5 Difficult Sounds in English Language Pronunciation (Most Can't Pronounce)

English is full of difficult sounds am i right but some sounds might be difficult for you but easy for other English learners why is this why is it difficult for my Brazilian English students to pronounce the R and the H sounds why is it difficult for my Asian English learners to pronounce the R versus the L and for my Arabic speakers the P and the B are a big challenge well this all relates to your native language your mother tongue the sounds that you grew up with but there are five sounds that across the board for every English Learner are challenging and I know this because I've been teaching for about 15 years and I've taught students from all over the world from over 134 different countries so I have heard a lot of different challenges in English pronunciation and I help you to improve them let me share something that's really important before we talk about the most difficult five sounds a sound is not a letter when you think about the way that words are written you think of the letters you use to spell them but a letter is not a sound a sound is not a letter it could be but it is not always this way one letter for one sound for example th two letters make one sound either or so this is a sound a phoneme it is represented by two letters other sounds could be represented by two letters as well like cou could be C K but other sounds could be just one letter like before love is an L and so on so I want us to be really clear that a sound is no always just one letter and that's really where we have to begin to open our minds to think about sounds as just sounds and not the same as the way we spell the words because this is where we have those difficulties I mentioned my Brazilian students struggle with the h and the R and Asian students struggle with R and L Arabic speakers with P and V and this is because of the way you think of the words spelled on paper in English because in your language if you saw these letters you would pronounce them with a different sound so you are transposing the rules of your native language onto English and we can't do that because the rules of English are different than the rules in your native language sounds can be represented by letters letters can represent sounds but they are not always equal are we good are you together with me give me a yes in the comments if we can go ahead first of all a lot of English teachers and a lot of English learners think that it is essential to have perfect pronunciation in order to communicate and this causes a lot of stress because it can take years or perhaps even a lifetime to get that perfect native like pronunciation it may honestly never happen especially if you have learned English later on in life you could develop a perfect native accent but you might not and that's okay because I'm here to tell you that communication and clear communication expressing yourself and being understood is not dependent on whether you can pronounce these five sounds correctly or really any sound correctly honestly it is not essential to have perfect pronunciation for example if an english learner says to instead of the it's a common mistake or pronunciation with an accent for an English I will still understand you if you say tanks teacher and not thanks teacher I will still get it no it's not perfect it's not native-like but you're still communicating I understand that you wanted to say thanks teacher I know what you mean from the context even if you say something like turd instead of third well other people might giggle and laugh a little bit but we will still understand what you mean to say from the context for example the third place I lived was Boston if you said the third place I lived was Boston it might make me laugh a little bit but I still understand what you meant to say you were communicating successfully even without the perfect third pronounciation so perfect pronunciation of every single sound in English is not necessary for communication however perfecting your pronunciation can really help to communicate faster to help your listener by reducing the cognitive load by helping them to understand you faster especially if you're speaking with someone who is not used to hearing someone with your accent there are a lot of people a lot of English speakers who have not ever spoken with someone who speaks English as a second language now if you speak to me your English teacher I will probably understand you because I'm so used to hearing a variety of accents but if you go to a small town in the middle of America and you meet someone who has never left their town or never interacted with someone from another country who speaks another language they might have more difficulty understanding you so of course it's a good idea to try to speak with a more correct or native like pronunciation what I'm saying is you don't need perfect pronunciation in order to start communicating I don't want that to stop you or make you hesitate or shy because you might mispronounce a sound or a word it's ok but having more native-like pronunciation can help with your confidence it can make you feel more like you fit in with other fluence or native English speakers so of course if it makes you feel better definitely keep working on your pronunciation and your accent reduction you should however in my opinion be very proud of where you're from and where your accent with pride some people think that it's really cool and sexy to have an accent so if it's not hurting your communication with other English speakers then why completely get rid of it or maybe you can have it both ways where sometimes you speak with a kind of perfect native accent but other times you choose to leave your accents on a little bit for fun it's nice when you have options right so here I've told you the truth before getting into the 5 most difficult sounds in English which I'm about to share with you I wanted to preface that or to first say that you don't need to master these sounds to start speaking English in fact the more important point to learn that is rarely taught or spoken about in English class is stress not the kind of stress you feel when you're going to have a test in English class but the stress where we put kind of an accent on words in English or we make part of a sentence louder or give it more weight this is stress and again because of time I'm not going to teach about stress in this lesson but if you would like to know more about it I'm going to make a lesson about it next week so make sure that you are subscribed here to go natural English so you don't miss it and if it is already published I will link to it as