I asked Chat GPT to write an inspirational quote about pronunciation and its answer was “your accent is beautiful” I was somewhat caught off guard with this statement. Thinking about my German accent as an English native speaker living in Switzerland, I don’t like the idea of myself having an accent. In fact when IContinue reading “Your accent is beautiful”
Category Archives: confidence
Five tips to speak English more naturally
One: Keep it simple Two: Enjoy your mistakes Three: Learn about word and sentence stress and intonation Four: Learn how English word sounds combine Five: Practice, practice, practice How I can help I can offer you an experienced ear, actually, two, to pick out which areas of pronunciation you need to work on to speakContinue reading “Five tips to speak English more naturally”
The dangers of pronunciation training
And how not to lose confidence in your speaking skills You need to improve your pronunciation, so you start pronunciation training. Of course, you want to improve but you must know there are dangers. It’s often true that the more you know you feel like the less you know. The problem is that the moreContinue reading “The dangers of pronunciation training”
Do I have to learn how to say the “th”?
The “th” or /ð/ and /θ/ sounds don’t exist in German or many other languages. Notoriously difficult to produce, to make them you have to find the right spot with your tongue on your front teeth. It takes a lot of practice and can take many months or even years to perfect. The question is:Continue reading “Do I have to learn how to say the “th”?”
Having a bad day
One thing I have noticed as a language learner and teacher is that on some days speaking a foreign language is much harder than on others. Sometimes I have days that I really find it difficult to express myself in German and some days students, who I know are pretty fluent in English seem toContinue reading “Having a bad day”