A complete guide to improving your spoken English
BlogLanguagesEnglishHow to Improve Your Level of Oral English: A complete guide to improving your spoken English
Pay attention to your English pronunciation
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“Thanks to languages, we can feel at home anywhere” – Edmund de Waal
In Spain, 56.3% of people between the ages of 18 and 64 know a language other than their mother tongue and English is the foreign language that the population uses the most, 40.3%, according to the Survey on the Participation of the Adult Population in Learning Activities released this Thursday by the National Institute of Statistics ( INE ) with data from 2016.
But, although English is the first foreign language we learn, we are not conspicuous by our bilingualism. Why is it so difficult to speak English being Spanish? Our level of English is improving, no doubt, but to improve even more, we must pay attention to several elements: not only pronunciation and intonation, but also fluency and level of vocabulary in English .
Pay attention to your English pronunciation: A complete guide to improving your spoken English
Let’s (a little) put theory aside and let’s talk!
When you started learning English, you were probably told not to make English grammar mistakes . But did they teach you the English pronunciation rules ? It is part of the theory that can be quickly put into practice.
The pronunciation helps oral comprehension. Mispronouncing a term or phrase can lead to misunderstandings on the part of your English speaking interlocutor. For example, you should know where the stressed accent of each word goes and know the different pronunciations that English words can have. It may be that two words are spelled almost the same, but they are pronounced in a totally different way, such as heard and beard .
Americans seem to try harder to understand us, but it’s best to learn the phonetic rules before launching into the British world!
Pay attention to the [h]: it is pronounced (almost) systematically by slightly inhaling the air,
The th can be pronounced in two different ways but never [s] or [z]: it is pronounced [θ] in think, mouth or thunder and [ð] in this, these or The support of the tongue against the incisors is more or less strong,
The [r] sound is very different from Spanish: it is pronounced by moving the tongue towards the palate without touching it.
As we have mentioned before, also pay attention to the tonic accents that allow you to emphasize a place in the word or sentence. The English do it naturally, you have to get used to it!
The best way to improve accent is to imitate English speakers and repeat after them, just like children when learning their native language.