3 Pro Tips to Improve Your Pronunciation

One of the very important aspects of a language is its pronunciation. How you pronounce the words makes a big difference on how impactful your statement is. But the truth is that most of people have some or the other pronunciation issue in their second language. Below are some tips to get rid of your MTI and have better pronunciation.

• Mimicking – Mimicking is a great way if you want to have a significantly better pronunciation. You simply need to play a video, movie, interview, or a web series of your own choice. Listen to a watch a simple dialogue and just pause it. Rewind it and then play it again. Repeat it multiple times while observing how each word is being pronounced. Also, do observe their mouth movements very carefully. Now, after a couple of observations, try speaking the same word the very same way as you see the speaker speaking on the screen. After a regular practice of mimicking for a month, you would notice a significant difference in your pronunciation.
• Learn Phonetics – Phonetics is the study of speech sounds, basically our pronunciation. IPA (International Phonetic Alphabets) is an integral part of Phonetics. They look very much similar to the English alphabets. Just like alphabets denote spellings, phonetic alphabets denote pronunciation. They are mentioned after the words and before the definitions in dictionaries. Though learning phonetic alphabets is more theoretical and consumes more time, but it would be very effective in the long run. The only time-consuming thing is learning the mouth movements for each alphabet. The ability to read a pronunciation is not only more accurate than listening to it, but also allows you to know the correct pronunciation of each word because it is also used in dictionaries.
• Get a company of better communicators – They say, “Your company reflects your character”. This is because when you communicate and live with a certain types of people there any many of their characteristics that you subconsciously start to acquire. The same happens when you have a company of better communicators. You won’t even realize and your communication skills will start improving, and so will your pronunciation. Observing their pronunciation consciously will be an additional advantage for you. Adding to the same, do make sure that those better communicators have good pronunciation too. Or else it might not help you much.
• Practice tongue twisters – Your tongue and your mouth are habitual of making certain type of movements based on your mother tongue. Tongue twister are a very good way to make your tongue flexible. Initially, you mouth might also pain a little as these movements will be new for it. Over time, your tongue will become more flexible and will be capable of producing more sounds. Another benefit of practicing tongue twisters is that it helps you minimize your MTI (Mother Tongue Influence). Some of the famous tongue twisters are as follow –

1. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
   A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked
   If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
   Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
2. Betty Botter bought some butter
   But she said the butter’s bitter
   If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter
   But a bit of better butter will make my batter better
   So it was better Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter
3. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
   He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, and chuck as much wood
   As a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood
4. She sells seashells by the seashore