once a week. Speak English half the time and your native language half the time. If you can't make that work, try dictating to your phone/computer in English. If your pronunciation is good, you'll get better accuracy. Gamify it for yourself if you can.
Knowing what it's supposed to sound like: for this I recommend radio and TV. This will help with aural comprehension as well.
Knowing how to make the sounds: for this, learning the IPA and looking at IPA pronunciation guides is very useful.
Putting it into practice: Find a native speaker who is learning your native language. Get coffee once a week. Speak English half the time and your native language half the time. If you can't make that work, try dictating to your phone/computer in English. If your pronunciation is good, you'll get better accuracy. Gamify it for yourself if you can.
I'm going through the opposite situation, but hopefully my experience will help. English is my mother tongue, and I immigrated to Israel where the only people who consistently speak English are high-tech workers, cab drivers, and 1 out of every 4 police officers. Of those, only the high-tech workers are in any way fluent. I completed a six-month language program, but I still couldn't speak or even read more than basic signs with any confidence. After 2 years here, I moved from a job for English-speaking immigrants to a job in Hebrew where everyone understood English.
I started working on a few projects with one engineer who reads English but cannot speak it. In a matter of weeks, my Hebrew pronunciation, comprehension, and fluency went through the roof. Since then, I've been started making friends with people at stores near my house, making phone calls to solve things that could be solved with an online form (and Google Translate). I'm still nowhere near fluent, but I gained confidence from being forced to speak and write.
The main thing is, just be prepared to speak, not be understood entirely, and make mistakes. The other day, I accidentally told the clerk at a store near my house that I didn't need a bag because I had large cunts instead of large pockets. We laughed, I survived, and I'll never get those words confused again.
I started working on a few projects with one engineer who reads English but cannot speak it. In a matter of weeks, my Hebrew pronunciation, comprehension, and fluency went through the roof. Since then, I've been started making friends with people at stores near my house, making phone calls to solve things that could be solved with an online form (and Google Translate). I'm still nowhere near fluent, but I gained confidence from being forced to speak and write.
The main thing is, just be prepared to speak, not be understood entirely, and make mistakes. The other day, I accidentally told the clerk at a store near my house that I didn't need a bag because I had large cunts instead of large pockets. We laughed, I survived, and I'll never get those words confused again.
Heh. In finnish a bag is called pussi, I'm afraid to use the word
A great way to passively improve for >= B1/2 level is to listen to English-language podcasts (or whatever other language you want to learn). It doesn't matter if you actually pay attention or care about the subject matter - the point is to program your "lizard brain" as to what native pronunciation sounds like for different words, the part of your brain that works when you're speaking without thinking about it.
Of course, it won't magically make your pronunciation perfect, but it will help your "speaking without thinking" pronunciation and it's Easy to do
Of course, it won't magically make your pronunciation perfect, but it will help your "speaking without thinking" pronunciation and it's Easy to do
I'm in the same boat. You need to build muscle memory.
Get audio files of spoken English, preferably of someone with a timbre similar to yours (YouTube is a good source, download some videos and extract bits of audio with Audacity). Listen and repeat, initially pausing and repeating after each sentence, then repeating along with the audio. Pay close attention to things like connected speech patterns. After a couple of months of doing this for 30-40 minutes every day I started noticing improvements in my spoken English.
Get audio files of spoken English, preferably of someone with a timbre similar to yours (YouTube is a good source, download some videos and extract bits of audio with Audacity). Listen and repeat, initially pausing and repeating after each sentence, then repeating along with the audio. Pay close attention to things like connected speech patterns. After a couple of months of doing this for 30-40 minutes every day I started noticing improvements in my spoken English.
There are many apps now that can check, validate and rate your language speaking and pronunciations for example ELSA Speak [1],[2]. They provide virtual personal tutor experiences for speaking English correctly. Never tried it myself and not affiliated with the app in any way, but ELSA has some good reviews on some videos that I've seen. I think it can be very good practice assistant for people in the country that learn English by default from the very young age but the language is not spoken widely in the country like Japan. But as a caveat, the app can be very biased towards a particular version of English for example ELSA Speak is biased towards American English not British.
[1]5 Awesome Apps to Help Your Students Improve Their English Pronunciation (2019):
https://ellii.com/blog/5-awesome-apps-to-help-your-students-...
[2]Meet ELSA - Your personal AI-powered English speaking coach:
https://elsaspeak.com/en/
[1]5 Awesome Apps to Help Your Students Improve Their English Pronunciation (2019):
https://ellii.com/blog/5-awesome-apps-to-help-your-students-...
[2]Meet ELSA - Your personal AI-powered English speaking coach:
https://elsaspeak.com/en/
Speak as much as possible, even if your only conversation partner is your dog.
I'm a native English speaker and one thing that helped me with other languages (let's say French) was the simple-in-retrospect idea of trying to speak French with a French accent. I.e. I know what French-accented English sounds like and I can imitate it, but it was sort of an epiphany to realize that the accent came from native French pronunciation habits. So if I pronounced French words with that same accent, rather than sounding silly and affected, it sounded like was supposed to.
