How to Improve Your Intonation | British English Lesson

hello everybody this is Elliot from ETJ English and today we're talking about probably one of the most important parts of pronunciation or actually probably one of the most important parts of English in general intonation let's do it your intonation is just as important as the words you choose this is something I have read in many books about phonetics linguistics yes vocabulary is important yes grammar is important yes vowel sounds and consonant sounds are important but intonation is the heart and the soul of all of this and we all want it all of my students one of the first things they want is a better intonation and yes there are rules there are things you can learn about intonation you can definitely learn the techniques and tips of what natives do but it's very very particular and things can change and things can be very specific but also very nonspecific at the same time it's such a complex topic and we all want it why because we are human you my students are human and humans always want the thing which is the most difficult to get and that's the truth there are lots of things I want in life which are very very difficult I could easily have something else but I want the thing which is more difficult and I'm sure you are the same anyway I'm going to give you just a few useful tips for improving your intonation some things which you can do to make your intonation better now of course the first thing I need to mention is you need to learn the rules you do need to know the reasons why we use particular tones and understand the names of different tones just so you know how it works and of course you need some stress and rhythm these are all things you could learn in my pronunciation course or from an English teacher the link to my pronunciation course is in the disc in box below but it's not just that you can learn rules but there's only a certain distance that the rules can go which leads me on to point number one I want you to imagine intonation is a bit like a song right imagine you're driving in your car and you do this every morning on the way to work and every time you're driving into work the same song seems to come on the radio is a very popular song at the moment everybody loves it it's really really popular maybe you like the song maybe you don't like the song no matter what you're hearing it every time you go into work because the radio keeps playing it and then you find maybe after a few days of hearing this song you've started singing it to yourself you start hearing it in your head because you're around it so much a good way to describe this in a native expression were to say that you have the song stuck in your head ok great expression there and this can happen with intonation if you do the right things so the reason why the song is stuck in your head is because you're hearing it all the time and your brain naturally just wants to wants to wants to replay it and that's what intonation is if you are listening to the accent a lot you're hearing the tone the way that people sing the song of English naturally you're going to want to do it yourself if no again because it's such a difficult topic I can't just say imagine English is a song hey now you have good intonation that's not how it's going to work there are lots of other things you need to do as well number two I want you to understand that intonation is also your personality okay my intonation is very different to my sister's intonation my intonation is very different to my girlfriend's intonation or my dad's intonation anyone's intonation the reason why is because I have my own personality so lots of people say that imitation technique is perfect it's the best way to improve pronunciation or intonation yes it's fantastic but do you want to sound like an actor or an actress no imagine you the only person you've been listening to is Princess Diana and you really want to sound like Princess Diana she did have a fantastic pronunciation a great intonation but then imagine you know you're trying to copy Princess Diana but you are a 50 year old man with a very deep voice yes imitate people imitate the way that they go up and down but remember you're not trying to be someone you're just trying to copy the techniques they use so instead of thinking how they say this or how they sing the song if you like instead think about the technical side of it are they going up at the end of a sentence by the way we do that to show we have more to say say or are they going down at the end of a sentence we do that to show that we finish speaking think about those technical things once you know the rules you can analyze the way people speak be yourself use your own tones and leads this leads me on to my next point point number three be playful have fun okay the more fun you have with intonation the more you're going to be again yourself for lots of people the most uncomfortable part of learning intonation is the fact that British people go up when they speak quite a lot you know in the middle of our speech we might go up particularly my Chinese and Russian students find this very difficult they find it very very difficult to go up the reason why is because lots of people are used to always going down every time they speak they have to go down and there is no tone in their voice but when you listen to British people we're stressing worse to show that they are important we're using our tone as a tool to make ourselves hurt to make ourselves sound interesting and to make people want to listen to us be playful go up go down experiment with different things and remember to mostly play with your intonation around the stressed words the words which are important in your sentence give them some intonation give them a bit of up downtown it's instead of saying it's really good say it's really good good okay an up-down tone is a fantastic way of showing emotion some other really useful things just some really important words I mentioned this in a lot of my videos and it's kind of becoming a meme now it's the word patience but this word is just as important and this word is repetition repetition repetition you need to be repeating lots repeating the tones the waves the sounds that we make and you can do this like I said through imitation and you can also do this from learning the rules so on one hand you have patience right you need to take your time understand the intonation in particular not just pronunciation but intonation takes a very very long time so you have the patience if you also have that repetition and you push them together patience and repetition sorry about my blisters I've been going to the gym if you have that patience and that repetition and you're using them together you are on to a winner repeat repeat repeat every day do some training imagine it's singing practice okay and finally step out of your comfort zone if you go up to a native and you start using some different tones which you're not familiar with it might feel uncomfortable because you are so used to maybe always using a falling tone but remember that's not normal to us so you're learning something new which is normal for us so using the thing which is normal for us isn't going to sound bad it's going to sound good it just might feel uncomfortable for you in the beginning you can learn everything about intonation and I guess speed the process up by learning with me on my pronunciation course I also give feedback on whatsapp with voice messaging and WeChat from only four members who join my course okay is only available for people who join the course you can join my course by clicking the link in the description box below if not I will see you next time in my next YouTube video cheers guys bye [Music]

Channel: ETJ English

Views: 193,136

Keywords: british intonation, how to improve intonation, british english, british accent, etj english, etjenglish, intonation, intonation lessons, pronunciation lesson

Id: rUY8LEMOYkQ

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2019