Pronounciation Diary 3 / Feedback

After our pronunciation exercise I got that feedback that I pronounced the ð sound wrong in "their". 

In order to correct this I first used the BBC pronounciation page and then did some minimal pair exercises on the Mirriam Webster website. 

The second word I mispronounced was debt. I used howjsay.com to look up the correct pronunciation of the word. Same applies for stimulus

Last but there was the metal trap. I wasn't aware of the effect that there was a British and an American way of spelling the metal in question. Accordingly I pronounced the American spelt aluminum like the British aluminium.

Pronounciation Diary 2 / Resources

I tried some of the resources from our pronounciation page and here are the ones which I got the most out of.

I am in love with Amy Walker!!! She is just amazing! I watched all her videos and I think the essence of her teachings is that in order to an accent you have to get into the mindset of the culture to which it belongs to.

Another website I find very useful is the Merriam Webster pronounciation page. Especially when you don't realize what the difference between two words is, minimal pairs are immensly helpful to identify those.

I am also very fond of BBC's pronouciation page. It gives you a short and sweet overview of all sounds existing in the English language.

Apart from that I also found Frank's explanation of how you can tell wheter you are pronouncing a letter voiced or voiceless very helpful. If something in your throat vibrates it is voiced.

Pronounciation Diary - Day 1

!!! I actually decided to really get into English pronounciation and dedicate a whole seperate blog to this topic: http://ohenglishwhereartthou.blogspot.co.at/ I will try to organise it better when I have written more posts.!!!

Often it is not so much what you say, but how you say it.

For example, I have got this one friend, who always manages to drag me along to his weird events just because he manages to sound so convincing. He manages to provoke action with his way of speaking.

On a larger scale this also true with accents in a foreign language. When I was studying Physics in Vienna we had one lecture which was partly in English. Of course our professors all were geniouses BUT their thick German accent just made them sound so uneducated. It really crushed their credibility. We actually came up with a name for that - the aesthetic paradox!

Yet even though our professor sounded funny, after listening to him for a while it was clear that he was an expert on his field. And since our field of expertise is languages we really really ought to get down our pronouciation! For the sake of our credibilty!

So I came up with a structured plan to help me improve my pronounciation.

Block 1 - erasing every last bit of German in my English...

Because....unlucky for us, a German accent doesn't sound charming like the French one.

v/w sound
the/ three

Block 2 - different accents

identify
imitate
Australian
British
American
after Erasmus in Dublin - Irish