Welcome to the listening time podcast. Hey everybody this is Corner, and you are listening to episode 131 of the listening time podcast today we are gonna talk about a topic that i love. it's one of my favorite topics and i think that this episode is gonna be very interesting for you. we are gonna talk about English pronounciation->pronunciation. so this is a very relavant topic for all of you because if you are listening to me this means that you are learning English so pronunciation is probably the element of English that is talked about the least.
it's probably the element that at->is the least foucused on when you learn English with a teacher or in school, pronunciation is a hard topic especially English pronunciation but i love it.
it's one of my favorite aspects of teaching English as you can probably tell by now especially if you join->have joined my membership because you see->have seen that i do a lot of training and practice with the sounds of English so i really like this topic and i want to talk about English pronunciation in general and about the difficulties with pronunciation and about how you can improve your pronunciation. so this should be a great topic for today.
Before we start remember to join my usconversations podcast if you want to start practicing with real conversations between me and other Americans.
this is what you need if you can already understand me pretty well and you need to reach to the->that next level where you can understand any native speaker when they are talking to you or when they are talking to other people so if you want to join that you can click on the link in the episode description below this episode that's patreon.com/usconversations.
And don't forget to join my membership and specifically if you become a listening time super memeber or any of the high ties->higher tiers then you'll get my pronunciation training, you'll get my pronunciation seminars where i actually train you and help you with your pronunciation so you can go down and click on the link in the description below to sign up for that. if you are interested it's patreon.com.listeningtime and of course if you like this podcast please give it a five-star rating and write a review and share it with anyone else you know who is learning English that really helps me out and it will help them out too.
Alright, let's get started! Are your ears ready? you know what time it is. it's listening time!
okay, let's talk about pronunciation specifically English pronounciation and even more specifically American pronunciation. so English is one of the hardest languages to pronounce like a native speaker. All languages have their chanllegens->challenges when it comes to pronunciation however if you want to speak like an American for example and you didn't learn English as a child that's really really really hard.
I can't even emphasize enough how hard it is. in my whole life, i don't think i have ever heard a person who learned English as an adult and speaks exactly the same with->way that an American speaks, for example.
I don't think I have ever seen that in my whole life, i've seen a couple of people who have gotten close who have gotten very close actually, but i don't think i have ever seen or met a person sounds exactly like a native speaker if they learn->learned it as an adult.
of course if you learned as a kid or even as a teenager yeah you can achieve that level many people achieve that level especially if you learn->learned as a kid well you can just become a native speaker of course.
however i am talking to you guys who most of you are adults and you learn->are learning English as a foreign language and so you have this unique challenge of learning English as an adult and try to improve the way you speak and your pronunciation so as->\ the first thing that i want to mention is that it's really hard to sound like a native speaker if you are learning as an adult so the first thing you need to do is lower your expectation->expectations okay?
so why is English pronunciation so hard? well the main reason is because in English stress is everything, stress is king okay. English is what we call a stress togue->stress-timed language. basically what that means is that we have more or less the same amount of time between stress->stressed syllables so even if you have a word or a phrase where there is a stress syllable and then three unstressed syllables and another stress syllable that time between the stressed syllables would be pretty much the same as if you had another word or another phrase ??->where it is one stressed syllable one unstressed syllable and one stress syllable. let me give you an example.
so if i say the phrase sadly no in that phrase i have 3 syllables sadly no so the way i would say that is i stress the first syllable i would have emphasis on sad not on ly i don't say sadly i say sadly right? so i stress->stressed that first syllable and i stress no sadly no so stress and then not as much stress and then stress and you can hear that pretty clearly right? however, if i say the phrase unfortunately no now i have stress on for unfortunately but then all of the next three syllables after it are all syllables that don't have a lot of stress and then the word no is stressed.
so listen again unfortunately no so that amount of time between the for and the no is pretty much the same as the amount of the time in the phrase sadly no that 'ly' in the word sad has pretty much the same amount of time that we use to say it as the last 3 syllables of unfortunately so become of that rule there are many times when syllables are said really fast and really short so listening to the two one more time, sadly no unfortunately no.
so you can hear how fast and how short the syllables are on the word unfortunately right so that's an example of what a stressed type->timed language is. so the opposite of the stressed-timed language would be a syllable-timed language so if you speak Spanish for example, you speak a syllable-timed language so each syllable has a pretty similar amout of time that it takes to pronounce that syllable. you don't have this big differences in the lacks->length of syllables in English an unstressed syllable might be 1/3 or sometimes 1/4 of the length of a stressed syllable. that's a huge difference however in a syllable-timed language, like Spanish you don't have that difference right?