soon as I publish it in the description and up there so what are the five most difficult sounds to pronounce in English and how can we practice them well let me tell you number one starting with what I consider the easiest of the hardest sounds is the th sound and I know it's difficult so we're starting from a challenging place to begin with but number one is th pronounced in two different ways as in father and as in theater let's practice those words again father father and theater theater I'm going to move quickly here so make sure that you practice along with me to practice these sounds and also watch the way that my mouth moves now it's very important for your pronunciation to understand how to use your mouth I'm going to talk more about that in just a moment but let's talk about these five most difficult sounds to pronounce first number two the sound which is represented in spelling most of the time as ER but not always for example the word nurse it's spelled and you are s e but we pronounce it nurse the same as the ER sound on the end of the word father nurse nurse father father this is an e R sound a which is also called in many cases an are colored vowel because we have vowels like you that actually sound like an e are the next difficult sound to pronounce it's a very interesting one I love this sound it is called the schwa sound now that's not how you say it but that's actually the name of the sound and it has a very important role in English pronunciation the schwa sound sounds like when you get punched in the stomach and you go oh or if you forget something or have a small problem and you say uh-oh so it's this uh sound this is the unstressed sound in many English words and so it can be spelled in many different ways with many different vowels for example the word amazing amazing it's not amazing it's amazing amazing amazing so many words that have more than one syllable in English have a stress syllable and then either before or after the stress syllable you will hear the schwa sound amazing let's try another word entrepreneur did you hear the schwa sound it comes after the first stressed syllable ah truff preneur entrepreneur so that is the schwa sound coming out again but with a different vowel the first word amazing is spelled with an A and the second word the schwa sound is spelled with an E entrepreneur number four is a sound that actually it's a name of a sound that could be many many different sounds some kind of cheating a little bit here consonants clusters so a consonant is any letter that is not a vowel a cluster is a group of them so for example the word cluster has a consonant cluster with the cut 'la sounds cluster another word friend has two consonants together or a group a cluster for end the F and the are make a cluster another word with a consonant cluster is stretch we have to rule the s T and R sound so we have three consonants that are clustered together and then the T CH sound at the end of the word is actually one sound it's not a consonant cluster just FYI so consonant clusters can be really difficult because we have so many consonants too and in English we don't need to add vowels between them next number five it's also okay I'm kind of cheating on this one a little bit because it's also five different sounds for number five which are long and short vowels actually ten different sounds five different vowels I'm sorry guys I am cheating here giving you a lot of difficult sounds it's a ten for one here so long and short vowels for example Apple and ape or like and lick or umbrella and usually robbed or robe and the word election can have a long and a short vowel or a short and assured vowel depending on how you pronounce it people pronounce this word election or election it just depends what region you are from but both are correct so how do you improve your pronunciation if that is what you would like to do well it is not by simply repeating these sounds over and over this it can help if you're doing it the correct way but if you are repeating incorrect sounds over and over it will simply make it worse so what you need to do is first understand the sounds and that the sounds are not necessarily letters they're not necessarily the same and second you need to understand how your mouth works how to position your tongue your lips and your airflow and your voice these are all important mechanics for making a sound your voice is a musical instrument and it's quite complex but there's no reason why you can't learn to use it now I would love to talk about this more but for the sake of time I'm going to have to wrap this up but if you would like me to make a video about how to use your mouth to improve your pronunciation then tell me in the comments and if we get enough requests I will make that for you one of my students chyna told me that after five minutes of me explaining how to place his tongue to make the L sounds he finally got it after five minutes when he had been studying English for over ten years and never got it up until that moment so if this sounds interesting to you let me know in the comments and I'll be happy to make a lesson about that special announcement I have a live online free English fluency training I'd like to invite you to join the link is in the description I think I can link to it up here as well and you can sign up for free to do a live fluency training with me showing you how to improve your fluency your pronunciation and your confidence in English so check the link in the description to find out more it's also go natural English comm slash live if you want to just type that in I hope to see you there and now if you would like to learn more about how to sound more American with your pronunciation I know a lot of you are studying North American English in particular and I can help you with that as a native English speaker from North America myself this next video up here is about eight ways that you can speak more like an American improving your American accent specifically about pronunciation so that's the next place the next video lesson that I recommend for you right now I'll see you there

Channel: Go Natural English

Views: 70,986

Keywords: American Accent Training, Go Natural English, learn english, english pronunciation, english lesson, th sound, native english teacher, how to pronounce, english pronunciation practice, improve english pronunciation, learn english speaking full course, english pronunciation practice american accent, english pronunciation lessons, english lessons for intermediate, th sound pronunciation, speak english like an american, gabby wallace, language

Id: RkFk12NVzl8

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020