What is good English pronunciation?

So many people struggle to improve English pronunciation. Do you think it would be going on possible that English learners could sound like native speakers in terms of pronunciation?

 

 

i This video tells you how much you need to work on your good pronunciation.

 

 

 

I’ve seen that so many Koreans seem to be obsessed with their English pronunciation, specifically British English or American English. I also wondered if my English pronunciation sounded good. As you see, I am definitely a Korean. Hardly ever had I grown up in a English environment till I became an adult. No doubt my English pronunciation doesn’t sound natural.

I was a bit nervous if many people could not understand my English. So I tried to improve my English pronunciation so they could understand it, which was quite frustrating, though. I felt that my English pronunciation didn’t improve a lot better than I expected it to.

 

I walked up to native speakers for some advice. They’d rather ask me, "what kind of pronunciation is good?" They also said my pronunciation is hands down good, because they can understand my English accent. I was so happy to hear that.

 

It turned out they didn’t care how good or bad my English pronunciation was. “It is silly to try to get to the point where one feels they pronounce English properly in the exact same way native speakers do.” they said.

 

Just Imagine your English sounds natural. How would you feel? You would be so happy. The chances of this happening, however, are slim to none. For me back then, the standard of English pronunciation pertained to American English or British English. I realized I was totally wrong.

 

My coworkers said that English is just a lingua franca, a global language. More and more people start to speak English, which means that there are differences in pronunciation amongst non-native speakers, not to mention native speakers.  

 

I have several years of experience living in some countries. Most recently I lived in Bangkok, which is one of the biggest cities. Of course many people from different nationalities talk in English, and there I saw so many locals even speak English as well.

 

I wanted to see if they could understand every bit of what I said, because I had a little trouble working out their mixed English accent for a while. Fortunately, they understood any of my single words albeit with my different accent. In fact they already noticed something different, especially when I articulated my target language.

 

The thing is that we are non-native speakers of English. It is kind of nonsense to step up to the level of near-native pronunciation as it is not that simple at all. There is a catch. Proper pronunciation couldn’t be done without developing things like stress, intonation, rhythm or something else, which we could not ever acquire for a long while.

 

You should instead spend more time expanding your vocabulary for better fluency. I’m 100% sure that it will work out well for you. Don’t get me wrong though. Proper pronunciation is still important enough to make others understand your English. My point is you don’t have to be concerned about how English speakers would react to your English pronunciation.

 

Any kind of pronunciation would be fine as long as English speakers kind of somehow understand your pronunciation without any trouble. That’s it! You need to let your target language come out of your mouth regardless of your pronunciation. Otherwise, you will have little chance of making your English pronunciation much better.  

 

I know how tricky it can be to acquire proper English pronunciation unless you have previous knowledge of IPA. It is hard to come by. To top it off, each dictionary has a slightly different way of representing the phonetic alphabet, which could be very frustrating and confusing.

 

That’s the place where 'Google' comes in. Google is a great online tool you can take advantage of in order to learn and say words correctly. Google makes it accessible for anyone to capitalize on the feature. It represents pronunciation of all sorts of words in a way it sounds, so it comes in handy for English learners of all levels.

 

All you need is either a smartphone or a laptop. It is so easy to listen to what a word sounds like. Let's take the word 'administration' for example. You type in a phrase like "how to pronounce or say the word administration" or voice-search on your smartphone. You can see a speaker icon right below and then click on it. You get to learn how to pronounce the word properly.