Post by Raquel on Apr 7, 2020 1:00:53 GMT 9
Hi Mayken,
Exposure is what usually helps with pronunciation and everything else. To be fair, English pronunciation is something I know I'll work on for the rest of my life and will never get exactly right. I'll just get better at it, very, very slowly.
Something that helped me a lot is songs. You get to sing along to the song while listening to a native speaker pronounce these words. We all tend to try and pronounce the same way the singer does. If you care about pronunciation, you'll discover many of the mistakes you usually make and try to correct them.
Movies and TV shows have helped me too, because you're constantly exposed to oral language. They're a fun way to work on English pronunciation (and everything else English), but you don't usually repeat what they say like you do in songs (although I sometimes do, when I hear a word pronounced some way I didn't expect, or a new word, to see whether I can get it right).
Something that I recently found helpful too has been my daughter's book on learning to read. It tells you how to read some letter combinations (er, ir and ur sound like the "ir" bit in "bird", "ai" and "ay" are pronounced like the letter "a", etc...) This would be a boring way to learn pronunciation, but faster.
There are people on YouTube that help with pronunciation. I don't know what English pronunciation you're after, but Rachel's English is very good for American pronunciation. I usually Google a word plus "pronunciation" when I struggle with how to pronounce a specific word, and she usually has a video explaining it.
There are also webpages on pronunciation that are good. Pronuncian is one I like. You can listen to different sounds and they have exercises too. It's also an American site. The University of Iowa has a very good page on phoneme pronunciation too. I believe it's called Sounds of speech. I love that you can listen to a single sound or sound cluster on its own.
Finally, dictionaries usually have the pronunciation next to a word (using IPA symbols or others). Some even have an audio recording of that sound. My favorite dictionary is Word Reference, which has both the symbols and the audio, plus an excellent forum where people can ask their questions.
I don't know how useful some of these resources will be. I realize some will be pretty boring for a child, but wanted to give you as many options as possible.
Exposure is what usually helps with pronunciation and everything else. To be fair, English pronunciation is something I know I'll work on for the rest of my life and will never get exactly right. I'll just get better at it, very, very slowly.
Something that helped me a lot is songs. You get to sing along to the song while listening to a native speaker pronounce these words. We all tend to try and pronounce the same way the singer does. If you care about pronunciation, you'll discover many of the mistakes you usually make and try to correct them.
Movies and TV shows have helped me too, because you're constantly exposed to oral language. They're a fun way to work on English pronunciation (and everything else English), but you don't usually repeat what they say like you do in songs (although I sometimes do, when I hear a word pronounced some way I didn't expect, or a new word, to see whether I can get it right).
Something that I recently found helpful too has been my daughter's book on learning to read. It tells you how to read some letter combinations (er, ir and ur sound like the "ir" bit in "bird", "ai" and "ay" are pronounced like the letter "a", etc...) This would be a boring way to learn pronunciation, but faster.
There are people on YouTube that help with pronunciation. I don't know what English pronunciation you're after, but Rachel's English is very good for American pronunciation. I usually Google a word plus "pronunciation" when I struggle with how to pronounce a specific word, and she usually has a video explaining it.
There are also webpages on pronunciation that are good. Pronuncian is one I like. You can listen to different sounds and they have exercises too. It's also an American site. The University of Iowa has a very good page on phoneme pronunciation too. I believe it's called Sounds of speech. I love that you can listen to a single sound or sound cluster on its own.
Finally, dictionaries usually have the pronunciation next to a word (using IPA symbols or others). Some even have an audio recording of that sound. My favorite dictionary is Word Reference, which has both the symbols and the audio, plus an excellent forum where people can ask their questions.
I don't know how useful some of these resources will be. I realize some will be pretty boring for a child, but wanted to give you as many options as possible.