This article will be helpful for those of you who believe you have a good command of the English language. You can speak fluently, you know the words, you know the grammar, you’re clear enough for most native speakers, however, you might get the feeling that you don’t sound interesting when you speak English. You feel there’s just simply a big gap between how you sound and how native speakers sound. You probably find it hard to follow native speakers on TV. You still rely on subtitles to follow the actors. Most importantly, you’re not happy about the fact that you are sound monotone, you sound like a robot! So, what this page will do for you is walk you through 4 ESSENTIAL STEPS to transform your English from Robot English to Human English.
There are 4 features you must know about. Just knowing about them is not going to make much difference though I’m afraid. You have to practice them, practice them until your jaw hurts and your throat goes all dry. If you master those 4 features, even if you still pronounce the [b] as [p], [d] as [t], [th] as [d] and [v] as [b], it seriously won’t matter much. The 4 features are all related to intonation. If you don’t know what intonation is and you don’t want to be confused, just think of it as that thing that makes the language meaningful, smooth, musical and…well, human (as opposed to robotic). So the 4 features. Without further ado, the 4 features are:
1-Vowel length: Very short, short and long
When you speak English, you have to make sure you’re shrinking some vowels and stretching others. Shrink and stretch. Remember that. Think of a rubber band. So if you’re saying:
Can you stop it?
You can easily shrink [can you] so it sounds like [kenya] and stretch the [o] in [stop], what that means is that the time you spend on [can], [you] and [it] is way shorter than that on [stop]. It would be like [pa pa paaa pa?]. if you end up saying [pa pa pa pa], it’ll put everyone to sleep zzzzzzzzzzz.
Now, the shrinking process is often referred to as “reduction”. We reduce the length of many vowels when we speak naturally as we believe the vowels we’re reducing are not extremely important for the person to hear fully. We know they can understand. We sort of save our breath for the long ones.
The most common phenomenon of “vowels reduction” is the schwa sound. The schwa sound can be so short that most learners can’t hear it. It’s probably one of the main reasons that many learners can’t understand native speakers. So, in the case of the schwa sound, you would have to imagine [p p paa p] instead of [pa pa paa pa].
2-Sentence stress
Right. Let me see how I can explain this. Look, if I say to you [the], would you have any mental image of [the]? I mean [the] has no meaning itself right? Same thing goes for [an] or [was] or [it] or [and] or [but] etc. Such words are called “function words” because they really can’t stand on their own. They simply have a job to do. They have a function. While words like [boy] would instantly trigger your brain to produce the image of a boy. [boy] has a meaning. If I say [red], you know the color, you brain will produce an image of the red color. Got it? Usually, NOUNS, VERBS, ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS carry meanings, they carry “content”, hence called “content words”. So generally, we stress content words much more often than we would stress function words. For example, your friend goes
If you told me you were coming, I would have waited for you.
What are the content words in this sentence? Told-coming-waited.
Now, we do not stress the entire word, we only stress the main syllable and sometimes we stress two syllables (in long words), the primary and secondary syllables.
The rest of the sentence consists of function words, which are normally pronounced without stress, unless there is a reason for us to stress them. For example:
If you told ME you were coming, I would’ve waited for you
=
you told my brother, you didn’t tell me.
3-Voice pitch
Many students and teachers confuse pitch with stress. They’re not the same. There are definitely times when they overlap but they remain different. Pitch has more to do with the emotional state of the speaker. It has to do with the speaker’s mood and attitude. Thanks to pitch, I know how you are feeling at the time you’re saying the sentence. In other words, without applying pitch changes, there’s no way for me to know if you’re saying the sentence above with regret or anger, offensively or courteously etc. Pitch gives speech another dimension which words alone can’t convey. That is why there are good actors and bad actors for example, good actors can use their voices (and of course body) to give meaning and a dimension to the words on paper. That is the best way I can explain pitch at the moment. Feel free to click on THIS LINK for more.
4-Connected speech
The last one is very complicated, probably as complicated as pitch. If you are at a point that you can say an entire sentence as ONE STREAM OF SOUNDS, it means that you’re now aware of how each phoneme gets modified (changed) before or after the other to maintain proper (natural) rhythm and speed. No wonder people think it is impossible to reach native-like proficiency after the age of 14, it’s just because it’s so so so very hard. Native speakers connect the sounds together naturally, that is without being aware of it. All they know is that they have to go from A to B within, say 3 seconds, and just because they have done it so many times in the past, their muscles have memorized the sequence of movements that occurs during the production of a particular stream of sounds. It all happens seamlessly. It’s muscle memory.
These are the 4 must-learn (or teach) features of native English that you must train yourself or your students to apply. So…
do you think you now know enough about these 4 features to use them in your practice or in your classroom? Here’s a little test for you: Read the following sentence and then answer the questions below.
How long have you been studying English for?
1-Where are the short and long vowels in the following sentence?
2-Which words are stressed, which words are not?
3-Which words can we connect?
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