george_martin
New member
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2013
- Member Type
- Retired Academic
- Native Language
- Hebrew
- Home Country
- Israel
- Current Location
- Israel
I want to improve my pronunciation and i have come across two different courses
the first program is "Pronunciation Workshop" and the second is "American accent training"
It seems they follow different training course:
the Pronunciation Workshop Advocate :"Practice speaking VERY SLOWLY, out loud, in a strong voice and exaggerate the mouth movements.You will be retraining the muscles of your mouth and tongue to move in new and different ways while mastering your new pronunciation patterns.Theoretically, once you understand the concepts and have retrained yourself, eventually these new speech patterns will progress into your own spontaneous conversational rapid speech"
in another hand the American accent training says something different, it says:
Do not speak word by word.
If you speak word by word, as many people who learned "printed" English do, you'll
end up sounding mechanical and foreign.
Connect words to form sound groups.
This is where you 're going to start doing something completely different than what you ave done in your previous English studies. This part is the most difficult for many people because it goes against everything they've been taught. Instead of thinking of each word as a unit, think of sound units. These sound units may or may not correspond o a word written on a page. Native speakers don't say Bob is on the phone, but say [babizan the foun]. Sound units make a sentence flow smoothly, like peanut butter* never really ending and never really starting, just flowing along. Even chunky peanut utter is acceptable. So long as you don't try to put plain peanuts directly onto your read, you '11 be OK.
staircase
Let those sound groups floating on the wavy river in the figure flow downhill and you '11 get the staircase. Staircase intonation not only gives you that American sound, it also makes you sound much more confident. Not every American uses the downward stair* case. A certain segment of the population uses rising staircases-generally, teenagers on their way to a shopping mall: "Hi,my name is Tiffany. I live in La Canada. I'm on the pep squad."
so what is your thought on these two courses, which one sound more practical to you?
the first program is "Pronunciation Workshop" and the second is "American accent training"
It seems they follow different training course:
the Pronunciation Workshop Advocate :"Practice speaking VERY SLOWLY, out loud, in a strong voice and exaggerate the mouth movements.You will be retraining the muscles of your mouth and tongue to move in new and different ways while mastering your new pronunciation patterns.Theoretically, once you understand the concepts and have retrained yourself, eventually these new speech patterns will progress into your own spontaneous conversational rapid speech"
in another hand the American accent training says something different, it says:
Do not speak word by word.
If you speak word by word, as many people who learned "printed" English do, you'll
end up sounding mechanical and foreign.
Connect words to form sound groups.
This is where you 're going to start doing something completely different than what you ave done in your previous English studies. This part is the most difficult for many people because it goes against everything they've been taught. Instead of thinking of each word as a unit, think of sound units. These sound units may or may not correspond o a word written on a page. Native speakers don't say Bob is on the phone, but say [babizan the foun]. Sound units make a sentence flow smoothly, like peanut butter* never really ending and never really starting, just flowing along. Even chunky peanut utter is acceptable. So long as you don't try to put plain peanuts directly onto your read, you '11 be OK.
staircase
Let those sound groups floating on the wavy river in the figure flow downhill and you '11 get the staircase. Staircase intonation not only gives you that American sound, it also makes you sound much more confident. Not every American uses the downward stair* case. A certain segment of the population uses rising staircases-generally, teenagers on their way to a shopping mall: "Hi,my name is Tiffany. I live in La Canada. I'm on the pep squad."
so what is your thought on these two courses, which one sound more practical to you?