How to Practice Your Intonation In English [Podcast]

hey it's a tower thank you for joining me and today I'm going to share with you another podcast episode from my podcast the influency podcast today we are going to talk about ways to improve your intonation in English the reason why we need intonation is because intonation helps us deliver the message clearly intonation is how we stress words and how we reduce the less important parts intonation helps us deliver the mood and our attitude and understanding the intonation of English helps us communicate clearly and without a lot of friction and this is why I decided to share with you a few tips to help you improve your intonation get a better understanding of what the American intonation is all about and just so you know a lot of these strategies are strategies that I've used myself when I was an acting student and when I was working towards improving my intonation and prosody in English so let's have a listen to the audio of my podcast episode how to improve your intonation welcome to the in fluency podcast I'm Hadar and this is episode number 13 and today we're gonna talk about how to improve your intonation [Music] hey hey everyone I hope all as well have you noticed what I've done there in the first sentence if you listen to the previous episode then you know that I talked about how I introduced this podcast the first sentence that I say and last time I really wanted to change the way I say it so you'll say to yourself what is different or what is up with Hadar and I wanted to do something like welcome to the in fluency podcast but I try to do it now and I it's just so not me and I decided that this is not the direction that I want to go in and instead I took out the melody completely off my speech so I spoke in monotone welcome to the in fluency podcast and the moment I changed I'm sure that you felt something different I'm sure it opened your ears all of a sudden you're like hey what what has changed because melody is really important in delivering messages in engaging people and in just making it interesting because if I were to speak like this the entire podcast episode I have a feeling that pretty soon you'd be tuning out right and me changing the melody going up sometimes going down helps you understand what I'm trying to say because melody is like the audio punctuation if I can say that so you know when there is a comma when there is a period when I ask a question so you have a good idea as to what I'm trying to say and how I'm saying it but if you don't have any indication if I'm not using my voice to tell you when there's a comma when I'm pausing when I'm asking you to think about something or answer me if we were you know speaking to each other face-to-face it would have been a lot harder for you to keep up with what I'm trying to say now why am I telling you all of this first of all just for you to start recognizing around you people who use varied intonation versus people who are more monotone so that's the first thing but another thing that I want you to be attention to is that sometimes our language may be more monotone than English and when we speak English without thinking about the melody we immediately apply the melody of our native tongue which might be a bit more monotone than English English is a very varied language the pitch changes quite often and there's a meaning to the pitch change if you listen to the previous episode you know what it means you know what it means when I go higher in pitch if you haven't then I'm gonna tell you that higher pitch means a stressed word so I actually convey my message I help you understand what is more stressed by using my pitch higher pitch more stress lower pitch less important you don't really have to pay attention right now so if I don't have this variety because also English has so many words in it then it's harder to understand what I'm trying to say to decipher what's more important and what's less important and a lot of languages Hebrew for example my native language is a lot more monotone and if I were to apply the Israeli intonation my English would sound monotone now in Hebrew it works we use other things to stress we use volume for example volume that's another thing we use and we use volume too yeah so we basically go louder when we want to stress something we basically go louder when we want to stress something this is why Hebrew may come across as aggressive but it's basically the way we stress words it all comes down to the language people now awareness is the key recognizing these patterns being aware that the variety is important for clarity to deliver your message to engage people to influence people to persuade people that's like the most important thing so once you're aware of it you start hearing it but it's not enough because you also need to change your speaking habits and your international habits and that takes a little more practice and I know that because when I first started learning the American accent in school in my acting school circle in the square no one spoke about intonation we had speech classes and it was all about pronunciation so I never thought that it was such a huge part of speaking with a better accent and I think that I would subconsciously imitate people I remember working on a scene in having my friend recorded the way she would say it and I would just like imitate it but I focused mainly on pronunciation I think subconsciously I kind of imitated the melody but I didn't think about it I didn't analyze it or I wasn't aware of it as I was aware of the pronunciation and in the second year when we started talking about dialects that's when we discussed intonation a bit more and the melody patterns and the rhythm but it was really quick like four we had one lesson per dialect and we just had to imitate the teacher and do the exercises but never went in depth understanding what are the the elements that comprise this idea of intonation and prosody and it was only when I started teaching the American accent of course he started teaching just pronunciation where I started to explore intonation and I felt that something was missing but I didn't find good enough resources to me that like to tell me okay this is what American intonation is all about so I would do a lot of research I would analyze speeches and try to understand the patterns and I would mark words on the page trying to figure out if there is a system behind it and I did try to explore it more when I studied linguistics at the University but even there I don't feel that I got all the answers