In a foreign language. Now last week

I did a video about why you should never feel ashamed of your accent, and that's true

I still stand by that. If your accent is not preventing you from being understood, then you should never feel self-conscious about it

But if people are having a hard time understanding what you're saying to them, now we have a problem. And fortunately,

It's a problem that can be solved. So that's what we're going to talk about in this video today.

My first tip is to watch what native speakers do with their tongues their lips and their mouths when they're speaking.

Then look in the mirror and try to reproduce that yourself.

Now, if you don't have a ton of access to native speakers that you can watch and creep on all day

YouTube is a great resource for that and it's arguably even better than talking to native speakers in real life because on

YouTube you can slow it down.

For example in Spanish T's and D's are not pronounced exactly the same way that they are in English.

In English, you put your tongue against your alveolar Ridge, which is a little further back in your mouth.

But in Spanish you put your tongue all the way against your teeth when you're pronouncing T's and D's.

So I want to show you a YouTube video of someone that I watched a lot when I was learning how to pronounce these sounds

in Spanish.

I want to show you guys this video that I watched when I was trying to figure out exactly how to

Pronounce T's and D's in Spanish, and I'm going to show you this video of this girl talking

Alright now I want you to pay attention

To what's going on right here in her mouth with her tongue as

It comes against her teeth and I'm gonna play it at full speed first

Then I'll slow it down as we go forward and we'll see what information we can glean from this

(Speaking Spanish)

Alright now that was pretty fast. Let me see if I can back it up here a little bit

That was pretty fast, but if you were paying attention you might have been able to notice her tongue

Popping out of her teeth right here

When she was doing her T's and D's. Now like I said

The really beautiful thing about YouTube is that you can go over here to the settings, and you can slow it down

I actually have my YouTube in Spanish right now

but this says speed. Now we're gonna slow it down to 75% at first, and we'll see how this goes and

We'll see if there's a big difference here

So you can probably tell if you speak any Spanish this was much easier to

Understand than the first time that she spoke, and we only slowed it down to 75% now

It's still kind of difficult to see exactly what she's doing with her tongue. You can see there

She's sticking her tongue out quite a bit

Let's watch another clip of it

So the tongue when we're speaking move so fast that even a 75% speed

it's still kind of difficult to see what's going on, so we're gonna slow it down even further to

50% and we'll go back to maybe right here

Alright now see if you can pay attention and pay close attention to what's going on with her tongue right in this region around her

teeth and it'll be even more clear

So

This was just really useful for trying to figure out exactly

What is going on in the mouth of a native speaker and you can even slow it down even further to

25% if you really want to hone in on that

See her D's there

That was a C there. There's a D. Let's go back to that D. Right here cuz that's really interesting

Now she's in the process of saying a D right here. She was saying "La cantidad de veces que decimos"

and this is the D of "que decimos". And you can see how far

She's sticking her tongue out when she's pronouncing this D.

And that's very different from what we do when we're speaking English.

So this is a great

example of how you can use native speakers to try to figure out exactly what they're doing and sound more like them and

YouTube is just a great resource because you can slow it down and really

Pinpoint what the native speakers are doing. After you spent a lot of time watching what native speakers do with their tongues and their mouths

And their lips and their whole vocal tract then you go to the mirror and you try to reproduce that same thing yourself

My next tip is to listen to your target language a lot without reading it.

I am a huge advocate of reading in your foreign language

I think you should do it all the time

but there's also something to be said for listening without reading and the reason for that is you don't want the

spelling of your native language to influence the way you're perceiving

Your target language. This can be a really big issue because in a lot of languages spelling does not reflect the proper pronunciation

Not to mention in the language that you grew up reading a given letter may have a very different

Pronunciation in your target language. For example, the R in Spanish is not pronounced anything like the English R

They just happen to be spelt with the same letter. R's in Spanish are actually pronounced a lot closer to the way

Americans pronounce the letter T when it comes between two vowels like in water or butter or later.

Now if you're just listening to your target language

There's a good chance you'll pick up on some of these subtleties

But if you spend more time reading it, then there's a good chance that your perception of these letters might be

Affected by the way these letters are pronounced in your native language. The second step will be

Marginally effective by itself, but it will become really effective if you combine it with the third step

And that is repeating the words out loud. You can't learn to play the piano

Just by thinking about it in your brain.

You have to actually move your fingers to get that muscle memory down and it's the same thing with your tongue and your mouth

You have to practice doing it out loud in order to really develop that muscle memory. A great time to do

This is when you're using Duolingo or Memrise. When I use these apps

I actually pronounce every sentence and every a vocabulary word out

Loud after I hear the computer speaking. And the key is trying to reproduce those sounds as closely as

Possible to what you're hearing and not letting your perception of the spelling

Affect the way that you're thinking about it. Another great option is following along in Pimsleur courses

These are audio courses that are either on CD or mp3 format

And they have native speakers speak a full sentence

And then they pause and give you the opportunity to repeat that sentence.

