Pronunciation: English Explained Clearly

If you are ready to improve your pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, and stress, today I'm going to share with you the number one strategy for improving your communication skills and pronunciation in English. Hi, my name is Hadar. I'm a non-native speaker of English. I have worked on improving my pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, stress, and connected speech in my 20s. And over the past 20 years, I've been teaching English communication and pronunciation. In this video, I want to share with you everything that I've learned throughout the years to help you improve your pronunciation and also to help you understand why it's so incredibly important. And it's not just an aspect of English that you should

learn when you are confident and fluent enough. I want to argue that pronunciation is a core element of learning English and of achieving fluency. So, I'm going to teach you just that and also show you the strategy that I've been using myself to improve my pronunciation so that you can get started and see results today. So, before I share with you the number one strategy for improving your pronunciation, I want to talk about why it's so incredibly important. Because, like I said, a lot of times people think that it's luxury problems. You only need to focus on your pronunciation if you want to sound like a native speaker. But as someone who has gone through this transformation and that training, I want to tell you what it has done to my

fluency and my confidence in English. First of all, learning pronunciation is learning the physical aspect of speaking English. English is not just letters and words and grammatical structures. It is sounds and intonation and thought groups and tone of voice and so much that goes into it that no one learns when they first learn a language. But that's the number one key for being more communicative and confident in English of conveying any message that you might have. Also, I believe that the actual pronunciation practice helps you remember things more quickly, helps you remember words. And so it enhances your vocabulary. It helps you put in a lot less effort into speaking and it has so

many advantages. You get used to your voice. You become more confident in hearing your voice. So that alone is a good enough reason to dive into pronunciation work. But here's why I think you really need to learn pronunciation and procity which is intonation, rhythm, stress, and phrasing. first because it helps you communicate in a clear way without friction. When you understand what people expect to hear and you are able to produce those sounds or stress patterns, then you are going to avoid a lot of miscommunication and a lot of moments of people asking you to repeat yourself or you will avoid the feeling of heavy communication or heavy conversation when there isn't flow. When you know what people expect to hear and

you use those sounds and stress patterns and intonation patterns, it's a lot easier for you to convey what you want to say and for the other person to understand it without friction. The second reason is for you to be able to be perceived the way you actually are to allow the level of your English to be conveyed through your mouth. There is usually a gap between all the knowledge that you have versus how it is communicated. And you want to make sure that you sound confident, that you sound authoritative, that you are able to express in a versatile way what you're trying to say, so that you are expressive, that you are able to engage the listener and that you feel like you

don't need to put a lot of effort into speaking, into communicating, and into saying what you want to say and getting what you want. Also, when people listen to you first, they already make assumptions based on your voice, based on the way you communicate, based on your speech, and sometimes because we have things that get in our way in terms of our pronunciation or flow that we're not even aware of, it might create more friction between you and the listener, and it might prevent you from being fully trusted right off the bat. It's subconscious, and it's unfair. And these biases exist. We cannot ignore them. So, while I want you to be able to own your voice and speak confidently, we also

need to be aware of how we're perceived. And with this type of work, with speech work, you are able to bridge those biases. And by the way, this is relevant for your first language as well, not only to you speaking in a second language. People analyze voice, analyze flow of speech, analyze patterns in your speech and based on that they make assumptions. Some are good and some might not work in your favor. And when you are aware of these things, you are much more capable of changing it and being perceived the way you want to be perceived. The last thing is pronunciation work is going to help you participate fully without holding back.

A lot of times when we feel self-conscious about our speech, when we don't like how we sound, where we are insecure, when we don't want to make mistakes or just when we feel like we put in a lot of effort into speaking, what ends up happening is that we just pull back. We avoid. We wait to speak and all of that can hold you back. Your voice matters. If you have something to say, you should be able to have the confidence to say it immediately without overthinking, without rethinking. And this kind of work can help you become more confident and ultimately help you become more fluent and to take on more opportunities to speak. And I'm saying that from sheer experience, my own experience, I know what happened to my

confidence and my fluency in English once I started doing pronunciation work. but also having worked with so many students and seeing how this very detailed work helped them improve not just how they sounded but also how confident they were and how they were able to express themselves freely and expressively. By the way, if you like this work and you want to dive deeper, I'm inviting you to join my free pronunciation master class that is going to absolutely help you understand how to identify your own challenges and to get a clear plan on how and what to improve starting today. So, if you want that, just go to the link below this video. If you're listening to the podcast, you can go to the show notes and save your seat

to get access to the free master class. So let's summarize the way in which pronunciation work can help you. One, the actual practice is going to help you build fluency, increase your vocabulary, and improve your grammar. Two, it's going to help you become more clear and more effortless when speaking. Three, it will improve your credibility and your connection with the listener. And four, it will allow you more freedom and confidence because you'll say yes to opportunities and you'll avoid English less. So now let's talk about the number one strategy for improving your pronunciation. So first of all before we get started with the number one strategy for improving, let's first talk about