and I think I have put in you know hundreds of hours of research and work and practice until I kind of understood the system behind it and I recognized what are the things that I'm doing differently in mind you this was into my teaching career right so I started doing this as a teacher already I started teaching pronunciation in the American accent without having full grasp of American intonation and prosody I'm just saying it's just so you know that it's possible to teach the accent when only talking about pronunciation but it's definitely not enough especially because for some speakers they need to mainly focus on prosody and intonation because some languages divide the sentences differently and the melodies so varied that it makes things sound unclear in English if this melody is applied and this is why I feel that it's such an inherent part of English not of the accent of English of spoken English and it should be taught since day one also understanding this concept and I talked about it in the previous episode too helps you understand native speakers better which is probably one of the most important things because if you can't understand you feel helpless and it's pointless like it's great that you can speak but what would you respond to if you don't know what you were just asked right so understanding native speakers is essential and a part of it is understanding all those reductions and what words are stressed and making sense of all of that together also how to listen to people and I think this should be a different episode of how to understand people how to take notes how to listen to people if you'd be interested in learning more about that then send me a DM on Instagram I'm at Haddad accents way and let me know if you'd be interested in learning more about how to take notes in a meeting or in class when it's in English because I actually have a few cool tips about it so now that you're convinced that intonation prosody is important and if you have already listened to episode number 12 great if you haven't I think you don't have to pause and go back to it but you should definitely go back to it and listen to it because you need to understand it before practicing it and today we're gonna talk about the practical aspect of improving your intonation and I'm gonna give you some strategies and tips and exercises that you can use but if you don't understand the basic concept of content words and function words stressed words and unstressed words and how we stress words in English then you'll be wasting your time a little bit so for that go back to episode number 12 listen to it it's not that long and then I mean not that long come on it's probably half an hour I like to talk and then come back here okay so now I'm gonna share with you the tips and exercises that you can do in order to improve your American intonation [Music] okay the first thing is not going to be something that you've never heard of before because you have if you've listened to at least one intonation video intonation related video or you've been listening to my content for a while and that is imitation exercises now I want to be creative and tell you all these new stuff that you've never heard before but at the end of the day this works and I'll tell you why because in order for you to start understanding intonation and hearing it and using it you have to perceive it you have to recognize it in your brain right and sometimes the only way to do it is through our mouth so by saying it the brain all of a sudden registers it because if you just listen to it without doing anything about it the brain filters out a lot of information and what you're hearing is not exactly what your ear catches does that make sense like it goes into your ear and then it goes through this filter that takes out stuff that are not relevant because it doesn't exist in your native tongue and it's definitely the case with intonation and then you're hearing other things it's how we perceive reality to right something happens and we interpret it so your brain interprets the music as well but if you try to imitate it with your mouth all of a sudden you're trying to be as accurate as possible to the facts which is how it's actually pronounced or the actual music of the sentence or the word or the phrase and then it's easier for the brain to perceive it all of a sudden you notice all those nuances and when you start hearing it you start making it right and this is why imitation exercises are so great especially now with technology that you can play video in half the speed or podcast in half the speed so you have time to do it at ease and it's okay if you don't get the message so much or you don't really understand what you're imitating because you're so focused on other elements so your brain is not actually analyzing the words or the message or the sentence and that's okay like you need to acknowledge that it's okay to do the imitation exercises and not to really listen to the podcast and if you're really interested in listening to the podcast then don't do imitation exercises the first time around you can do it the second time you listen to it so playing it and half the speed and then repeating it and imitating it is something that is extremely extremely helpful because it helps you understand this idea of American intonation even if you don't get it like even if you don't know exactly what it is that you're doing your body gets it you're you you start feeling the language which is really important you start developing intuition and that's how you'll start recognizing in the future if something is right and smooth or if something is a little strange or it doesn't fit so much because it doesn't fit that experience that you have experienced when you imitated someone else's speech okay so imitation now the most important thing here is that you take a voice that you resonate with so don't take a speaker that you really don't like because everyone else is doing it or don't take someone who has a very different vocal quality than yours find someone that you like his or her voice and you like to sound like them so that's that's always good and if you have the text in front of you that's even better this is why I have the transcript ready for you if you want to work with my voice in my episodes so you can download the transcript and listen to it and then repeat it and imitate what I'm saying okay next we have analyzing a TED talk I love TED talks because they're very varied especially the good ones they're varied in terms of intonation they're more conversational