My French is pretty limited but native speakers have told me that my pronunciation is good. I credit it to this one simple trick. To use it for English though, I guess it helps to have encountered native English speakers trying to speak your language, so you know what their accent is like.
Other than that, I guess it could help to work with a coach with ESL training, maybe for an hour per week or whatever. I'm sure you can find someone on Craigslist like that.
My French is pretty limited but native speakers have told me that my pronunciation is good. I credit it to this one simple trick. To use it for English though, I guess it helps to have encountered native English speakers trying to speak your language, so you know what their accent is like.
Other than that, I guess it could help to work with a coach with ESL training, maybe for an hour per week or whatever. I'm sure you can find someone on Craigslist like that.
I found this to be helpful in talking to non-native speakers as well actually. I lived in Japan for several years (and did not speak Japanese), and noticed that Japanese had many loan words from English whose phonemes had been bent to the more rigid Japanese phonemes. Words like "toilet" and "milk" in Japanese are "toi ray" and "miriku." Turns out there are many more and speaking with a faux-Japanese accent made it noticeably easier for Japanese listeners to understand what you were trying to say.
Yes, from an American-perspective, it felt slightly disrespectful at first to do this, but the results were positive.
Yes, from an American-perspective, it felt slightly disrespectful at first to do this, but the results were positive.
Do you mean that speaking English with a Japanese accent made it easier for Japanese people to understand you? That is interesting and I guess it makes sense, though I'd have a hard time bringing myself to do it, for the reason you mention. Heh.
This is somewhat anecdotal, but the immigrants I know who have made the most successful linguistic transition to America did so by watching a ton of American media: watching TV + movies and listening to music. See how English-speaking people speak and practice imitating them. Practice imitating some of the most well-known movie quotes. And try and talk to people if you can.
Offhand, it might sound dumb and a little dated now, but a show that I think shows off a lot of interesting speech patterns to check out is Buffy the Vampire Slayer: there all kinds of English-speaking accents and very interesting colloquial style speech patterns there.
Offhand, it might sound dumb and a little dated now, but a show that I think shows off a lot of interesting speech patterns to check out is Buffy the Vampire Slayer: there all kinds of English-speaking accents and very interesting colloquial style speech patterns there.
You not only have to listen you have to speak. Like watching tennis it might appear obvious but you need to get that brain larynx, mouth coordination going. So listen to audio, record yourself trying to repeat it like hearing yourself as a third person to get feedback. Phonetics will be all over the place but it gets better pretty quick.
If you want to try more academically check out this app from the university of Iowa but it needs studying. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.uiowa.uirf...
If you want to try more academically check out this app from the university of Iowa but it needs studying. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.uiowa.uirf...
I am a non-native speaker of English and several other European languages.
English is the hardest to perfect, because of the numerous loan words which defy any systematic rules for correct pronunciation when you read. Then you also have the problem of accents and dialects. Even within a single country there are differences. In the USA: New York vs New Orleans, in the UK: London vs Manchester or Ireland / Scotland.
You could record some TV or radio program, repeat what you hear onto a recording and compare. Best approach would be to get a speech coach. They will explain correct mouth, tongue, etc placements.
English is the hardest to perfect, because of the numerous loan words which defy any systematic rules for correct pronunciation when you read. Then you also have the problem of accents and dialects. Even within a single country there are differences. In the USA: New York vs New Orleans, in the UK: London vs Manchester or Ireland / Scotland.
You could record some TV or radio program, repeat what you hear onto a recording and compare. Best approach would be to get a speech coach. They will explain correct mouth, tongue, etc placements.
Playing video games, which have a voice chat, or joining a discord server and playing together with others are what has helped me and many friends of mine (in Europe) with practicing English.
I assume you can't just go and live in an English-native country, otherwise just do that.
I tried the Elsa app and found it pretty well done. It's an app with exercises tailored to your native tongue and they use the mic to give you a score. TBH I didn't use it as much as I wanted, so maybe after a while it decreases in value, but the impression I had it was very good. (I'm just not too motivated to improve my accent.)
I tried the Elsa app and found it pretty well done. It's an app with exercises tailored to your native tongue and they use the mic to give you a score. TBH I didn't use it as much as I wanted, so maybe after a while it decreases in value, but the impression I had it was very good. (I'm just not too motivated to improve my accent.)
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Starting early trumps everything else.
You can still try and be competent in a year or two, but you'll sound weird saying certain words.
Read more, speak more, and try to not translate from your native language to english.
You can still try and be competent in a year or two, but you'll sound weird saying certain words.
Read more, speak more, and try to not translate from your native language to english.
Native English speaker: talk slower and be sure to observe the natural conversational pauses. Also: Listen before responding... too often we're quick to interrupt
There is some app/web to speak with strangers to learn English? No general chat web, a specific one oriented to learn the language.
I respond to myself. https://disboard.org/es/servers/tag/english-learning?sort=-m...