How to improve your pronunciation of foreign languages
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- Опубліковано 1 чер 2024
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What actually makes a language easier/harder to learn? • What actually makes a ...
How to read the IPA charts • How to read the IPA Ch...
Omniglot Writing Homepage omniglot.com/writing/
The song I used to demonstrate mouthwatching • שקד קוממי - כיכר המדינה
WIRED videos relevant to the subject: • Accent Expert Breaks D... • Accent Expert Breaks D... • Accent Expert Explains... • Dialect Coach Teaches ... • Movie Accent Expert Br...
Corrections: • Corrections on the fir...
Translations:
5:04 (Spanish) [bdg] lenition between two vowels; [n] agrees with the next sounds; [s] almost disappears before a consonant; others depending on the dialect
5:08 (Hebrew) [those 3 letters] change sound; the vowels around [those 2 letters] change; Hebrew’s system is so historic that I don’t know how to show the allophones without breaking the rules, because everything depends on the letter.
5:10 (French) R loses its voice; If you’re wondering why I didn’t write the silent letters at the ends, it’s because they still appear at the ends in other cases (feminine words), so just like in Hebrew, the system is too historic.
5:12 (Arabic) All vowels change to... ; I couldn’t do the formatting with more IPA characters or [the formatting] would be weird.
5:13 (Swedish) All front vowels (3x)
5:15 (Russian) Reduction (2x); Fricatives lose their voice at the ends [of words]
5:16 (Dutch) The “L” thing from earlier; on the ends (3x)
5:18 (Portuguese) The “L” thing from earlier; in the middle positions; before [i]; reduction
6:31 (Hebrew) My brain when I speak Hebrew
6:49 (Spanish) Uhhh, I don’t wanna try
7:04 (bad Spanish) And then uhhhhh, my dad picked me up from the airport and like, brought me home.
7:50 (Hebrew) I have no rights to these images, I’m not claiming ownership of them, and there’s no copyright infringement intended. The images that will appear will be used only for educational purposes, and in fact, this is free advertisement for the creator, because I’m a fan of him.
We don't pronounce "Guadalajara" as "Gua'alajara", and "Me gusta" is only pronounced as "Me guhta" in only a couple of regions.
Agreed. Lenition affects D in some dialects and positions but definitely not in Guadalajara in any dialect I know of. There should be a [ð] sound there even if it’s very light. Plus I don’t know if it was just me but all the A sounds sounded very nasal
@@abel___ I agree. We do have some nasal vowels, but only when there's a [n] or a [m] sound around.
Yeah this guy doesn't seem to have figured out that dialects exist in Spanish. Several of the statements he makes only hold true for specifically Bolivian Spanish, which is the dialect he studied.
The degree to which the /s/ is lost in Spanish varies wildly by region; many speakers only reduce it slightly or not at all. But he keeps saying that the /s/ is lost "as often as possible." He also did an entire Spanish overview without even mentioning the /θ/ phoneme.
@@abel___ Same. From my experience, people from Andalucía when pronouncing words with two different syllables with a consonant and a vowel, it has lenition. Taking the word 'todo' for example, 'to' and 'do' becomes almost 'tó', in order words, lenition. However, I've never seen lenition happening towards a vowel nor a diphthong, so in the cases of the word Guadalajara, there's no lenition there to end up being Gua'alajara.
This guys teaches people how to improve their accent but whenever I hear him speaking any language I know he sound so awful and exaggerated lol
I found your channel through the vid on future American (which was fantastic, btw), but I got to say I'm so glad I stumbled upon this one as well! This is by far the best guide to learning L2 pronunciation I've ever seen full stop. It's always frustrated me how criminally underutilised the IPA is when it comes to language learning, and your advise on observing mouth shapes really complements that, especially since narrow transcriptions aren't always available to the average learner. Everyone talks about shadowing, but shadowing can only get you that far if you don't understand the technicality of how sounds are actually produced. Great work and I'll be off to watch all the rest of your videos!