again the good one there are some TED talks that are very that just feel recited and over-the-top so I wouldn't choose them but the more popular TED talks are usually the ones that are better in terms of how they deliver it and a good TED talk to my opinion is very conversational it feels like someone is just speaking to you it's not someone giving the speech of their life it feels like you know two people speaking in a room and when you work with TED Talks first it's interesting it's super available you can download the transcript and what I would do there is take a marker a magic marker and first listen to a small part of the talk then as I'm listening I would mark the words that are stressed again if you're not sure what is the difference between stress words and unstressed words I urge you to go back and listen to episode number 12 where I talk about it and then apply it in the exercise that I'm giving you here I'm gonna put a link to that episode in the show notes so then you just like mark all the stressed words usually they are content words nouns verbs adjectives and adverbs and you can then take a pencil and cross out the vowel in all of the reduced words all the function words on an at4 is could would so you cross it out and then the script becomes very visual and it's kind of like the imitation exercise but it's more in-depth here you're actually doing some research in a way and you're analyzing the script and it's more of a listening exercise before you putting it into practice right away then of course practice it so do the imitation exercise but after you will have marked all the stress and unstressed words then it's a lot easier and you get it on a deeper level and I think it's extremely valuable another thing is to memorize a monologue from a movie or a play here's a thing this is sheer experience only in hindsight I know this because I was trying to understand what made it extremely valuable for me like or what has helped me improve my accent and I think having worked with a lot of texts having memorized a lot of texts really helped I had to memorize I think at least two long scenes a week and maybe another monologue here and there and some Shakespeare and I had to work on something for speech classes so I worked a lot with texts and I think that when I did that I had to memorize it and I also memorize the melody and by doing that I created patterns of speech in my head and by the way that was also great for grammar because I memorized patterns and paradigms of speech in my head and years after I remember like using sentences that I've heard before just changing you know some of the words there changing it to fit my needs but I've been using those things that were stuck in my head because I've memorized them a lot of a lot of those phrases and sentences a lot of other people's words and I started giving this to my students as well and you know in my exit makeover program we have different modules and towards the end I give them exercises that are a little out of the box just to get them work comfortable and confident and give them more power and one of the things that we do I ask them to memorize a powerful speech where they have to kind of like use their full voice and get all emotional and angry and the results are remarkable I mean the stuff people do there is just beyond this world I have worked with actors for years and some of the videos that those non the actors created were as good as some of the best audition pieces my actor students submitted really it was incredible but beyond this beautiful experience memorizing a text and speaking freely in English without thinking about what words to use was a very freeing experience and it has stayed with them and it was extremely valuable and definitely when it comes to intonation they all shared that it really helped them notice things and do things that they've never done before so memorizing attacks memorizing a monologue especially a powerful monologue or a really funny monologue that were it choirs versatility is so useful so next time you watch a movie or you watch a TV series and there's like a really good monologue there just remember the scene remember the episode search for the script because all scripts are out there online you can find a script for everything and just take that part memorize it work with the original you can even analyze it like you know we do with the TED Talks and then just go for it do it in front of the mirror once a day and as we say in Hebrew fly on yourself it's a poor translation to a really good expression just like go with it and love yourself and do it with all passion and it's going to be a really interesting experience okay another thing you could do is take a two people scene right before we talked about a monologue this time take a scene and either practice it with someone so do this exercise with someone and this is a good opportunity to invite you to the influency community on Facebook where you can find conversation partners and practice with us in the group we have weekly discussions so it's a great platform for you to find conversation partners or practice partners so you can find someone there and practice the scene with them it's a lot more fun or do it alone now here's what we want pay attention here here it's both the intonation of the back-and-forth dialogue so you want to pay attention to how we end sentences when we make a statement or when we ask someone a question it's different than a monologue so this is really useful in that sense and also the timing like how much time goes between one sentence to another how long do people wait before they respond of course you want to work with the original right like with an actual scene and then you take the script and you work with it but you listen to the original and you should pay attention to all of these things because these are things that we can pay attention to in a monologue and on top of intonation you get a better sense of rhythm and of conversation like a Bic back and forth conversation another thing that is helpful is to sing the melody so for example if you're listening to a movie or a scene or youtube video you can play it ideally in half the speed and then instead of repeating the where it's just repeating the melody it's where you focus that's where your brain starts noticing things and changing things so if you focus only on the melody the brain will start noticing it more that a data that at that mmm-hmm that's the melody of what I just said that at that at that at that at that yeah mmm and then you notice this up going