As I have written before, there are many things which don’t help your pronunciation of English sounds (phonemes), below are a couple of more issues.
Knowingly or unknowingly pronouncing a word incorrectly may cause miscommunication, especially with other people who use English as a second language. When using English to communicate it isn’t always native English speakers to consider.
English as a second language
There are sounds in English that don’t exist in Japanese and other non-English languages. It is worth the effort to try to pronounce these phonemes to help the flow of conversation and/or to be understood.
In a TV programme I watched, a Japanese man was on an overseas trip and while at a restaurant he asked for “ソルト” (soruto, salt). Even though I understood him, the waiter didn’t, he thought he wanted soup! Maybe it was because English was their second language too. What pronunciation issues caused this miscommunication? Perhaps, one of the following things:
Using only Japanese sounds
There are sounds in English that do not exist in Japanese, it’s easy not to try to make the “new” sound and use a Japanese sound instead.
Solution – Don’t only use Japanese sounds to say English words. There are many sounds in Japanese that are the same in English, however, if you only use Japanese sounds there will be mispronunciation.
It sounds close enough
“I sink dat isu gudo”. “I think that is good.” I don’t think there is perfect pronunciation in real life, there are so many different English accents which are all correct but don’t sound the same.
Solution – Analyse the sound not the word, think about how you can make that sound. Look at diagrams to see the shape of the mouth. Look at the speaker’s mouth to see how it moves to make that sound. Your pronunciation will be influenced by whichever English you are learning; American, British, Australian, Singapore English, Malaysian English, etc.
The English mispronounce words too
It isn’t easy at first trying to make these new sounds, this includes children learning how to speak. In the UK I often heard “I fink” or “I sink” instead of “I think”. In some parts of Britain “I fink” is used instead of “I think”; hypocritically, this is a real dialect when they do it and mispronunciation when foreigners do it.
Sounds before words
To improve your English pronunciation, listen to the different phonemes at first and then try to copy that sound only, don’t worry about words in the beginning. This is just part of what I help our students with if requested. Our main goal is your successful communication. Pass the salt, please.
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