Day 9: Pronunciation Practice
This is the 9th day of my 100 days English diary challenge.
I've started a new English course at the 1st April, and I've met several new classmates. Everyone has good energy and fight for learning. Their good will encouraged me to study more hard.
Some of them lived in the UK, and they speak very well. I try to imitate their pronunciation during the class. I feel sometime, listen and imitation is one of the best practices to improve speaking. On the other hand, when I listen to those speak very Japanese accented English, I tend to receive them as just Katakana or spelling and it makes me hard to respond naturally. I agree with the difficulties to pronounce like a native person, but why don't they practice their pronunciation whereas they can listen well, write well and learn very well in grammar?
Main factor of the issue is our educational environment where the most of the English teachers in Japan are not good pronunciation, so that their students' pronunciation never could be good. I've heard that a teacher speak in osaka accent. The teacher is a great teacher and it was a pleasured to hear her but it sounds funny. Some university students also mentioned that most of the professors who teach English for permanent work have a bad pronunciation. We could have better pronunciation class in our beginning days of English lesson.
The second factor is possibly some sort of our embarrassment. You feel as an idiot yourself as pronouncing a foreign language desperately. So that you also feel as a fool when you play your recorded voice in English. But hearing voice recording is the good way to analyze and review your pronunciation. I was afraid of hear it, because it's horrible, but I am getting used to it.
As one of pronunciation practices, I've recorded my reading aloud with my smart phone. While I was trying to speak out words clearly, I heard it unnatural. It's feel like all the syllables were separated in each. I've tried 10 times and I found at last, to use the stress and the intonation is more important to my English pronunciation make natural.
I tried to use stresses and rising and falling, and reading faster as I could. Even though speaking fast is the most hard for me, but good speeds make good stress and drop I suppose.
Related article below. Intonation and Stress in English
Also, I believe in the importance of pronunciation skill of basic consonant and vowel sounds, I'll do either practice them.