up in pitch and down in pitch and this wavy feel of the voice right because it's not one tone it's not that it's a lot more varied tatatatata and when you play the music with that adapt or with hmm then it's easier for you to start hearing just the music so I would just the hum or the Terra Dada and then say the sentence it's really interesting because even though we know what the music is when we'll use our own words our habits will take over and even though you're thinking hey I'm using this new melody your mouth is going to do something else unfortunately you need to tame your tongue you need to tame your vocal cords and to do that you need to first break the pattern break the pattern of speech and turn it into melody and you just identify the melody and that's one layer and then you add the words but even then it's not enough I would recommend for you to record yourself and listen to the recording and try to pay attention if or try to notice if the hum resembles the melody of the actual sentence where use the words so you never want to take anything for granted when you practice your melody and when you practice your pronunciation now you could say that practicing melody in words is also useful I think that's less effective honestly I think maybe using songs is better for vocabulary or for pronunciation for pronunciation it's definitely good but for melody because you have like this external melody the term and melody it's not very helpful to recognize your brain does this separation oh that's a song that's okay in a conversation I can't do it because then it's gonna sound like I'm singing or then I'm gonna sound artificial which is important to note because a lot of times when people try to apply the American intonation they start feeling artificial so they stop doing it because intonation is something so intimate and so deep that it feels weird to change it into nation and rhythm also changing the rhythm is extremely uncomfortable but the more you do it the more you make your own this is why practice is import and especially fuel to record yourself and listen to it and you're able to give yourself objective feedback don't judge yourself so much be like okay it doesn't sound like me but it doesn't sound bad it sounds like the original right like the person I'm trying to imitate which means it's good if I want to use intonation to be more persuasive when I speak to native speakers because they expect to hear the language a certain way and if you're doing something differently let's say stress it you stress different words or let's say you don't distinguish the more important words by going higher in pitch it'll be just harder for them to understand you now we don't care so much about how they feel necessarily we care about you getting what you want right I mean of course we want to be clear so we are communicative and it's fun for other people to communicate with us but what I'm trying to say is that you don't need to do all that so people feel more comfortable with you because you sound like them no they should feel comfortable because you are communicating clearly that's the most important thing and even what's more important than that is that you need to feel comfortable and you feel comfortable when you're understood when you see that spark in the eye of the listener and when you see that people are engaged and they're answering you and you get them to take action if needed and this is why intonation is my passion intonation is my passion that's a rhyme my friend that's a rhyme let's move on I have two more things for you the next one is to identify your own native intonation pattern in comparison with the American intonation pattern and what do I mean by that let's say you are listening to someone and that person says a certain phrase in English and you're trying to imitate that phrase what I want you to do first is to listen to that phrase in English and listen to the melody and then I want you to say it to translate it and to say it in your native tongue and then to say it as neutral as possible right and then to recognize the melody pattern there and to see how it is different and what you mainly want to look for is big differences for example is there a place where you went really low in pitch and the other person went really high in pitch on that part maybe you want to listen to how they connected words together was there anything different there or maybe the rhythm how long it took you to say it versus how the person said it in English so you want to start paying attention to all of those things why because when you recognize your own patterns it's easier to change because it's easier to say this is sort of the same but this is really different gotta pay attention to this because if there is a huge gap between how you say something and how didn't the native speaker says something then that's the place where you want to focus in on you want to pay closer attention there because that's the place of unclarity that's the place where people would expect it to be one thing and you might be doing something else now I know what you're thinking right now you're thinking wait but intonation is so dependent on the context if it's a question if it's a statement if you want to stress something it's in the red box it's in the red box of course I'm not talking about really unique situations or situations that require further context I'm generally talking now about neutral intonation how things are said in a neutral way I'm gonna talk more about that in the future but because I can't talk about everything today you are going to just feel overwhelmed so yes this is why we're only gonna focus on neutral intonation and as I said do you want to pay attention to the differences I'll give you an example I always give this example when I teach my students I'm gonna say a sentence in English and then I'm gonna say it in Hebrew and I'm gonna use the American intonation then I'm my Israeli intonation I want you to think about the difference between the two the difference in melody I don't want to go home I don't want to go home and loads off the beta Anil or tell us the beta so in English the melody was something like da da da da da da and in Hebrew Teradata right I started rather low and then I kept going down now here's what happens when I apply this intonation on to English I don't want to go home I don't want to go home and then this is where I want to start recognizing the differences the main difference that emerges from this is that in English a home was higher in pitch I don't want to go home right and