Hi Tracey, I can totaIly relate to your thoughts about how IELTS changes/benefits us so much while not only preparing for it but also after the test as well. I took IELTS years ago and it helped me navigate which part of english i should work on. In my country, most people don’t know about IELTS but only TOEFL. I hope IELTS gain more attention that it deserves! I wonder how people think about both in your place🤓
I'm a lifelong student of languages, and like you, I'm a real perfectionist about pronunciation. It takes thousands of hours of practice to get anywhere near a native accent, and it is clear that you must have worked very hard on your English pronunciation. I heard only a small handful of very small mistakes, and nothing at all that would make it hard for a native speaker of English to understand you. For example, when you said "academic" you dropped the second "a" so it sounded more like *acdemic. However, this is a trivial error, and there was no question whatsoever about what you were trying to say. My point here is not to denigrate your accomplishment, which is hugely impressive, but is rather to emphasize how good your English really is by pointing out explicitly how few errors you make, and how small they really are. I also want to give you a hint on where you still have a very tiny Chinese accent. As a language student myself I know how hard it is to get precise feedback from native speakers, because no one wants to be "rude", so they just tell you how great your accent is, sometimes even when they can hardly understand you. In your case, you still have a very slight tendency to do what most Mandarin speakers do in English, which is to occasionally drop a sound that does not fit naturally into the sound system of Mandarin. However, I want to stress that this is very rare in your speech, on the order of once a minute, and not several times in each sentence, which is typical of most Mandarin speakers in English. You spoke for five minutes, and I only heard about five such errors. Also, on the positive side, you never dropped a final consonant, which most Mandarin speakers do all the time in English. On a much subtler level, the rhythm of your speech sounds just a trifle choppy compared to the more drawled speech of native speakers. For an extreme example of this drawl try listening to people from the Southern United States, but then notice that all English speakers have some tendency to do the same thing. I realize that terms like "choppy" and "drawled" are not very precise linguistic terms, but what I mean is that even unstressed syllables have a longer duration than you sometimes give them, and stressed syllables tend to be much longer in comparison to unstressed syllables. Again, you are very close to native, and there is no trouble whatsoever in understanding anything you say, but this is the sort of subtle detail that keeps you from sounding perfectly native. Another way to say this is that a Mandarin accent can make one sound like someone speaking English in a bit of a rush, whereas most of the time English speakers sound very relaxed, as though they have lots of time to enunciate everything without trying to compress their speech for the sake of brevity. Again, this is a very slight tendency on your part, so native speakers might feel that you are not really a native speaker, but would not be able to say exactly why they feel that way, because the difference is so subtle. Finally, I can only wish that the little bit of Mandarin that I know were anywhere near as fluent as your English is. Even after some months of listening practice I still do not recognize Mandarin tones reliably, much less reproduce them with reliable accuracy, even though I use software tools like Praat to visualize the tone contours of a sentence very precisely. So, when I say that I am impressed by your English, I really mean it. I know from direct experience how big the phonological differences between Mandarin and English really are. So, again, my most sincere congratulations.
Nice video
Hi Tracey, I can totaIly relate to your thoughts about how IELTS changes/benefits us so much while not only preparing for it but also after the test as well. I took IELTS years ago and it helped me navigate which part of english i should work on.
In my country, most people don’t know about IELTS but only TOEFL. I hope IELTS gain more attention that it deserves! I wonder how people think about both in your place🤓
Holy cow! Your English is perfect. Zero accent. How is it possible that you are not a native of the USA or Canada?
I'm a lifelong student of languages, and like you, I'm a real perfectionist about pronunciation. It takes thousands of hours of practice to get anywhere near a native accent, and it is clear that you must have worked very hard on your English pronunciation. I heard only a small handful of very small mistakes, and nothing at all that would make it hard for a native speaker of English to understand you. For example, when you said "academic" you dropped the second "a" so it sounded more like *acdemic. However, this is a trivial error, and there was no question whatsoever about what you were trying to say.
My point here is not to denigrate your accomplishment, which is hugely impressive, but is rather to emphasize how good your English really is by pointing out explicitly how few errors you make, and how small they really are.
I also want to give you a hint on where you still have a very tiny Chinese accent. As a language student myself I know how hard it is to get precise feedback from native speakers, because no one wants to be "rude", so they just tell you how great your accent is, sometimes even when they can hardly understand you. In your case, you still have a very slight tendency to do what most Mandarin speakers do in English, which is to occasionally drop a sound that does not fit naturally into the sound system of Mandarin. However, I want to stress that this is very rare in your speech, on the order of once a minute, and not several times in each sentence, which is typical of most Mandarin speakers in English. You spoke for five minutes, and I only heard about five such errors. Also, on the positive side, you never dropped a final consonant, which most Mandarin speakers do all the time in English.
On a much subtler level, the rhythm of your speech sounds just a trifle choppy compared to the more drawled speech of native speakers. For an extreme example of this drawl try listening to people from the Southern United States, but then notice that all English speakers have some tendency to do the same thing. I realize that terms like "choppy" and "drawled" are not very precise linguistic terms, but what I mean is that even unstressed syllables have a longer duration than you sometimes give them, and stressed syllables tend to be much longer in comparison to unstressed syllables. Again, you are very close to native, and there is no trouble whatsoever in understanding anything you say, but this is the sort of subtle detail that keeps you from sounding perfectly native.
Another way to say this is that a Mandarin accent can make one sound like someone speaking English in a bit of a rush, whereas most of the time English speakers sound very relaxed, as though they have lots of time to enunciate everything without trying to compress their speech for the sake of brevity. Again, this is a very slight tendency on your part, so native speakers might feel that you are not really a native speaker, but would not be able to say exactly why they feel that way, because the difference is so subtle.
Finally, I can only wish that the little bit of Mandarin that I know were anywhere near as fluent as your English is. Even after some months of listening practice I still do not recognize Mandarin tones reliably, much less reproduce them with reliable accuracy, even though I use software tools like Praat to visualize the tone contours of a sentence very precisely. So, when I say that I am impressed by your English, I really mean it. I know from direct experience how big the phonological differences between Mandarin and English really are. So, again, my most sincere congratulations.
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