How to pronounce English words.

Wynand

How to pronounce English words.

I am not an English speaker. What I mean by that is that I can read and write English but I do not really speak the language. This is because I am a student and live in a country where all the lectures are in your mother tongue but all the manuals and study material are in English.

I accepted a work position next year (when I have completed my studies) and it is a predominately-English firm. The problem now is that I do not know how to correctly pronounce words. This is because from a young age, I was watching television programs from all around the world and in every program they pronounce the English word different.

What do think will help me?

mathiaus

Here are some sites...
Pronouncing English Sounds
English Pronunciation/Listening
Learning English - Pronunciation tips

Lots of people claim that English is the most difficult language to learn (I personally would've expected Chinese) so I suggest looking for some 'English' classes at college or somewhere similar.

Shewolf

People claim Norwegian being harder to learn than Chineese, but anyway.

After trying to learn this language I am typing for more than ten years, I am fully aware of this problem, and I don't appreciate it. Well, you could try watching the televistion soem more, listen to the sounds, and try to pronounce them to yourself. Until you feel you've got it right. As you said, English is spoken in different ways around the globe, but try to grasp the general sound of the language, and speak it. You can do anything by practice Wink

coolclay

Like people have mentioned there is no "right" way to pronounce some English words, even in America and England people pronounce some words differently. The best thing to do is watch American or English news programs. Most of them have free videos on their websites, for example http://www.foxnews.com/video/index.html
and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/video_and_audio/default.stm

Obake

Other people have posted some good ideas to help you learn English pronunciation from specific sources, but I would also suggest a couple of short-term measures to get you used to using English at work on your own. The first thing is just to pay careful attention to the way people around you pronounce English--if you can't understand what they're saying, ask them to talk a little slower so that you can keep up. You'll probably find that you pick up pronunciation quite quickly that way, particularly because you've already got a good knowledge of the language itself, how you put words and sentences together and so on, from your reading/writing knowledge.

The other thing is, if you find you need or want to use a word and you really don't know how to pronounce it yet, try it out once or twice, and if people can't understand what you mean, write it down. They'll probably say the word back to you when they're reading, and then you'll know how to pronounce that word.

Outside of work, see if you can find an English-speaking partner to have conversations in English with--if you live near a university, there are often noticeboards with advertisements for students from all sorts of countries who want to improve their speaking in all sorts of languages. If you can find someone who maybe uses English but wants to improve their skills in your language, you could do a language exchange.

The single best way of learning how to pronounce English words is going to be by actually speaking in the language, not just listening to TV programs--even though they can be helpful too.

Molle

Srs2388

some words people swear the word is pronounced the way they say it.... tomato.
pecan. car. etc.
a lot of it depends on dialect.

skygaia

Wel.. it's difficult question.. Actually english is not my mother tongue. so I have same problems with you. But in my experience, after people(english people) recognized that english is my secon language, they tried to pay attention more.. so it's not big problem.. of course, I would ask some pronounciations to my canadian friends. usually they enjoyed it.. Laughing

James007

Please do not bump a topic of an inactive user (-230.22 Points).

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