How I Improved My American Pronunciation – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.hello and welcome back to another video where I tell you how I learned English and today we're gonna talk about my American pronunciation and what I did to improve it over the years so first and foremost I wanna talk about the fact that people do not start learning English and start looking into pronunciation right away I think this comes from our school system our traditional school system where we learn a lot in written form and we read a lot and we only hear our teachers but we don't get a lot of chances to speak and typically in a in a large classroom a teacher doesn't really have the time or the resources to try and check if every single student has a good pronunciation or if they understood how to pronounce a word and work through that and I have met a lot of people and I've had a lot of students who had really good English but they were so insecure about their accent and they had a pretty thick accent and they had been studying English for years and years and the reason why I'm saying that it's so good to start with pronunciation right off the bat like the day you start learning your first word that day you have to make sure that you're saying that word correctly the reason why I'm saying that is because it's very hard to unlearn something that you've hammered into your brain for years and then you meet someone you go to a teacher and they're like well you're saying all these words wrong and that could be pretty discouraging and pretty disheartening to know that oh my god I thought that I had been saying all these words decently correctly but then now I have to change everything and the thing is that the more advanced you are in English and you're not working on your accent or pronunciation the harder it is going to be to catch what exactly is wrong and another reason why I recommend everybody to look into pronunciation right away is that you get that little boost of confidence every time you say something in English one word a group of words a construction a phrase a sentence you like what you hear because you say that and you're like oh wait this sounds like the word that I heard on TV the other day or this sounds really good this sounds like something that I would hear this native speaker say and if you don't build that little bit of confidence from the beginning then it is very hard later in life to be confident in your accent and to to be excited to speak so in this video I'm gonna give you my exact steps that I did the exact sounds that I looked into the exact techniques and methods that I applied that really helped me polish my pronunciation and accent so first I had to work on some sounds that were very different in my native language Romanian from English so I had to work on my Rs because in Romanian is R Rodica not Rhodika I had to work on my th's and th's because we don't have this sound in Romanian at all I had to work on nasal sounds because that is very specific of the American accent I had to work on my flap t's like in water better butter because in Romanian we do have a specific but it doesn't really match the exact same tongue position so I had to work on that too and then the letter d or the sound d because in Romanian would be the it's a very flat D in English it's a DEE it's a little bit sharper so these are the the sounds that I thought okay I noticed them being so different right in my native language I have to work on them so what I did was very simple repetition so I would take a word with one of those sounds and I would say that word 20 30 40 times and the thing is I noticed even with my students that people are very afraid of repetition they think it's kind of stupid it's kind of silly so if I would tell someone OK say this word 10 times they wouldn't really say that word at 100% they would just for example I I would ask them to uh say the word I don't know couch 10 times and they would say couch couch couch couch couch but that's like quiet that you're whispering you're not really using the muscles that you're supposed to use in your mouth for this word right so you need to say that word 10 times or 20 times or 30 times but proper each time because you're not repeating it just to remember what it means or something you're repeating it so you could teach your mouth how to move couch couch couch couch couch couch couch like that English pronunciation is a skill like you are developing a skill if you wanted to start driving you wanted to become a car driver you would want to go and practice driving right you can't just read the rules and expect you to be able to drive working on your English pronunciation means that you are working with your muscles with your jaw with your cheeks with your tongue with your lips it's like going to the gym and having to do 20 reps or 10 reps or whatever it is of a certain exercise in order for that exercise to bring results you can't just do five sit ups and expect strong muscles or a round bum you can't just lift a tiny weight and expect your biceps to grow so English is the same thing English pronunciation is the same thing you have these muscles and they need to work differently than they usually are in your native language okay so that brings me to my next point how does my mouth feel so when you're learning a new word you want to be aware of how your mouth feels if you are saying that word that you're having troubles with and you don't feel like your mouth is uncomfortable and it kind of hurts then you're doing it wrong so for example a lot of people have issues with the word girlfriend right it's a pretty tough one girlfriend girlfriend girlfriend right so there's a lot of things going on with the tongue you know with your mouth all of that so if you do not adjust your muscles to this word and to these sounds then you're just gonna keep your native language mouth and you're just gonna say girlfriend or something something that would match the sounds from your native language if you take a very simple word like door or window right when you say window there's a lot more muscles involved than you think when you say the word table when you say the word computer when you say the word lamp cat right there's all of these sounds that are moving and shifting your muscles in your mouth on