i need to improve on my pronounciation, can you listen to it and point out the biggest problems and gimme some advice? i think my issue is mainly with vowels, english vowels are retarded. but so am I
thanks
inb4 show tits and get out
im gon stay.
https://voca.ro/14v9xI6965XR
https://voca.ro/1iZOK1VYq3of

>>33365776 (OP)
You are unable to pronounce the “the” sound, which you pronounce as “de”.
Your vowels are to extreme, you need to pronounce the vowels as though you are holding your teeth together at all times.

>>33365793
fuck, true, ill try being a parody of a cali girl and speak through my teeth. thanks!!!!!

>>33365803
https://voca.ro/1axuINkmWwYx
im failing at the southern accent too, but im having fun.

Yes, English is retarded, agreed. I hate it.

What you are doing is reading the letters and not saying the word. You do this because you don't know how the word is pronounced as a whole, or in relation to surrounding words. Perhaps you learned them from a book, instead of through speech. You have endlessly copied and recopied your own internal "book speech" versions of words, at the loss of natural speech. It is harder to practice with and copy humans though, when developing your language skills. You have applied your own language's vowels to English vowels. Duh, it's easier that way because having 40 vowels or whatever is stupid. Everybody will understand you, but it just sounds odd. You have the advantage of being fluent, which is the dream. The accent part is just polishing, at the point you are at, Good on ya for reaching out and trying to improve!

As somebody who is not fluent in a foreign language I have been studying for 2 years, but can say and pronounce everything pretty excellently... except somebody might say to me:
"wow you say every word perfectly but your grammar sucks lol. what do you mean tho?"

(continued)

>>33365865
What you need to do is get yourself an audiobook of your favourite book, plus the physical book. This is my super secret language hack. You should not focus on the whole story beginning to end, that is too much. You just need one chapter or section. I do various things to change it up. Passive listening is easy, and has like no barrier so you can do that every day. But sometimes I will read along in the book as I listen. Other days I will also copy the speaker word-for-word as he speaks. Other times I will try to read the book aloud - these are probably the most beneficial, because I see the disconnect between my interpretation and the original, and then I can't wait to listen again and correct those little mistakes.
One consistent thing I have done, is that I have been listening to one specific 15 minute chapter in my native language, and my target language, nearly daily for a year or so. I listen to other chapters casually and randomly, but this one I have nearly memorised and I can copy it easily. I can't tell you how pricelessly helpful this strategy has been for pronunciation.

>>33365854
Haha, I can't actually tell too much of a difference... But somehow it might be better, actually. Have fun with it! Just try different stuff! Whatever keeps you into it.

>>33365776 (OP)
https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey/videos
watch this guys videos and also check out the pronunciation dictionary he refers in some videos
>>33365793
>You are unable to pronounce the “the” sound, which you pronounce as “de”.
that's how you are supposed pronounce it in regular speech unless you want to mimic a german accent

>>33365776 (OP)
The answer depends on whether you want to sound British or American. As I'm British, I'll focus on that.

The most important thing to work on is the difference between long and short vowels. For example, the difference between "rich" and "reach", "cot" and "caught", or "can" and "khan". In Romance languages there tend to be a much smaller range of vowel sounds. My partner, for example, is from Italy, and there are only seven vowel sounds in Italian; in British English (depending on the dialect) there can be as many as twenty distinct vowels, and distinguishing between long and short versions gives foreigners a lot of trouble. Practise saying "Who would know aught of art must learn, act, then take his ease" and then "my loud voice nears their moors" - that covers most of them!

Most vowel sounds in English are more open than Romance equivalents.

Also, be very mindful of the neutral vowel, which is the sound most other vowels tend to degenerate into if you're in a hurry :) or the vowel sound in "huh". It's a very common sound in English. For example, a word like "teacher", foreign speakers tend to render as "tea-chair," whereas it should be "tea-chuh".

