Pronunciation

Hi there language freaks! I thought I might cheer up your Halloween break.

As I said at school, I have decided not to teach pronunciation like I used to do (i.e. 10 minutes every day). If I’ve learnt something over the past 25 years on the job that is the grim truth that teaching pronunciation is pretty useless. No matter how hard I try. No matter the angles I use. On average, most adult learners in Spain dismiss pronunciation out of hand. I do know they would love to pronounce things a little bit better but I suspect that some of them would also like to be a little bit taller and their attitude to both wishes is surprisingly similar. For the most part, they are just not willing to go the distance. Part of the tragedy lies in the fact that, unlike children, grown-ups have a special gift for finding excuses not to pronounce things. Here is a brief summary of the standard excuses:

Excuse	Truth
I feel weird when I say things right	That is your problem. Many speakers from other countries don’t have that problem
The Spanish media mispronounce words	Your teachers don’t. Native speakers on the internet don’t. Many speakers from other countries don’t.
People might laugh at me if I pronounce words correctly	(Some) people may laugh at you when you speak with an embarrassing accent. If they don’t, they might only patronize you. Not nice, is it?

Comedian John Oliver (the one and only) recently used the graphic below to joke about a confusion. In Spain that is no joke. What am I talking about here? The dreaded [v]. What about it? Well, the truth is that Spanish speakers (and Basque speakers, for that matter) are probably the only people in Europe that have trouble pronouncing the V-sound. What does that entail? For one thing unwanted mix-ups (best/vest, very/bury, blog/vlog, etc.). Another undesirable consequence of bad pronunciation is miscommunication. Suppose you’re on the phone and need to give someone your work email address, which happens to contain a “v”. Suppose you pronounce a [b] instead of a [v]. You know what? You may never get an email from that contact. Finally there’s the “prestige thing”. Believe it or not, people react differently to speakers who don’t pronounce basic sounds… I could also comment on the widespread inability to articulate simple words like “she”, “English”, etc. So… what can you do about it? Just practice simple sequences like these: everybody, vibration, bravery. This website has a lot of minimal pairs (in case you're curious).

There is really no use trying to venture any further if you don’t master the basic problem areas first. In our case that means: the V-sound, the SH-sound, the initial sp- st- sk- clusters and the regular past tenses (played, worked, etc). Once you have that down we can begin to wander into uncharted territory. Remember that even if the context makes it easy for people to understand what you mean, the impact of bad pronunciation is inevitable. Food for thought.