Ian’s Blog

English Speaking (Volume 01)

Have you ever dreamed of speaking English like those native speakers?

Here’s some tips I would like to share, and I hope this will help to make you a mouth of native english speaker.

Well, let’s see the following sample sentences :

“Do it!”
How do you read it? Do you read it word by word as “Do-it”? Try the whole sentence as a whole word, and see what you’ll have…
“Doit”, huh? It sounds better, doesn’t it?

“Get away”
Same, do not spell it as “Get-a-way” or “Get-away”…
Make it “Getaway”…

“What is happening over there?”
Again, it shall be read as “Whatishappeningoverthere”
And, please take note that for every single junction of the words, where there is at least one vowel involved…
“Whatishappeningoverthere”.
We don’t read the “What is…” as “What-is…”, but rather something like “Wha-tis”. And the same thing goes to “…happening over…”, it rather sounds like “…happeni-ngo-ver…”.

In short, allow no ’splitter’ or no gap between the words of a sentence when you’re making them out of your mouth…

‘Remember, mouths don’t read ’spaces’, but words and punctuations.’

English Speaking (Volume 02)

Pronunciation is rather another important thing to make a native English speaker’s mouth.

Let’s try these words:

“Climbing”
Some pronounce it as ‘claimbing’, but it is correctly pronounced as ‘claiming’.

“Determine”
It is not pronounced as ‘ditermain’, but rather ‘ditermin’. Although the [mine] is pronounced as ‘main’, but that doesn’t mean it can be taken the same way.

For every single word, we have to read every single character in it. For instance :

“Stunt”
Some people read it as ’stan’, being too lazy for the “-t” at the end of the word. Why not take it the right way, read it as ’stant’, so when you have any word followed behind, like “on”, or “if” or any other word that starts with a vowel. Then you may do it as what was told in Volume 01.
“…stunt on…” as ’stanton’, “…stunt if…” as ’stantif’, so it wouldn’t be ‘…stanon…’ or ‘…stanif…’, because “Stunt” and “Stun” are two different words. You don’t wanna say “Stun” but actually you mean “Stunt”, do you?

English Speaking (Volume 03)
There are some words, or rather, some characters taken incorrectly.
For example, the character [A], [K], [J], [O]…
[A], as ‘ei’, not ‘ehh’, so [cake] = ‘keik’, not ‘kehk’
[K], as ‘kei’, not ‘keh’, so [okay] = ‘oukei’, not ‘okeh’
[J], as ‘jei’, not ‘jeh’, so [James] = ‘jeims’, not ‘jehms’

Some people say “Come here…”, and that might sound like this ‘gam hier’. Try to make the tone lighter, as ‘kam hier’…
“Cannot…”, sounds like this ‘gehnot’, which the proper sound is ‘kenot’…

To be continued…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Ian's Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.