your face differently than you're used to so if you go to the gym and you leave with a little bit of a sore kind of feeling throughout the body it means that you did you made some effort it means that you are gonna get some results but if you go to the gym you spend an hour there and you leave without being sweaty and without feeling a little sore then what did you do in there so for example if we took some words like this for example this right if I don't adjust my Romanian mouth to the English sounds I will just look at the word and say Zis or Tis Tis right because that's how I interpret those letters through my Romanian brain if I wanna say three I will look at those letters and say sree or tree haha not three morning not morning this is my family this is my family do you see how different that is and that is simply because I do not read those letters as if they were written in Romanian I have to read them as they were written in a completely different language which is English another example is how in Romanian we don't have certain sounds that position our mouths in a certain way for example w right my mouth becomes or my my lips are forming a tube so when I say why where window if I said these words multiple times which is how I improved my pronunciation I was repeating these words like millions of times so if you have some issues with W for example you take all these words and you take them one by one so let's say window if you say window correctly each time for 20 times window window window window window window window window window window window I don't know how many times that was but I can already feel my top lip tingling because this is the feeling you should get when you position your your lips in a different way than you're used to if you say window 20 times and your top lip doesn't start to feel weird or even hurt then you're doing it wrong and you can't just say window window window window window window but that's not the point the point is to train your brain and to tell it what does your mouth look like what does your mouth feel like when you're saying this particular word in Romanian the sound L is actually L L is a lot lighter so if I say I like it I like it I like it it's not I like like I like it I like it and there's a lot of other sounds a lot of other little tiny sounds that you have to work on and change when you switch to English so imagine you don't have a native language you're just a kid learning how to speak that's pretty much how how you should be learning English pronunciation and not look at it not look at the words through your native language brain so if your mouth doesn't hurt after speaking English for about 15 minutes then you're doing it wrong okay the next thing that I was doing and again this is not part of the curriculum this is not part of the usual traditional school system is connected speech so when we learn words in isolation like glass book house suitcase right we only look at the words that are isolated that are individual independent not connected to anything else not put in a sentence not put in a structure of some sort they're basically naked they're naked words they're just there for you to know that this word means that for example if you learn the verb to see or see right I see you you see me this is how you should learn it you should learn it in at least tiny little constructions I see you I don't see you can you see me I don't see anything wrong with that OK so even if you're at the beginning and you are only learning a few words at a time you don't know what the other words mean that's OK because you're learning pronunciation you're not learning vocabulary we don't wanna talk like robots right we don't wanna stop after every single word so the thing is when you know that these words get connected in a certain way with articles prepositions other words around them right it'll also be easier for you to catch these so your listening skills are gonna be better because you're gonna know how real people talk I have had probably every single one of my students say that when a native speaker talks to me it sounds like one long word and it is one long word it is all these words connected it's there's no word word word word no there's word word word word word word like this everything is intertwined OK if you do that from the beginning if you do that at the beginning of your English learning journey you're gonna know what to expect when you listen or when you hear English and you will also be able to produce the same construction the same connection between words and you will be surprised how different the word sounds when you hear it in speech in connected speech compared to when you put it in Google and you click on that audio to see what's the pronunciation because if you write down the word good you read good good OK good means this good but if you hear it in real speech it's gonna be good morning good morning good morning good good good oh I met a good friend of mine I met a good friend of mine good good very short good it's not good it's good so you're always gonna have the impression that you know a lot of these words but your listening skills are going to be so weak because you're always gonna say all I can hear is one big long word because it is one big long word another thing that helps with this even if you obviously can't do that in school or you don't have a teacher who really does that a lot you can do shadowing yourself so you can take a show a TV show a cartoon a speech anything in English spoken by a native speaker and you can just repeat in small little chunks after that speaker even if you don't really know exactly what the words are just try to practice the melody the tone whatever they pronounce later on you will know what they pronounced but for now just try to get that connection going so for example you learn the word job try to say things like I need a job and not I need a job try to say it quicker I need a job I need a job I need a job I'm looking for a job I love my job my job is stressful connected speech is such an important part of the pronunciation department you can't even imagine a lot of people are shocked this thing even exists because all they've done their entire life is learn words in isolation so when you speak you sound a lot more robotic and it's a lot harder