what is pronunciation and pronunciation work. When we talk about pronunciation, we are actually talking about two elements. One is the pronunciation of sounds which is the actual sounds the human mouth makes. In this case just the sounds of English like consonants and vowels e a o. So that's pronunciation here. We want to make sure that we understand all the different sounds that English uses and that our pronunciation is always predictable and aligned with a pronunciation that the person expects to hear. So for example, if I say free, when I want to say three, that's not predictable pronunciation. The person is going to hear a different word. And even though I know I want to say the number three, because of my

pronunciation challenges or because of the habits I have for my first language, I might replace it with another sound that exists in English. As a result, saying free instead of three, but it's going to hurt my communication and the person is going to hear something else than what I intend, hence affecting my intelligibility. So that's sounds, consonants and vowels, the building blocks of the language. The other aspect is procity. Proity is everything about the human speech that is not the speech sounds which means the music of the language, the way I stress words, my pitch, high pitch, low pitch, how I connect words together, where I take pauses, if I sound cheerful or sarcastic, the

musicality, intonations, stress patterns, if I sound certain, if I'm asking a question. So all of these things go into procity. Now most pronunciation trainings do not take into consideration this aspect or at least they don't put a lot of emphasis into teaching that. So most students think that just the sounds is pronunciation work. But the truth is that you need both to be able to be clear. And sometimes knowing what word to stress or making sure that you connect your thoughts together is a lot more critical than pronouncing the R correctly. By the way, if you sign up for my free pronunciation master class that you need to sign up for if you want to access it, I will teach you how to identify the key

sounds that are preventing you from sounding clear. I'll share with you my priority chart and help you identify what your most critical sounds are that you should improve, how to improve them so that you can get faster results by working on your pronunciation and sound clear, confident, and free a lot faster. So now, let me share with you a bulletproof strategy for improving your pronunciation. It's called the pronunciation confidence method and you can use it to improve sounds to improve your procity and later on I usually teach my students on how to use that to improve other aspects of English like grammar and vocabulary but today we're going to start with pronunciation. So

the first thing is perception. Being able to recognize that thing that you're trying to change. And why is that important? Because your ear can hear everything. Your brain does not perceive everything. Your brain filters out a lot of information, usually information that is not needed for your own language, your first language. For example, if you don't have the th sound in your first language, F or VV, then your brain might not detect the th every time it's pronounced. and it might detect it as something close like a t sound. So you might hear think instead of think or free instead of three or maybe in your first language there isn't a distinction between the tense e and the lax e like

sheep and ship. So your brain hears it the same. So if you can't really hear it and pinpoint the differences, there's no way your mouth will be able to make those sounds, right? So you first need to hear it. And that is what pronunciation training is designed for, to first of all help you become aware of all the sounds that exist in English that you may not have in your first language. Because if you can't hear it, you can't make it. So perception is key. This is why I make all these pronunciation videos to help you develop your awareness and become more aware of the sounds in English even if you can't make it because when once you start hearing them gradually you will be able

to start making them. So perception is the first thing. The next thing is prioritization. Here, I want to encourage you not to have to practice and learn every single sound that exists in English because some are not that critical. Some are not going to make a difference in your speech. You want to identify and to focus on the sounds that are very important for your clarity. Again, in the master class, because we have to go deeper, I'm going to explain how to do that. So you can click the link below and sign up and then go through those 60 minutes with me where I explain how to prioritize your sounds. Very important step so that you wouldn't spend time in the wrong places practicing something that is not going to get you results. Okay. But in general

here is how you can also do it. You can identify it and hear if there is a big difference between the sound that you are making and the sound that is expected. For example, if you need to say R and say right and you end up saying it like an L light, it's very different and that is definitely going to be a high priority for you. Right? If you tend to drop consonants left and right and you might say mine instead of mind, then yes, this is an important element of speech that you need to work on. If you tend to separate every single word when speaking, then yes, this is something that you should be working on, right? So, usually I would recommend to work on something that is very different than how it's supposed to sound, right?

The way you make it is very different than how you're supposed to say it. Here's a little exercise that can help you become more aware of your own speech. Pick a TED talk or a speaker that you like that where you have their speech and a text. First read the script one or two minutes, not more than that, and record yourself. Then listen to the original speaker saying that text. Then play your own recording. compare the two and detect all the sounds or elements of speech that you feel are very different. This is your go-to practice list and this is where you know that these are the elements that you need to improve. Okay, so we talked about perception. First, you have to hear it. By the way, this exercise is

going to help you with that. And second, you want to be able to prioritize it and to make sure that you are not working on things that you don't have to work. The next step is pronunciation. Understanding what you need to do with your mouth to be able to produce the sound. For example, if you want to practice the th, you need to know that you got to stick the tongue out, let air flow between the tongue and teeth, relaxing the lips, allowing air to come out. or with voice. For the R, you need to bring the tongue back. The sides of the tongue touch the sides of the teeth. Lip round. So this is the physical aspect of speech. We can do that with procity