And this is great because it's entirely audio with no reading or writing whatsoever and I think that's a big help and really starting to

Internalize these sounds this option will be free if you have a library nearby that stacks Pimsleur CDs

Another option that I really like is if you can find a song in your target language that is sung very slowly and clearly

Then this is gonna

be really good practice to sing along with that. And this is really interesting if you're

Relatively new to the language, and you don't understand a lot of the words in the song because then you're just practicing pure

pronunciation, and you don't have any preconceived notions about spelling or about how vocabulary words sound you're just listening to the

sounds of the languages and trying to reproduce them my next tip is to learn about the

international phonetic alphabet and to look up the phonology of your language the IPA is a

scientific way of transcribing words in any language that removes almost all

ambiguity about how they're supposed to be

Pronounced remember earlier when I said that ours in Spanish are pronounced almost exactly the same way as certain T's in English there's a symbol

In the IPA that kind of looks like a weird little R

And that symbol is used for this sound no matter what language you're talking about

Remember when I said that DS and T's Spanish are pronounced with the tongue at the teeth whereas in English

They're pronounced with the tongue a little further back

We have a way of marking this in the IPA as well for the Spanish ones you put a little mark underneath and to me

It kind of looks like a little tooth and this reminds me that in Spanish DS

And T's are pronounced with the tongue at the teeth

When you start to see all this stuff spelled out on paper. It really does start to make a lot more sense

I've done several videos about the IPA in the past and so I'll link to some of them up here

And I plan on making more because this is a really interesting topic and I do think it has a lot of

Potential to help you learn pronunciation

In your language if you're not sure where to start learning about the IPA in your language just go to

Wikipedia and type in the language that you're learning followed by the word

phonology and that will take you to a page that has all kinds of charts and all kinds of information

About the language that you're learning

I'll also put some IPA resources in the description below

So you can check those out if you're still confused

In my last tip which kind of pulls all of the rest of these tips together is to practice tongue twisters in your target language

And this really goes back to my tip about speaking out loud because tongue twisters are going to give you a lot of

Repetition and they're really gonna get that muscle memory

forming quickly think of tongue twisters kind of as going to the gym and getting a lot of reps and your bicep curls or

Whatever exercise you prefer to do well repetitions and pronunciation are just as important

I remember when I first learned that T's and DS and Spanish are pronounced differently than they are in English it does you no good

To have the head knowledge that T's are pronounced differently in Spanish from in English if you don't put that into

Practice and develop the habit of actually pronouncing them that way

So what I did was I got a lot of practice pronouncing those words like came up with a nonsense tongue twister

They had a lot of T's and E's in it and I practiced pronouncing them over and over and over

intentionally pronouncing them the Spanish way and not the English Way and this coming twister was todos los toros de Davin de Soto's all of

The Bulls give you treasures, and it means nothing

But that's not the point the point is that I was practicing pronunciation of Spanish T's instead of my usual

English

Now with all these pronunciation tips laid out. I have a few footnotes for you first of all you will never eliminate your accents

100% and I know this sounds kind of pessimistic

But this is just what the science is telling us if you're an adult who starts learning a language as an adult

You never will perfect the phonology of that language to a native-like degree now

You can get really good at pronunciation in that language

But you will never perfect your accents to sound exactly like a native speaker

But that's okay my second note is that you should worry about being understood. Don't worry about speaking perfectly

We've already established that it's impossible to speak exactly like a native speaker

And that shouldn't be your goal your goal should be to improve your pronunciation

So the points that everyone can understand what you're saying and that's totally

Satisfactory to me after you reach that level if you're really interested in phonology

And you want to keep trying to improve yourself

Then by all means go for it the difference between the Spanish tea and the English tea is not

Significant enough that a lot of people are gonna misunderstand what I'm saying because I use the English tea, but I love phonology

It's interesting to me

And I just want to keep learning and I want to keep improving and I do want to sound closer to a native speaker

So I have no problem with spending a little bit of time learning that but once you've reached the level that

99% of the people are able to understand everything that you say with no problem

You don't need to worry too much about that last 1% because we've already established that

Becoming perfect in your accent is not gonna happen

It's not possible and it's really not even that useful and my last note on the subject is never

apologize for your accent this goes back to the video

I made last week about spongebob, but as long as people are understanding what you say it's much better to speak with an accent

Confidently than to have really good pronunciation and be too afraid to speak we should want to improve our accents

But don't let that tear you up inside

There are much worse things than speaking with a slight accent, so that's all I have for you guys today

Thanks for watching my video, and we'll see you guys next