marcodraper
Member
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2012
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Italian
- Home Country
- Italy
- Current Location
- Italy
Ok, let's start saying I have "studied" phonetic for the last two or three months, until then I always focused on grammar, vocabulary, idioms, etc.; I knew that my pronunciation was bad, but people just made fun of me or they used to say something like "take it easy, I can understand you anyway" and nobody ever taught me or helped me to speak better, so I started exerting the pronunciation on my own with the support of videos on Yotube, etc.
I'm Italian and we have just 7 vowel sounds and some diphthongs; I was shocked when I found out that English has twelve or even more of them and I figured out where my accent comes from, I've always been speaking English with a half of its vowels sounds (I should also mention the th sound, but let's focus on vowels).
Anyway, I started to pronounce the vowel sounds singularly and the words in which they are present...ok I know that's always easy to pronounce a single sound than a word and a single word than a sentence....
The fact is, whereas I had some problems (and I still have) at recognizing (or should I say in recognizing?) and pronouncing the sound 3: (which is in words like word, earth, work, etc.) I easily recognized and I can pronounce individually the "schwa" sound (teacher, about, etc) , maybe because it's used in some Italian dialects or just because it's simple since it doesn't require the use of the tongue... anyway if I try to say "teacher", "about" or any other word that comprises the sound I pronounce it more like an "e"...
Is there someone else who has faced this problem? How did you cope with that?
I'm Italian and we have just 7 vowel sounds and some diphthongs; I was shocked when I found out that English has twelve or even more of them and I figured out where my accent comes from, I've always been speaking English with a half of its vowels sounds (I should also mention the th sound, but let's focus on vowels).
Anyway, I started to pronounce the vowel sounds singularly and the words in which they are present...ok I know that's always easy to pronounce a single sound than a word and a single word than a sentence....
The fact is, whereas I had some problems (and I still have) at recognizing (or should I say in recognizing?) and pronouncing the sound 3: (which is in words like word, earth, work, etc.) I easily recognized and I can pronounce individually the "schwa" sound (teacher, about, etc) , maybe because it's used in some Italian dialects or just because it's simple since it doesn't require the use of the tongue... anyway if I try to say "teacher", "about" or any other word that comprises the sound I pronounce it more like an "e"...
Is there someone else who has faced this problem? How did you cope with that?