FIX THIS TO IMPROVE

YOUR SPEAKING

What can I do to improve my

speaking?
Why don’t native speakers
understand me?
Where should I start when working
on my speaking skills?
What should I do to try to get rid of
my accent?
I get these types of questions
literally every
other day. Speaking is important,
it’s this unique way for people
to communicate with each other
and get their point across.
Speaking another language is hard.
Nonetheless speaking another
language, specifically
English, because it’s an
international language, can open
many doors for you.
 It can help you with your career
and your personal
life. We all know this. Then what
we also
know is that we have to practice.
We
actually have to get those words
and sentences
out of our mouths every single day,
as much as possible. It’s key.
The thing that distinguishes a
professional from an amateur
is that a professional never stops
learning
and working to improve their
skills.
Some people just don’t do this and
complain that they can’t
speak. Some people are very
resistant to this whole idea of
practicing, because it is hard work
and it has to be consistent.
But we’re not talking about those
 people
right now because and thankfully
there are
those and you are one of them if
you’re watching this video, that
do practice and learn. But
sometimes you just hit
a plateau. It’s when you reach a
certain level
and then you’re stuck, it’s like
there’s no progress anymore.
Well based on my personal
experience
and my experience working with
my students
I’ll tell you - one thing that is
frequently overlooked and
underestimated
but has a large impact on your
speech is
stress - word stress and sentence
stress.
Not getting the stress right messes
 with people’s pronunciation
big time. Maybe you have heard
that English is a stress-timed
language,
which means some syllables will
be longer
stressed ones and some shorter
unstressed ones, compared to
syllable-timed
languages where each syllable
takes
approximately the same amount of
time. Putting the
in the wrong place makes it very
difficult for native speakers
to understand that word let alone
the whole sentence.
And it can even change the
meaning of the word. However,
putting the stress in the right place
usually helps us
with knowing where a true vowel
has to be pronounced
and that all the rest of the syllables
have to be
reduced, meaning those other
vowels have to be pronounced as a
schwa.
And I said usually because we also
have words with a secondary stress
but it is weaker than the primary
stress.
It will make your speech a lot more
clearer.
I’ll give you a couple of examples.
but not then we have
In Compound nouns for example
the stress usually goes on the first
word
Now consider these word pairs
where changing the stress changes
the meaning of a word.
I have the whole video with these
words compared.
You can click the link above head
to watch it. And I'll link it in the
 description.
The same goes for sentences. In a
sentence,
we stress content words that are
important for a message, therefore
we need them to
stick out. And we reduce function
words,
those that serve their purpose of
course
but we don’t need to pay our
listeners attention directly
to them. That is what creates this
nice
rhythm to the American
pronunciation, that
contrast that non-native speakers
really struggle with.
So when a native speaker is
listening to someone their ear hears
those
important words and that’s how
they get the gist of a message.
 But when people stress
every single word, thinking that
they are being
very clear or when they stress a
wrong word
in a question or sentence it will
take a native speaker a second to
think
and try to make out what those
people are trying to say.
Consider these examples that I
took from an accent
reduction introduction lecture from
the University
of South Carolina. They will give
you an idea
of stressed and reduced words.
When you say them you can clap
to feel the rhythm.
It’s a great illustration of a stress-
timed language.
Even though each sentence has a
different amount of words,
it takes the same amount of time to
say them
because of this contrast between
stressed
and reduced words.
The cows have been eating the
grass. Nobody talks like that
Now, listen to this example.
In this case we add one more
descriptive word
that needs to be emphasized- one
more content word.
And now the rhythm has changed.
And people oftentimes call this
“fast speech”.
When this is just natural speech
that is created
by this beautiful contrast between
stressed and reduced words. Now a
very
effective method that I personally
swear by
is shadowing or imitation.
 It’s when you copy a native
speaker’s speech.
Exactly what they say and how
they say it,
stressing the words they stress,
using the
intonation they use. You can click
the link above my
head to watch a video on how to
know that you’re imitating
correctly.
And now, I want you to take a
look at a very good example of
shadowing
Although there are certain
guidelines
for word stressing and I don’t call
them rules because
there are too many exceptions.
Although
we have them and I’ll get to them
in a second. I
personally recommend to listen a
 lot,
and pay attention to the way native
speakers speak
and shadow them of course. When
you come across
a word that you don’t know or are
not sure how to pronounce
look it up! Check it’s meaning and
check
it’s pronunciation. I like
Dictionary.com
and Youglish. That’s a great
resource.
You can type a word you need in
the search box,
choose an accent and listen to that
word being said by native
speakers.
Now lets take a little break to talk
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Now lets get back to our topic and
lets talk about the rules.
 these first two guidelines have
many
exceptions to them and are
applicable only to two-syllable
words.
Now these following rules are
more reliable.
Put the stress one syllable before
the suffix if a word ends in these
suffixes
Put the stress two syllables before
the suffix if a words end in these
suffixes
When you see these suffixes –
stress the suffix
Bye

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