Wiktionary is a great resource for finding IPA transcription
@@calebf3655 the only problem with Wiktionary is it's inconsistent. When I look up an English word on Wiktionary, I'm not sure if I'll find:
1- GenAm transcription
2- RP transcription
3- AU transcription
4- GemAm recording
5- RP recording
6- AU recording
7- GenAm narrow transcription
8- RP narrow transcription
9- AU narrow transcription
That’s how I got here too. But I’ve got to get up to speed on IPA.
Dutch is only closing in the Netherlands. In Belgium it's stationary.
Crazy how both are very similar in vocabulary, but the way most sounds are made is very different to the point foreigners often don't recognize Hollandic Dutch and Flemish Dutch as the same language.
Correct, although I would like to point out that both the Netherlands also has places where stationary is more common (think De Achterhoek, Limburg) and Belgium (especially standard Flemish) has places where closing is common.
ok just a tiny correction: there's a difference between [ʟ] and [ɫ]. The first is fully velar, whereas the second is a velarized alveolar (equivalent to [lˠ]). [ʟ] is extremely rare, [ɫ] is quite common.
Also, the Dutch text at 5:15 should be "aan de eindes", not "op de eindes".
Hey, just wanted to say that the way you're reducing the S and Ds in Spanish is a little exagerated. It usually only happens if you're speaking very fast.
Okay, so it wasn't just me! Granted, I'm a non-native Spanish-speaker (heck, I'm not really even a Spanish speaker, to any useful degree), but I've lived almost my entire 40 years in Florida, California and Nevada - the dialects of Spanish that I've grown up hearing my whole life sound SO different than what he gives as "correct" or "real" pronunciation. Heck, the Spanish I heard most growing up in Florida (mostly Cuban and Puerto Rican) sounded noticeably distinct from what I heard when I moved out to CA (where I lived right across from Tijuana in San Diego county) and NV (also mostly Mexican Spanish, but more/different regions).
Great video, Sam. My favorite so far. It elucidates clearly the problems I've had with other languages, some I knew about and was working to correct, many I never even noticed. Your tips on how to improve are excellent. Keep up the great work.
4:00 so my problem here is that I don't even know what my native language is. I was raised in Slovak but went to a Flemish school, but these days I actually have the most fluency (when constructing sentences) in English. My pronunciation of all of these is imperfect.
I'm happy to have found your channel. I'm pretty good at aping pronunciation from audio and skipping the notes although I'm no slouch at phonics. But you've demonstrated control and production of pronunciation that is, dare I say it, better than mine.
I found a little mistake on 5:18. You say /a/ becomes [ɛ] because of reduction. But [ɛ] is the sound that an open E (é) makes. I believe you meant [ɜ], although [ɐ] is a common transcription too.
Super helpful! Thank you!
For example at 5:13 I think you confuse the term allophone with what are still perceived as different phonemes by a native, but where some of the phonemes occur in certain places (sound changes) and the spelling convention dictates when/where that phoneme is to be used instead of the phoneme (and its allophones) that the letter combination. The /g/ before /i/ simply is subject to the rule (in both Swedish and Norwegian) that the phonemes [j][i] are to be used, not [g][i], like in the word "gi" (give). In Norwegian the word "gear" is borrowed from English but spelled "gir". It uses the phoneme [g] though, and it is not perceived as just another realization (=allophone) of the [j] phoneme.
What vowel/phoneme sequence is the french example [yu̯] supposed to be a realization of?
Is it (word-final) /y/ without following schwa?
I do hear a slight centering and maybe increase in friction there, but i'd not transcribe that as an [u] sound, maybe [yɥ] (sparsest description in my eyes, which gives a good idea of the slight binding glide in e.g. [ty ɥa] -- certainly not [tyua]), [yɥ̝̽] (pedantic) or [yʏ̯] (does not describe the friction)
Excellent video. Too bad I can’t use most of these tricks with the language I’ve been studying…
But Sumerian TV shows are my favorite!
5:12 the transcription of ظ is not [z] with pharygilization, it's [ð] with pharygilization.