in Hebrew what I did was that I just dropped down I don't want to go home it was really low in pitch now you may not know where the issue is but if there is a gap then you want to pay attention to it and just look for it when you listen to English but for now I'll tell you that the problem is that when you stress a word you want to go higher in pitch and usually the last content word in a phrase or a sentence is higher in pitch is stressed that's the pattern and if it's not then people will look for other words that are stressed now I did not intend to stress I or want when I said it with my israelian tonation I wanted it to have the same meaning but by not raising the pitch on home and dropping down it made it seem less important so while this is not that of an important sentence if I were to say something more important not stressing the right words just because of my intonation pattern it would result in miscommunication especially when over the phone or speaking on a videoconference it's harder to really get where the other person wants and this is why we want to make sure that we're stressing the right words and recognizing your native patterns versus the patterns of English is really helpful to recognizing the pitfalls that you might fall into when communicating in English so identifying your own patterns and comparing them to the patterns of American English and American intonation is the first is yet another step in developing your awareness and changing your patterns or knowing how to change your patterns when you want because I always say that an accent is like a costume you can put it on and take it off depending on who you're speaking with because when I speak to people who struggle with English I may reduce my accent to help them understand be better so I speak with more neutral vowels my intonation is more monotone but when I speak with an American speaker especially over the phone I have put on my best American intonation because I want to be clear and I want to get what I want from the other person so it's not just about changing your English it's about knowing how to use English depending on the situation and the circumstances the last thing for today and I actually really like this one because they think this was also extremely helpful on my journey is to recognize common patterns what have come to learn is that American intonation or English intonation in general is not that original people use the same patterns in different places and you may hear the same melodies when a certain person speaks right so that person may use the same melodies in different places if it's very much the same that person may sound monotone and yes English speakers American speakers may sound monotone as well if they use the same pitch or the same melody pattern over and over and over again so we want variety but when you listen to people you'll notice that they all have the same pattern for example when people start a new idea there's always what I call that wavy intonation where they start really high in pitch and then they go into that normal American intonation for example last time we spoke you weren't that interested in going to the party with me I never noticed that they put up this new building there I locked the door in the bathroom so don't freak out the data the data that data the data that edit the data did that at the debt at the data right that's how people usually start sentences and they start new ideas when they speak now I want you to start noticing it I want you to listen to English through this lens that I'm giving you right first the stress words versus the unstressed words but also these built in intonation patterns where especially the beginning or at the end did you like it so I went to my friend that up speak that's another pattern so I went to my friend and we talked the entire night and it was really cool now up speak is okay especially in the middle of the sentence I use it a lot when I speak but then I always close it a lot of times you'll hear people just going up and up and up and it always sounds like a question mark at the end which I guess creates more uncertainty it sounds more uncertain than certain but that's another episode up speak but that's another pattern that I want you to pay attention to sarcasm oh really like I'm gonna do that that's really interesting right that tone that quality of voice that little rise in pitch at the end that's another pattern that people use so I want you to start recognizing common patterns that people repeat over and over and over and then if you like it you can use it if you don't like it you don't have to use it but sometimes it's helpful as I said treat it like a costume if you want more about this about common patterns if you want me to analyze a lot of patterns and actually analyze audios of people using the same patterns let me know again send me a DM I'm you can find me at Haddad accents Way on Instagram start a conversation with me I'm always there ok that's it I hope you enjoy this episode and you have some practical tools to start improving your intonation again if you haven't listened to episode number 12 I'm gonna link to it in the show notes below it's also a video on youtube so you can watch the YouTube video as well if you liked this episode please I invite you to subscribe to whatever platform you're listening to or coming over to my website Hadar Shemesh comm forward slash influency podcast and you can subscribe there to get email updates and if you happen to listen to this on itunes please rate and review that is going to really help me spread the word and allow this podcast to reach more and more people so everyone will be able to practice their intonation one day thank you so so much for being here for tuning in for doing the work for being passionate about English I love you I will see you no I won't see you because that's a podcast I will speak to you in the next episode bye [Music]

Channel: Accent's Way English with Hadar

Views: 185,848

Keywords: hadar intonation, american intonation pdf, hadar shemesh intonation, intonation exercises, intonation exercises sentences, english intonation, intonation in english, rhythm and intonation of american english, american english intonation, intonation pronunciation, intonation exercises english, accents way with hadar, intonation audio examples, functions of intonation, importance of intonation, intonation and stress, How to pronounce intonation, hadar shemesh podcast

Id: Y3JOteXB9do

Length: 41min 0sec (2460 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 30 2020