Pronunciation isn't everything, but...

Welcome to my first blog post!  My aim is to provide you with useful, informative tips about learning English. I'd also love to hear from students and teachers about what you think, and how you learn or teach.

Today I'm going to start with one of my favourite subjects - pronunciation.  When I was at university, I studied linguistics for a year and learnt the sounds (or phonemes) of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).  The symbols (phonetics) on this chart cover all the sounds made in all known languages, so I would not recommend learning all of them!  However, if you want to improve your English pronunciation, I would recommend that you learn the symbols on a chart of British English phonetic symbols, such as this one, (taken from englishclub.com). I like this chart because it not only shows you the symbols but if you click on them, you can hear how they sound too. 

The main reason for learning phonetics is so that when you hear something, you can write it down exactly as it was said, and then when you come back to it later, you can still see exactly how it's pronounced.  You can of course try to approximate the sound of the word using your own alphabet.  For example, I could tell my students that "pronunciation" is pronounced as "Prernunseeyaishern' - but does that really work? Speakers of other languages will read those letters in different ways, depending on how they pronounce those letters in their own languages.  And even in English, is 'ai' pronounced like the letter A or like the word 'eye'? And does 'er' sound like 'air' or  like 'errr...' when you're not sure about something?  So to solve this problem, the IPA uses specific symbols to represent specific sounds.  If you've learnt all of the phonetic symbols used in English, you can look at these symbols and know how to pronounce a word much more accurately.

You can practice listening to different words using an application such as google translate.  Type in the word(s) that you want to listen to, and then click on the speaker icon in the left-hand corner of the typing box.  As you listen, you can try to write down the phonetic symbols. You can check if the symbols are correct by looking in a dictionary.  All good dictionaries will show the word in phonetics either next to or under the word.  See WordReference as an example. It's also fun (and very helpful) to automatically translate English text to phonetics using a website such as tophonetics.com and then reading it out for pronunciation practice. You may have to scroll down past the annoying adverts, but it's worth it I think.

I must say that no matter how much you practice pronunciation, you probably won't get rid of your accent entirely.  And that's just fine! The main thing is to be able to communicate and be understood. Our accents are part of us, and we all have different accents anyway, even within our own languages. Our mouths learn to form sounds when we're still toddlers and often it is just impossible for an adult to get a sound from another language exactly right.  We can only do our best - and then smile, relax, and enjoy our differences. At least, that's my point of view on it.

So, it just remains for me to say have fun experimenting and good luck!  Let me know if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback on phonetic symbols or pronunciation in the comments section below.