Forget About Native Pronunciation & Focus on NATURAL Pronunciation
This is a psychological aspect of achieving good pronunciation.
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here and today I want to talk about natural pronunciation.
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I do appreciate it.
So I wanna follow up on the fascinating discussion that I had
with Stephen Krashen the other day.
And that was a live stream.
And you may have watched it.
It's available uh, here for you to, uh, look at if you, uh, weren't able
to participate in the live stream.
It is also going to be available as a lesson with subtitles, with the, uh, the
transcript in our English library at LingQ where we have a number of videos from Dr.
Krashen that you can use if you're working on improving your English and if you
want to become more familiar with Dr.
Krashen's ideas.
Now, in the conversation with Dr.
Krashen he had a, he has wonderful stories to tell, but one of his stories
was that, uh, he was in a French class or he heard about someone who was
in a French class and who was always criticized for his pronunciation.
His pronunciation wasn't very natural.
It wasn't, I mean, we don't have to be totally native, but it was still very
much far away from French pronunciation.
He was in a way hiding behind his English pronunciation.
And then for whatever reason, he decided that he was going to
impersonate, imitate a French person.
So he arrived one day in front of the class and he put on a beret because
people think French people all wear...
french men, all wear berets, which they don't, and he pretended to be a Frenchman.
And he was, you know, we can imitate French people speaking English, like
very often, some people can imitate the French accent, the English...
but when they go to speak French, they're still using their English accent.
So he decided that he was going to pretend to be a Frenchman with his beret,
with whatever other disguise he had on.
And he spoke French and he spoke with a very good accent with good pronunciation.
And the teacher said, where has that pronunciation been hiding?
And of course he was in the mood for that.
And so I think we can achieve if not native-like pronunciation, which is more
difficult to achieve, but we can achieve comfortable pronunciation pronunciation
that the native speaker enjoys listening to, even with an accent that feels
natural, that is not strained, but is free of the inhibitions that too often
people feel when they're hanging back in the safety of sort of pronouncing French
... in other words, staying with the less risky sort of pronunciation of not making
an effort to imitate, not to take that, that jump into the, what might be cold
water of trying to actually sound like whatever language it is we're learning.
I mentioned to Dr.
Krashen that I have referred to this as cultural weightlessness and
that this is a psychological aspect of achieving good pronunciation.
There are many other things that we can do to improve pronunciation.
Uh, listening is certainly one, listening to things that engage us
emotionally is going to help us.
But also at some point you have to recognize that you have to sort of lift
yourself up, this cultural weightlessness.
You're not a part of your native culture now.
You in fact are gonna try to sort of immerse yourself, throw yourself
into the water, into the culture of the language that you're learning.
You're gonna pretend to be one of them.
And if you do that, and, and I think that's, as I said, also to Dr.
Krashen why very often actors, I remember once hearing Jody Foster
speak French, she has phenomenal pronunciation in her French.
She makes mistakes on her.
gender So it's not to say that her French is perfect, but if we are
concerned about pronunciation, if we think of an actor or an actress that
has to, they're no longer, she's no longer Jody Foster, she is whatever
person she's playing in the movie.
And so actors are used to the idea of projecting them themselves
into the role of someone else.
And when we speak a language, not only do we have to learn the words and
the phrases and so forth and improve our comprehension, which I always
stress, but if we want to improve our pronunciation, if we want to achieve
natural, comfortable pronunciation, comfortable for you using it, comfortable
for the person listening to it - it needn't be perfect - I think that requires
that willingness to play act to, to sort of pretend you're someone else.
And once you've done that a few times, that then becomes the natural
pronunciation for you because you have now moved as a speaker, I use French,
but it could be any language, you've moved from being sort of a foreigner
attempting to speak the language to this new role where you see yourself
as a member of that cultural group.
And I think if we can learn to do that, and it's certainly what I try
to do when I learn a language, we then develop what I would call natural
pronunciation, which is not the same as native pronunciation, because
realistically it's very difficult to achieve, uh, uh, a level of pronunciation
that is where you'll be mistaken for a native, by and large not gonna happen.
However, you can achieve a level of pronunciation that is
very pleasant, very natural.
So that's my recommendation when it comes to pronunciation and I'll leave
you with a couple of, uh, videos that I've done in the past on pronunciation.
You may also wanna visit the, uh, Krashen interview whether, uh, at the YouTube
channel here or in our library at LingQ.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.
