Pronunciation

Pronunciation

In school and in the first year here at the university, we have worked diligently to perfect our writing skills in English. This means that classes and exams were mainly composed of grammar exercises and text production. Of course, this is essential when learning a language, however, another important point to really master a language has been largely neglected: pronunciation.

These days, at least here in Austria, people are constantly faced with English words. Therefore, most have a general idea of how to pronounce these common English words. Here at the university, however, we often have to deal with words whose pronunciation is a bit more challenging. Add to that the fact that we not only want to know how to pronounce certain words, but also want to sound like native speakers. To do that, I am very glad that we are know dealing with pronunciation in Frank’s class.

Frank tries to expel us our German accent by telepromting sounds and words, showing us helpful links and making us aware of difficulties of native German speakers, which we probably wouldn’t even notice. A very useful exercise we did in this respect was the Pronunciation Diagnostic Exercise. For this exercise, we had to record ourselves individually  while reading an unknown text, an unknown dialogue and describing a picture. We did that to get an idea of what our English really sounds like when listening to our own recordings afterwards. I think that was a very important exercise to become aware of our own mistakes.

If you want to perfect your pronunciation further and do not want to be recognized as a non-native speaker, you should opt for a particular accent of English. There are so many different variations of English, which you shouldn’t mix as a perfectionist in any way. The most common types of English are of course the British and American English. But if you only  think of how many countries have English as their official language, it is obvious that there are many other interesting accents you should get to know.

Personally, I think that I will rather work as a translater than a interpreter in the future, so perfect writing skills are the most important thing for me. Nevertheless, I also want to have a good pronunciation. In my next blog post about pronunciation, I will explain exactly how I try to improve my skills in this regard and give some tips.