That's also a good example of the fact that in RP British English, the letter "R" is generally silent, unless it comes before a vowel that is part of the same syllable, or at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel and you're eliding the two. So, again, the "r" at the end of "teacher" is silent; in the word "river", you pronounce the first "r" but the second is silent ("ri-vuh", with a short "i" and a neutral vowel). The English "r" is also quite different from other languages: further forward in the mouth.

Also, British English tends to have a greater range of different pitches than other languages. And of course there is a far looser connection between spelling and pronunciation than in most languages, so don't suckered into learning to pronounce words the wrong way from the spelling.

th and dh therapy is what every foreigner needs asap. It can really help set you apart from Fresh Off the Boats

>>33365875
I always grew up hearing about "long and short vowels". This is English's crappy attempt to distinguish the radical amount of different vowels, and it never made sense to me.

>Most vowel sounds in English are more open than Romance equivalents.
>English tends to have a greater range of different pitches than other languages
This is good insight.

>>33365865
>>33365868
thanks for the effortpost!! the weird thing is i have been consuming english (mainly american) media for like 10 years now, so i can mostly understand anything, my accent is still strange though, because i haven't been practicing it much. also, I am hungarian, and in our language we pronounce everything as is written. we have a fuckton of different vowels but they are all specificly pronounced as written, its a phonetic language
my main issue, as you or another anon has pointed out is when to use the schwa, i tend to forget about its existence
but the audiobook thing is an excellent idea, thanks for that
>>33365873
hey, i actually discovered him like last week, i love him but hes english, and I don't really want a british accent, mostly bc i wouldnt find it authentic coming from me, who learned english through american movies, comedians, radio shows etc
thanks for reminding me for using his dictionary though
>>33365875
thank you, too, as ive said, the "huh" sound is so randomly occurring and alien to me, i will focus on that. I will also be repeating those two sentences for a year now, thanks:D

>>33365893
yeah, according to Geoff Lindsey, there are no such things, the long vowels are actually dipthongs, or something like that
i think he says it here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtnlGH055TA
but the core thing is still not to say rich and reach the same way, so he's right i should practice that

>>33365910
Yeah consumption is easy, but creation is always the hard part. It's p. cool you got this far in 10 years!

Hungarian, in my mind that only means "Bela Lugosi Land". I thought I knew about a buncha langs but now I realise I know nothing about Hungarian or how it relates to other langs. Congrats on having vowel distinctions, you are lucky. I have been doing a bit of Hindi which reads every vowel as written, which is refreshing coming off the tail of German. And then spanish and Japanese only have 5 vowels which is nice.

When I was learning German, some regular natives would say it's "phonetic" until I show them the linguistic proofs that it's not phoentic at all. They don't have as much vowel variation as English, but it is still not represented in writing.

Schwa, eh? uh... just uh... be more uhncertain, I guess... It duhs sound pretty lazy, though, I get it.
Itso weerd tuh re-wire are brainz fur this stuff.

>>33365933
Ah right on. Most natives don't know what a dipthong is. It blows their mind when I say something like "mind has 2 vowels, aaah + iii"
I think language courses should have like a Level 0 linguistic section, just to clarify these basic mechanisms. They all just skip ahead too fast and then the learner makes the same simple mistakes thousands and millions of times in the future.

>>33365893
>th and dh therapy is what every foreigner needs asap.
That's also true: the difference between the "th" in "this" and the "th" in "thin" - the first vocalised and the second not - is important.

>I always grew up hearing about "long and short vowels". This is English's crappy attempt to distinguish the radical amount of different vowels, and it never made sense to me.
Well, I don't know what you want me to say: there are just far more distinct vowel phonemes in English - especially British English - than in other languages. Americans don't distinguish between them nearly as much, so "cot" and "caught" in most American dialects sound the same; but in British English they're completely different sounds. (Though Americans pronounce "r"s more, so "caught" and "court" are very different in American, but the same in RP British English).