as well. To stress a word, you want to go higher in pitch and make the word longer. Right? That is how we stress words. That is the practical part of speech where you learn how to produce it with your mouth. Understanding the physical elements of speech. So we said perception, prioritization so that you don't have to practice something that you don't need. Then pronunciation, learning how to physically produce the sound or element of speech. Then practice. So this is where repetition comes. you have to say it again and again for you to be able to build new habits in your speech, right? So, we're not just like learning how to make it and that's it. No, you want to make sure that you don't think

about it when you speak spontaneously. It has to be there for you. For that to happen, you have to build habits. That happens through practice and repetition. Usually when I provide exercises for my students, what I do is I build their practice in a way that helps them build confidence and clarity in that particular sound. So only in words. Then I'm challenging them a little bit with phrases and then comparing that sound with other similar sounds and then more complex sentences and then sometimes tongue twisters. So we build the difficulty level as they practice. I find this type of practice to be super

effective. This is what I used to do and I remember vividly how I used to kind of like get better the more I went through the practice. But you have to start small. So I recommend practicing words and then phrases and then sentences. Lastly, we need to practice intentionally. Here it's a little different because in the fourth step we just worked on practicing the text, right? Words, phrases, sentences. You read and you repeat, you read and you repeat. If you're one of my students, then you get to listen to my audio as well. Or if you have any of my recorded practice sheets, then you listen and you repeat. Whatever works for you. But you regurgitate, you imitate someone else. Now to be able to start using it while speaking

spontaneously, you need to practice it intentionally. That means that you need to focus on the sound, but you want to speak freely. You want to just talk about something, but making sure that you are using the sounds that you're trying to improve. So let's say you just practiced words, phrases, sentences of the th and now you want to practice intentionally. So, you want to talk about something and every time you recognize that you missed a th sound or there is a th coming up, you want to be extra intentional about pronouncing it correctly. It means that you will be speaking slower. You will be repeating yourself. This is not natural speech, but it's a way for you to connect speaking freely, but also being

conscious about this sound that you're trying to change and being able to do it at the same time. Now, here is one thing that I want you to remember. When you are out there speaking to real people, you should not be thinking about your pronunciation. You shouldn't be thinking about sounds. You shouldn't be correcting yourself continuously when you speak. You want to keep all the things that you've worked on outside of the conversation, outside of your head, because otherwise you will be in your head and not present in the conversation. So you don't want to always think about your grammar, your vocabulary, and your pronunciation. And you definitely don't want to constantly correct yourself. This is why practice

matters. You can do things in practice that you can't do in real speech. And the more you practice, the more confident you will be when speaking to real people. But also, the work that you've done will be there for you because the practice helps you build speaking habits that will be there for you when you are speaking. This is why this work is so great because it helps you bring ease and clarity and that ability to be expressive in real life. But you have to do the work outside of it to be able to allow that. Otherwise, you'll always be stuck in the loop of really trying to integrate everything together while speaking. And let me tell you this, it is not super effective. So, to wrap up, why pronunciation is so important and what is the number one strategy for

improving your pronunciation. One, you need pronunciation because it helps with fluency. It helps you with clarity. It helps you with credibility and it provides you with freedom. Then we talked about what is pronunciation. We talked about pronunciation being two big elements. One is the sounds that we make and we want to aim for predictable pronunciation so that people know and understand and detect clearly the sound that we're trying to make. and also procity which is everything else about the human speech. It's what makes a person an engaging speaker. It what makes us interesting as speakers and most importantly clear because you put emphasis on the right things and your

tone is aligned with what you want to say. It's the intonation, rhythm, stress, connected speech, phrasing, tone of voice and so much more. Then we talked about the number one strategy for improving your pronunciation. I have used it myself and I've taught it to my students for over 20 years and I'm telling you without fail this works. And I also taught you a method to start recognizing and develop awareness around your own speech. And I said that you want to read a text out loud, a text that you have another speaker saying it. maybe a TED talk or an interview where you have the script or you want to read it out loud and record yourself. Listen to the original, compare the two and

detect the key challenges. This is a super effective method for you to become more aware and to start detecting the challenges that you might face. And lastly, I want to invite you again to my pronunciation master class where I teach you the elements of speech no one teaches. I'm going to teach you how to identify your key priorities when it comes to clear pronunciation and why we even need it. I'm going to dive deep into teaching you everything about paracity and the key aspects of procity that you can start incorporating today to become more confident and communicative. And lastly, how to practice effectively so all of that sticks. I'm going to teach you all of that within one hour. It's absolutely

free and you can sign up using the link below. Thank you so much for being here with me and for learning with me. Again, I want to tell you that as a non-native speaker, I know how challenging it is to feel at home in a language you weren't born to. But I also want you to know that it is possible to speak freely and confidently, to say yes to opportunities, to do things in English you never dreamed of doing. And it's possible for you to make that change soon. And I am here to help you with that because I know the impact it had on me and I've seen the impact it had on so many of my students. I believe in you. Have a beautiful, beautiful day and I will see you next week in the next video. Bye.