When it comes to speaking a language other than your mother tongue, a person might find some challenges in conveying their message to those who speak the target language. The foreign accent, mispronunciation of words, and grammatical mistakes might all contribute to the loss of communication and sometimes conveying the wrong message. All the above reasons would lead to frustration and a learner of a foreign language could end up discouraged to improve their pronunciation of the language they are learning.
Most of the time, as foreign language learners, we mispronounce words because we didn’t actually hear them correctly in the first place and if it happens and we hear the correct pronunciation, we don’t carefully listen and then give it enough practice till we master it. This could be one of the reasons we fail in getting the correct pronunciation.
“Practice makes perfect”, Benjamin Franklin. It is always recommended that when you encounter a new word, don’t just learn the meaning or definition of the word. Learning the shape and sound of the word is as important. Effective learning strategies to improve pronunciation would involve listening attentively to how the word is pronounced and then repeating it until you feel that you are able to mimic the right pronunciation. This could be done by recording your own voice and listening again to how you produced the word. You might get surprised to find out how you could easily spot which part of the word you seem to have mispronounced when listening to your own recorded voice.
With practice, your pronunciation will improve and you would be able to even mimic a native speaker's accent if you want to sound like one. Some learners like the idea of learning the accent by imitating the way their favorite celebrity speaks. You don’t have to pick a celebrity to learn how to sound like a native speaker of a language. You just need to listen carefully and practice on your own. After all, having an accent is just a sign that a person has not only mastered speaking their mother tongue but also another foreign one. That is something one needs to be proud of even if the level of competency of a foreign language hasn’t reached yet that of their mother tongue’s.
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