>>33365933
>yeah, according to Geoff Lindsey, there are no such things, the long vowels are actually dipthongs, or something like that
One can talk about diphthongs and monophthongs if you prefer; but the point is that there a number of phonemes in English that, to a foreign ear, sound exactly the same, but in English are two distinct sounds. "Rich" and "reach" are two very different sounds in English, but a native Spanish speaker often can't hear the difference.

>>33366001
>uh... just uh... be more uhncertain, I guess... It duhs sound pretty lazy, though, I get it.
The neutral vowel (schwa) and the short "u" aren't the same. The two vowel sounds in "dozen" or "doesn't" are quite different; only the second one is neutral.

>>33365910
>the "huh" sound is so randomly occurring and alien to me,
It is an extremely common sound in English, especially if you are speaking quickly. If you say "I'm going to go to lunch" very slowly you might say "I am going TOO go TOO lunch"; but at normal speed you say "I'm going tuh go tuh lunch". Similarly (again, rendering the neutral vowel as "uh") it's fathuh, muthuh, sistuh, tuhday, mantruh, doesuhnt, cuhress, and so on, and so on.

>>33365875
>Also, British English tends to have a greater range of different pitches than other languages.
By way of illustration, I'll read that passage of yours. And bear in mind I'm autistic, so I'm actually quite monotonal compared to some speakers.

https://voca.ro/14uOQbQo7xfE

>>33366090
nary
xD
Are you a voice actor, mr. attenboroughburyshireton?

>>33366313
>nary
Oh, hush, it's from a magazine article. OP chose to read it for her vocas, I wanted her to hear a native speaker doing it.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture

The section called "Integrating Nature".

>Are you a voice actor
I did a bit of amateur stage stuff in my distant youth, but not since then.

>>33365776 (OP)
>pronounciation
NO.
It's pro nun ci a tion
Pro nun see ay sh'n
Not pronounce-iation
Pronunciation
The number of FUCKING English language teachers I've heard say "pronounce-iation" has seriously endangered my mental health

>>33365776 (OP)
I suppose it's okay if you want to sound American, but if you want to sound either more British or less working-class, then don't convert Ts to Ds. So, "little" not "liddle", "bottle" not "boddle".

>>33366090
OP here, I LOVE this, you call this monotone? or are you overcompensating
anyway, i will never master the british accent but it made me smile
>>33366418
yeah, ive since double checked and figured it out myself, i cringe
>>33366500
lmao its NOT okay for american either but thanks. i want to sound working class since I am. btw, the class warfare is not as prevalent in other places as it is in the UK afaik

>>33366584
>you call this monotone?
Well, I tried to deliver it in a way that sounded appropriate for the passage. It's not exactly dry: "All buildings should look like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon"! But honestly, I think that is how that particular piece should sound. And it's genuinely the case that English tends to sound more animated, with more variation in pitch, than many other languages; non-native speakers tend to sound rather flat. This is particularly true of people coming from languages like German, but others too.

>>33365776 (OP)
other than the constant pausing, there is nothing here that would annoy an American having to speak English to you. i was not confused at any point by what the words you were saying were supposed to be. you would not have trouble in customer service or as a university lecturer

it's always good to keep getting better but overall you are 99% of the way there and fixing what's left is diminishing returns on effort

>>33369296
hey that is nice to hear but i always wanna improve
ofc ill never sound like a native unless i move there (and i wont, current us is hell) but itd be nice to sound better
the constant pausing is because i was focusing on how i sound and i get nervous and fuck it up lmao, the human condition.
thanks!!

I am a native speaker and I speak deliberately and with and care, so I "'pause'" regularly, and hasty hedgehogs who don't know me yet may interrupt me in the middle of a sentence. So I have to say,

"mm hm. Hold that thought. To continue what I was saying..."
and then repeat the first part. It is annoying, but I guess people just expect real life to be like Tweetgram or whatever.

For reading, tempo or cadence is different. If you are trying anything other than a robotic monotone "get it done" method, you have to create an aural lure and flow to keep the person engaged and not get lost. That includes pausing and paying attention to chunks of sentences.