Three of the Most Commonly Mispronounced English Sounds for Indian Speakers

In India, about 10 percent of the population are English speakers.  Of these, 226,449 speak English as a first language, while 125,000,000 speak English as an additional language. About 4 percent of the population consider themselves fluent

 Our Indian students live in:

• Boulder & Denver, Colorado; California; Florida; Virginia; North Carolina, Pennsylvania; Louisiana and in Canada.

  Why do Indian people have such difficulty with clear English pronunciation?

•  They use the pronunciation from their 35 native languages on their English speech.
• In those languages, most speech sounds are spoken quickly.  In American English, some sounds are spoken quickly but others are spoken slowly.
• Multiple syllable words are especially difficult to understand because the sounds are spoken so quickly
• There are different positions of the tongue, lips, teeth and jaw for many of the Indian-English speech sounds.
• The stiffness or tenseness of the speech muscles are greater for many Indian-English speech sounds than in American English.

What are three of the most difficult sounds for our Indian students to say accurately in English?

• “w”  

• “t”  

• “th”  

Why are these so difficult?

• Two of these sounds are produced slowly in American English – “w” and “th.”
• Positioning of the lips for “w” and the tongue for “th” is quite different than Indian-English
• The tongue is more relaxed for the “t” in American English than in Indian English

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

 Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos and Accent Reduction Tip videos  for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Three of the Most Commonly Mispronounced English Sounds for Chinese Speakers

In Asia, the number of English-users has surpassed 350 million, equal to the number of people who live in countries where English is the dominant language: the United States, Britain and Canada. More Chinese children now study English — about 100 million — than there are Britons.

 Our Chinese and other Asian students live in:

• Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, Colorado; California, Oregon, Washington State, Washington, DC, Virginia, New York, etc.
• Canada, Australia, Luxembourg, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, … all over.  

Why Chinese people have such  difficulty with English pronunciation?

•  Like all people learning another language, Chinese people will use the pronunciation from their native language on their English speech.  That’s what people call accent—Chinese-English accent (Chinlish!).  Not native accent.
•  Because the roots of their language is so different from English, the speech sounds are also pronounced very differently.
• Different position of the tongue, lips, teeth, jaw.
•  Different muscle strength.
•  Different speed of muscles for speech sounds.

 What are the three most difficult sounds for our Chinese student to say accurately in English?

• “r”  

• “L”  

• Short vowel “a” as in “hat”  

Why are these the most difficult?

• To make these sounds accurately takes particular and difficult positions of the tongue
  • The position of the tongue is so difficult that the “r” is also the most difficult sound for native-born English speakers to say.  Some children don’t master this sound until they are seven years or older
  • To make an accurate “L” consistently means to train the tongue to push out to the lip, and most languages do not require this movement.
  • To make a accurate  short vowel “a” as in “hat” also requires the same strong “push tongue” muscles as for the “L.” Most languages do not require these muscles to be strong.

Surprise! (Smile!) That also means, of course, that these  sounds are also difficult for many people who speak one of the 4000 languages of the world!

Next week’s blog will cover the most difficult clear English sounds for people born in India. 

Be sure to watch our English Speech Tips videos (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2EFE0544AA7222F8) and Accent Reduction Tip videos (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEqcWG754u86nmYRHQ95AD8RM5n5DwNAu) for more English pronunciation and accent reduction exercise.

Three Most Commonly Mispronounced English Sounds for Spanish Speakers

 
Nearly 20% of Americans speak a different language at home. About 47% of the foreign-born  population are Hispanic. The Latino population has doubled since 1990. Florida is home to the third highest total of Latinos, or 22.8 percent of the state’s population. California and Texas are home to even larger totals of Latinos at 38.1 percent Latino.

 Our Spanish-as-a-first-language students in Florida and California, and Canada and Australia hold management positions (especially for restaurants). They are also teachers or professors, and they are entrepreneurs. Two of our students have won “manager of the year” for a large restaurant chain in Florida.

When I was in Miami, a human resource administrator stopped me in the hall to praise Carlos. “What an amazing change, “she said. “It used to be he wouldn’t talk at all. Now he stops me to do friendly talk. Getting to speaking clear English has given him amazing confidence.” 

Life change. That’s exactly it. When you know you have the clear English speaking skill, then your confidence soars, and life, career and relationships blossom.

There is not one Spanish but many Spanishes. Countries and regions of countries have particular speech sound differences. For example, many people from Cuba have a “w” sound which is preceded by a “g” sound. So the “w” sounds like a “gw.” (Tip: Because Spanish as a first language people can have very different speech sounds, that makes it so wise to do a good assessment on speech sounds and word intelligibility. That way you know what your errors are so you can work directly on them. That makes for efficient learning!)

 What are three of the most frequent errors for Spanish as a first language? By numbers, the most frequent errors are the short vowel “a”, “d”, “z.” Also many people pronounce these sounds inaccurately: “j”, “ch”, short vowel “i.” Below is a quick lesson for “j” in “jewelry”. Father R, Miami, Florida, asked for help with exactly that word in this week’s personal coaching.