Don’t say Portuguese has a dark l an show the Brazilian flag. In Brazil we have light l’s (the intervocalic ones. The ones in coda aren’t really l’s). In Portugal they have dark l’s.
I don't understand why you use the velar lateral approximant to represent the dark l, because I mostly see it as the Velarized alveolar lateral approximant
For me it’s not even only English allophones that get me in trouble… I learned French to fluency, and their R allophone system messes me up so often in German. The German sounds represented by R and CH are both just R in French, and it makes me mispronounce and misinterpret words so often…
algo que aún no entiendo es que ¿cómo se pronuncia la g suave en español? ¿
Me puedes ayudar?
Si estás hablando de la G en “hago”, es [ɣ], para decirla di G dura, pero no hagas contacto, sólo sopla aire con fricción. Si estás hablando de la G en “general”, es [x], la misma parte de la boca y todavía con fricción, pero sin voz
Youre using the wrong symbol for dark L. Dark L is ɫ, not ʟ. ʟ is the velar lateral approximant, not the dark L's co-articulated alveolar lateral approximant & velar approximant (l and ɰ).
What type of intravocalic mouth movement is german, I can't find it online
I haven’t learned German yet but just analyzed an Easy German video to answer this… it seems that the “eh” and “ü” vowels have slight closing tendencies, long vowels (especially those ending with r) have opening tendencies, but the rest are still. (Any native German speakers wanna help me out with this answer, go ahead)
@@watchyourlanguage3870 Okay thank you
In Catalan our Ls tend to be velarised
7:50 i cant think of a context where ש- would be pronounced without a following /ɛ/, and משומשות is definitely /mɛʃumaʃot/ with four syllables
generally that whole paragraph seems unnatural and translated word by word
(also youd never use ת' in writing in a video like this its way too informal)
otherwise sounds pretty good to my native ears
5:45 languages can also have several of so called 'r's as different phonemes. so does shqiptar
And Spanish and Portuguese as well.
@@dgstranz you dont mean castilian spanish i guess? I am not aware of several r sounds in spanish. Do you have an example?
@@derikaem8021 pero (tapped r) and perro (trilled r), the difference exists across all varieties of Spanish AFAIK
@@dgstranz ah ok ty. I think i was not able to distinguish these sounds yet. But maybe i will, when i watch out for them
Great video but bolivian detected, opinion rejected
Why is “dialectcoach” one word
it's only in Hollywood dialect
saying that _L_ makes the sound [ʟ] for American English speakers is disingenuous because as of right now it makes [ɫ] for (i think) most speakers, including me. don't get me wrong- i think the American English _L_ sound is definitely headed towards [ʟ] for all speakers, but I think /l/ is a better way to transcribe [ɫ] than /ʟ/ is.
Looks like you are not invested in reaching a laymen audience. For whom are you making the videos? Your Germanic sound shift video I saw another day is a disaster from an educational point of view.
7:57 for someone who's supposed to be teaching us how to pronounce "foreign" languages, your pronunciation of Hebrew is quite... bad. Not just the IPA - I mean it legit sounds like you're drunk. You're slurring, and adding all those slight "eeee" sounds in-between. The length of each sounds etc. is also important. Also for some reason you soften vowels so much! Not just in other languages, but English too. I wish I could explain, but I'm not a linguist. Anyway - immersing yourself in a foreign language is the best way to go. You'll pick everything up like a native without even realizing it. No need to over analyse XD
You have a video getting mad at people for yelling at native speakers for speaking wrong, then make a video yelling at non native speakers for having foreign accents while trying to speak new languages.
It's just advice for people who want to improve pronunciation, relax
You should listen to your own advice to better your spanish pronunciation ❤
Gosh this is way to complicated. Just listen and copy EXACTLY what they say. Ask a native to judge you give feedback till you get it right.
dark L is usually [lˠ], [lˤ], or in extreme cases [l͡ʟ] pure [ʟ] is exceedingly uncommon