Bad Pronunciation Sounds Like Singing Out of Tune

If you want to sound like someone from an English speaking country, you have to work on your pronunciation skills all the time. Pronunciation is often seen by many students as something they don’t have to get right but nothing could be further from the truth.

Native speakers sound good because they pronounce the words perfectly and every student’s goal should be to sound as much like them as possible. The best way to learn good pronunciation is to learn how to sound out each word by breaking it into smaller parts and then pronouncing it correctly. Learn this and most of your pronunciation problems will be over.

The process is called Basic Syllable Rules and it works like this:

• A syllable is a unit of sound contained in each word. English words must be divided into units of sound before you can pronounce them correctly because English is a Vocal language. That means each word will contain a vowel or a vowel sounding letter that gives the sound to the word. To find the units of sound, you start by:

1. Counting the vowels in a word (a,e,i,o, u and sometimes y and w),
2. Subtract any silent vowels, (like the silent “e” at the end of a word or the second vowel when two vowels a together in a syllable)
3. Subtract one vowel from every dipthong, two vowels together pronounced as a single sound, (diphthongs only count as one vowel sound and usually the first vowel is the one you pronounce.)
4. The number of vowels sounds left is the same as the number of syllables.

The number of syllables that you hear when you pronounce a word is the same as the number of vowels sounds heard. For example:
The word “came” has 2 vowels, but the “e” is silent, leaving one vowel sound and one syllable.
The word “outside” has 4 vowels, but the “e” is silent and the “ou” is a diphthong which counts as only one sound, so this word has only two vowels sounds and therefore, two syllables.

• Divide between two middle consonants.

Split up words that have two middle consonants. For example:
hap/pen, bas/ket, let/ter, sup/per, din/ner, and Den/nis. The only exceptions are the consonant digraphs. Never split up consonant digraphs as they really represent only one sound. The exceptions are “th”, “sh”, “ph”, “th”, “ch”, and “wh”.

• Usually divide before a single middle consonant.

“o/pen”, “i/tem”, “e/vil”, and “re/port”. The only exceptions are those times when the first syllable has an obvious short sound, as in “cab/in”.

• Divide before the consonant before an “-le” syllable.

When you have a word that has the old-style spelling in which the “-le” sounds like “-el”, divide before the consonant before the “-le”. For example: “a/ble”, “fum/ble”, “rub/ble” “mum/ble” and “thi/stle”. The only exception to this are “ckle” words like “tick/le”.

• Divide off any compound words, prefixes, suffixes and roots which have vowel sounds.

Split off the parts of compound words like “sports/car” and “house/boat”. Divide off prefixes such at “un/happy”, “pre/paid”, or “re/write”. Also divide off suffixes as in the words “farm/er”, “teach/er”, “hope/less” and “care/ful”. In the word “stop/ping”, the suffix is actually “-ping” because this word follows the rule that when you add “-ing” to a word with one syllable, you double the last consonant and add the “-ing”.

Good pronunciation is the first thing people notice when you speak English. Pronunciation is like singing, it is either good or bad, in tune or out of tune. Someone said, “Imagine a person who sings, but one cannot listen to that person with pleasure. He or she is losing the rhythm, sometimes sounding more like a wolf than a human being. I could describe this as singing out of tune.

So I think that we can liken a person who doesn’t sing well to somebody who can’t pronounce words properly. Sometimes people may say that they don’t have to learn pronunciation because they don’t realize how important it is. If only they tried to imagine how unpleasant it is to be listening to a person who is singing really bad then they would know what it is like to be listening to a person with terrible pronunciation.” (Antimoon.com)