Students from Latin America: Quickly Fix English Pronunciation Challenges for the Interview (and Beyond)
Written by Nina, UCLA MA; Former Teaching Fellow, Harvard University; and author of 20 textbooks
Please read "Quickly Fix English Pronunciation Challenges for the Interview (and Beyond): Series for Non-Native English Speakers from India" up to the section "The Top Sounds to Practice for Speakers from India".
This blog post focuses on native Spanish speakers and the differences between key pronunciations in Spanish and English. Those differences comprise your accent. A strong accent can make it difficult for others to understand you. Perfect English makes a great impression.
To give some context, I was an exchange student in Mexico. Though I'd studied Spanish in high school and college, I didn't really speak it until I lived with a Spanish-speaking family, and I had to communicate every thought in Spanish. Did I want breakfast? Then I had to learn the proper names of foods and how to ask for them. What if I got sick? I had to learn how to talk about symptoms and what I needed. To this day, I don't think I'd still speak Spanish if I hadn't lived with that family. I love Spanish, and belong to a Spanish club where we communicate entirely in Spanish at our interactive meetings.
If you do the exercises from the "Open the Mouth Audio Exercise" in "Quickly Fix English Pronunciation Challenges for the Interview (and Beyond): Series for Non-Native English Speakers from India (Part 1)”, your English will be significantly closer to a native speaker pronunciation. Every international language group will benefit from this audio exercise.
The Top Sounds to Practice — Specifically for Spanish Speakers
Practice by recording the following sentences, and then listening to your recording. How close to a native speaker pronunciation do you get?
Audio (Practice the following sounds with me.)
1. final consonant clusters
He listens to modern songs.
2. final "m"
Some of them can come to the party.
3. "z"
The reason Zachary likes some raisins for lunch is that they're sweet.
4. "y"
For many years, young people have loved just rock music.
5. "e" "I"
We usually see him sit with his kids in the garden when he eats lunch.
6. "b" "v"
Valerie has a very bad cold.
7. "r"
Robert really realizes that spending too much time on the Internet can be boring.
8. "h"
He was ahead of her in the race.
9. initial "st"
Steve lives on a strange street.
10. "th"
He thinks they will arrive, and then they'll start the party.
Language represents a cooperation between what we think and what our body does. For that reason, it's important to practice so that the body knows what the correct mouth positions feel like. Spanish and English both represent beautiful languages. Our efforts to be authentic in each show the excellence of our communication skills.
