If someone were to ask me what I thought were one of the
most important elements that demonstrated a level of mastery in another
language, I would say that accurate and authentic pronunciation were key to
becoming fluent. Even though I am nowhere near perfect, as no one is, I have
always had an ear for having what many would say is a “good”, or a “native-sounding”
pronunciation. I have already been mistaken for a native French speaker and
have been told that my German accent is good by students who have already
studied abroad in Germany and by other native German speakers. This ability,
just like anything else, did not just happen overnight. I can still clearly
remember stumbling across words that were unfamiliar and trying to force myself
to produce German sounds by being my American-self and by trying to transfer
that over to a language whose pronunciation was nothing like that of English.
This is where I went wrong. I truly believe that anyone,
including immigrant parents, adults, and teenagers who have never been exposed to
a language other than their native languages can eventually sound like a native
speaker in a foreign language. My hope for this post is not to try to denounce
accents, or to say that you must sound a hundred percent authentic, but I do
hope that you can gain some words of wisdom from someone who has had years of experience
trying to find the best methods to completely get rid of, or to improve on your
accent.
My first tip is to try to speak as early as you can. Even if
you only know a few basic phrases, or have an elementary-level vocabulary,
there are no real excuses to not start using your language as frequently as
possible. I would recommend talking to yourself, finding language partners
online, talking to your friends, your classmates, or your family-members, and to
get as much exposure to authentic listening material as you can find. If you
have been keeping up with my blog posts, you will know how strong of a
proponent I am of YouTube. It is just like Google, in the sense that there are
hundreds of thousands of videos dedicated to learning another language, or,
what I almost solely do, listen to YouTubers who are from a country of your
target language. (Feel free to read my post “How to Improve Speaking a Language” and “Listen to YouTubers in Your Target Language” if you want to know
how to improve on those skills).
I also recommend reading passages out loud as many times as
you feel necessary on a regular basis, so that you get used to making new
sounds with your throat, with your mouth, and with your tongue. Remember that
you should not try to make sounds using the same parts of your mouth as you
would with your target language. Instead, you have to slowly train yourself to
start using different parts of your mouth in order to make them without even
thinking about it. The more practice that you get, the less you will have to
have stop and think about where your tongue should be placed in order to make a
particular sound. In other words, the more audio, reading, and speaking
exposure that you get, the more likely it will be that you will start to
familiarize yourself with how words should be pronounced.
Lastly, it is very important to ask advanced language
learners, especially native speakers, if you can have conversational practice
with them. If you do so, you can ask them to correct your pronunciation, or
words that you are not saying correctly. You should not be corrected after
every mistake, especially if you are a beginner, or feel that you need a lot of
speaking practice in order to become proficient; however, you should take any criticism
to heart and work on your weak spots. If, for example, you had trouble pronouncing
words with accents, you could practice saying those words out loud based on
what you thought were their correct pronunciation. After a lot of repetition,
the extra exposure will help make you confident when speaking without worrying
about sounding “very (too) American”, or “not very good.”
I hope that you found this post helpful. I figured that I would
give you tips about how to start taking your language skills to the next level,
as I feel that perfecting my pronunciation has helped me gain more confidence
and become closer to reaching fluency in several languages.