for you to get those words out because you're taking them out of your brain one by one okay another fun thing I recommend doing is Tongue Twisters you've seen it on my channel you've seen it on my TikToks everywhere I love Tongue Twisters because they're such a good challenge however at the beginning when you learn English for the first time it is going to be very difficult to do these tongue twisters right the ones that are pretty complicated and complex and like big funny poems or something what you need to do is create your own personal tongue twisters and what I mean by that is you can create a one word tongue twister and sure maybe it's not necessarily a tongue twister officially but that's what I like to call them a personal tongue twister if you have a word that you're having troubles with you're not really sure how to position your mouth it sounds kind of weird you need to take that word and say it 20 30 times fast which makes it your own personal tongue twister so let's say um you're having some issues with the word temporarily a lot of people have issues with the words with the word temporarily temporarily temporarily temporarily right in order for you to practice this word like fully practice it you need to say it at least 20 times in a row as fast as you can at the beginning you can take it a little bit slower and then you can increase the speed making it a tongue twister temporarily temporarily temporarily temporarily temporarily temporarily temporarily temporarily temporarily it's going to be a little bit harder you're going to be like temporarily temporarily right but with practice you will improve and if you don't try to do it and to say it so many times your brain doesn't really know exactly what you wanted to do so you can't just say oh I can't say this word I can't say this word doesn't exist because you can you just have to practice it so that was one word tongue twisters then you can do two word tongue twisters so what I used to do is if I heard something on TV or somebody said something and I liked it I wanted to repeat that so then it becomes part of my vocabulary and that I can and I know that I can pronounce it well okay two word tongue twisters for example you are learning the word decision right you can do it as a one word tongue twister and say it multiple times decision decision decision decision or you can use some adjectives or some other words that are used with this word for example bad decision and you can say that many times bad decision bad decision bad decision bad decision bad decision bad decision bad decision bad decision it does sound like one word now right and do you see how bad ends in d and decision starts with D so you don't need to stop there and say bad decision bad decision you can use 1 D for both these words and you say bad decision bad decision you don't stop bad decision there's no pause there's no break bad decision bad decision bad decision and that applies with a lot of words that end in a consonant and start with the same consonant you only need one consonant in the middle you don't break those two apart I had a great time great time 1 T for both great time great time great time I had a great time great time great time great time great time great time right but to your learning brain great time sounds like great time or something right'cause you're expecting a separate word there and then you move into three word tongue twisters for example let's say you wanna say make a decision or an important decision make a decision make a decision make a decision make a decision right it's not make a decision it's make a decision you say that in one breath make a decision that is your construction that's why it sounds like one long word and native speakers when they take one construction put it next to another construction next to another construction that inside have connected words like that it does become one big long word so start early and you're gonna be prepared for that you're not gonna have any surprises and you have to be okay to look and feel weird in this area your face is going to be making weird movements and your mouth and your lips and your jaw is going to move differently it's gonna be uncomfortable it's gonna feel strange but you just have to make that decision for yourself if you want to improve your pronunciation just know that this is what you need to do if you want to stay where you are then that's okay too but just don't expect to improve magically somehow overnight and the thing is this might actually even look silly or sometimes people don't want to change this much just for a language and that's okay too this is just for people who want to actually take it to the next level I have been learning and speaking English all my life even to this day I can still feel pressure here because I didn't grow up learning English I didn't grow up or not not learning English I didn't grow up speaking English that wasn't the language that I picked up in the first 7 8 years of my life so yeah it does feel uncomfortable to this day but it pays off and you know I learned English and pronunciation 20 years ago I didn't have access to a phone to a laptop to internet you know nowadays there's so many tools there's so many apps there's so many ways to learn pronunciation and to not only learn but actually check it and get corrected you know and you don't even need a teacher you can find free apps for that so it's definitely a whole different world and it should be a lot easier to learn English especially that English is everywhere and you can watch all these American movies and shows if we're talking about the American accent but you have a lot more access to a lot more useful and practical resources so that is a lot better right than 20 years ago however it is your brain that has to do the work it is your mouth that has to make the movements so please believe me if you want to improve make sure you get comfortable with being uncomfortable it will only get better with time I hope you enjoyed watching this video and I hope you learned something new make sure to check my website for some live lessons that I have going on right now some upcoming speaking clubs and stay in the loop for when I'm launching some learning products please let me know if you have any questions and I will see you next time bye