Understanding over perfect pronunciation .

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Casey

Understanding over perfect pronunciation

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I think your problem is that you’ve convinced yourself that it’s impossible for you to roll your R’s. This has set a mental block for you.

Everyone can roll their R’s. Spanish and Arabic speakers aren’t born with a different set of muscles in their tongue that allows them to do different things with it. It’s just a matter of practice and adaptation. I actually had a speech impediment when I was young and couldn’t pronounce any R, rolled or otherwise.

It’s important to keep in mind that progress doesn’t come from just the amount of effort you put into something; it comes from the right kind of effort. If you don’t know how or what to practice, no amount of effort will lead anywhere. That’s why it’s sometimes important to hire experts to help us. Experts know how to teach, not just what to teach.

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I specialize in teaching phonetics and pronunciatiom here and I think there are three levels to think about:

1. Intelligibility

2. Accuracy

3. Native sound

Number 1 is really important from day 1. Number two is also important but can be worked on as an intermediate or advanced student.

Number 3 is something I hope for every day in italian but after years it still eludes me. Its probably not a reasonable goal for most of us.

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You should always try to sound as natural as possible in your target language but as long as you speak clearly and only mispronounce one particular sound, especially if you pronounce it very differently to all other sounds to avoid confusion, I don't see it as a big problem. There are lots of myths around pronunciation. People say you won't be able to "unlearn" certain things. This is very individual. My pronunciation of English improved once I became so confident I didn't need to think about what I was saying. Also, I was surrounded by native speakers then and was able to copy them. This was eight years after I started learning English. I suspect it helps if you have a good ear for music although I don't know if this hypothesis has ever been proven. I met a guy from Colombia who was so determined to nail the British accent he spent a significant amount of time going over the same phrases until he actually got there. Again, he has a good ear for music which helped him hear the difference. So I don't think it's a matter of "now or never". You can definitely focus on other aspects of your target language and one day you might get the sounds right. It shouldn't discourage you from learning.

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A good and correct pronunciation is not "nice to have" but essential. And this is about something beyond "being understood" which many people might consider sufficient. Of course, being understood is a must, but having the "right sound" makes all the difference.

I have observed this all the long years of my language learning journey that, with a good pronunciation your "real mistakes" will be pardoned or easily ignored. Bad pronunciation is an excluding factor. Here we are talking about psychological, not linguistical factors.

I will give a real life example:

Once I attended an educational training course. The course language was German. The professor and me, we were the only native speakers. Almost everybody else spoke really good, fluent, educated German. We talk about a group of about 20 people from Europe, Africa, and Asia. So, the following is not a remark on "how Germans react to accents" (because none of the reacting persons was German) but a very general thing.

Everyone was respected for their language proficiency, but not in the same way. Some people had little flaws in their speech, but regarding their overall proficiency that was no deal, because they sounded right i.e. the spoke without accent. The person in the group who spoke the very best German (I mean better than both of us educated native speakers) was not respected as a competent speaker. This resentment was very obvious and almost physically present. And it also couldn't be explained by the personality or any other elements that might turn people away. Just a very nice, positive, educated person. That person's speech could have been printed as is and it would have made a flawless scientific essay... but the accent was so strong that obviously nobody was able to perceive that person as a competent speaker...

I would also like to add my personal language-mistakes-accent-acceptance story, but I have to leave now. So I am going to add this later.

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