English For Students

Check the pronunciation while (or after) speaking

When you’re speaking and you’re not 100% sure how to pronounce an English word, you shouldn’t try to guess its pronunciation. If you do, you will probably make a mistake, and mistakes can lead to bad habits.

The ideal way to avoid guessing is to check the correct pronunciation before you say the word. When you’re talking with a native speaker (or someone who is good at English pronunciation), you can simply ask them: how do you pronounce this word? It is very important to ask them directly because native speakers have a tendency to ignore mistakes made by foreigners.

When you’re talking with a less competent speaker, you have two choices. The best choice is to say wait a minute, take out a dictionary, and look up the word. (If you can do that, you are truly a hard-core English learner and I tip my hat to you.) You can also try to “talk around” the problematic word — express the same meaning with some other word or phrase that you know how to pronounce.

If you are forced to guess the pronunciation, at least make a mental (or real) note of the word, and check it after the conversation. Even if you mispronounced the word this time, you can make sure you say it correctly next time.

Check the pronunciation while reading
If you were learning a more predictable language like Spanish or German, you would have much less work. You could just learn the spelling of a new word and that would automatically give you the pronunciation.

The irregularity of the English spelling system has an unfortunate consequence: when you learn an English word, you have to learn not only its spelling, but also its pronunciation.

That is why you should use your dictionary to look up pronunciations while you’re reading in English. As you read, keep asking yourself: Do I know how this word is pronounced? Can I transcribe it with phonetic symbols?

If you’re not sure, look it up in a dictionary. This should happen very frequently when you’re a pronunciation beginner. As you learn the pronunciations of the most common words (from a dictionary or from spoken input), you will use your dictionary less and less.

Do you have to do this? Couldn’t you pick up the pronunciations of words just by listening to English? The answer is: you could, but learning from a diction¬ary is better for beginners. There are two main reasons for this:
1. Dictionaries have phonetic transcriptions. When you see the phonetic transcription of a word, you can clearly see what sounds it contains. If you hear a word, you may hear it wrong; for example, you may hear /æ/ where there is an /e/.
2. Recordings in dictionaries are usually clearer than what you will hear in spoken input (movies, TV shows, etc.)

Check the pronunciation while listening
When you’re listening to spoken English, sometimes the following happens: you hear a word, you understand it, but you are not sure what the exact pronunciation is. For example, you’re not sure whether you heard /tʃuːz/ or /tʃuːs/.

When you are in this situation, look the word up in a dictionary. That will let you read the phonetic transcription and listen to a clear recording of the word. This should clear up your doubts.

A handful of tips
• If you think you may forget the pronunciation of a word, add it to your SRS (spaced repetition system), either as a sentence item or pronunciation item.

• Beware of basic words. You have to be a bit obsessive about checking the pronunciation of words, especially in the beginning. You should think of every word as a potential trap — not just the “difficult” words like process or conscientious. English has a lot of basic words (like color, won’t or does) with highly irregular pronunciations. The problem is that everybody knows what they mean, so nobody looks them up in a dictionary. This is a mistake. Here are some examples of tricky pronunciations from the list of 500 most common English words used in our pronunciation software:

enough /ɪˈnʌf/ Not: /ˈiːnʌf/, /ɪˈnoʊ/, etc.
until /ʌnˈtɪl/ Not: /ˈʌntɪl/
market /ˈmɑːʳkɪt/ Not: /ˈmɑːʳket/
country /ˈkʌntri/ Not: /ˈkaʊntri/
early /ˈɜːʳli/ Not: /ˈɪəʳli/, /ˈeəʳli/
lose /luːz/ Not: /luːs/, /loʊz/, etc.

• Beware of “international words”. Certain words, e.g. automatic, bilingual or wi-fi, are known in many European languages with the same, or similar, spelling. These words often come from ancient languages like Greek or Latin, but sometimes also from modern languages like French or English. Because people recognize these words, they don’t check their pronunciation in a dictionary — instead, they pronounce them the way they are pronounced in their native language. This is typically a mistake. English usually has its own pronunciation for such words. Here are some examples:

automatic /ɔːtəˈmætɪk/ Not: /aʊtɔˈmætɪk/
bilingual /baɪˈlɪŋgwəl/ Not: /biːˈlɪŋgwəl/
Orion /əˈraɪən/ Not: /ˈɔːriən/
media /ˈmiːdiə/ Not: /ˈmediə/
psychology /saɪˈkɒlədʒi/ Not: /psɪˈkɒlədʒi/
stereo /ˈsterioʊ/ Not: /steˈreɔ/, /ˈstereɔ/
wi-fi /ˈwaɪ ˈfaɪ/ Not: /ˈwiː ˈfiː/

• While modern computer dictionaries have recordings, I recommend that you always look at the phonetic transcriptions. There are many reasons to do that, but the main one is that your ears are not perfect — they can fool you. Sometimes you hear a /t/ where there is a /d/, an /æ/ where there is an /e/, etc. Even if the dictionary has high-quality recordings, it is always good to see all the sounds in a word written down.

• Don’t push yourself too hard. The most important things in the Antimoon Method are to have fun and get input. You should never let a dictionary get in the way of that. Looking up words in a dictionary can get boring after a while, even if you like dictionaries and really are interested in pronunciation. If you get bored with using a dictionary, it’s OK to give yourself permission to stop for a while. You should also remember that you don’t have to look up every word — you should be primarily interested in words you may want to say yourself. Literary words like ferocity, pertinent or sequin should not be your top priority because you probably won’t need to say them.

• In addition to using a dictionary in your everyday study, consider learning the pronunciations of most common English words in a systematic way. You can get a list of most frequent words and look up their pronunciations in a dictionary. Or you can use our English pronunciation software that teaches you the pronunciations of 500 most frequently used English words and makes you remember them with spaced repetition technology.
by Tomasz P. Szynalski
Source : http://www.antimoon.com