Tagged With: tips & tricks

What do babies do to speak with a perfect accent?  How can you do it as you study to sound as native as possible in English?  Learn three tips from how babies learn language and practice speaking!

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Today you are going to learn tips on speaking English like a native from studying how babies learn to speak English. I’ve been teaching English for over 10 years, but it’s just in the past year that I’ve had the chance to start to pick up the language. He’s 20 months and his language skills are exploding. I’m going to give you three tricks to help you study the language the way that he is.

When a baby is first experimenting with language, it’s babble, la, la, la, ba, ba, ba. Stoney had almost no sounds developed. He had an AH vowel, and he had m, mama, b, baba. What he seemed to be imitating and playing with more than sounds was stress. So many students get hung up on the sounds. I actually think stress is more important. Stress relates to rhythm and intonation. These make up the feeling of English more than the sounds do. Somehow, I don’t know how, he got obsessed with the song ‘mambo italiano’. The chorus goes like this: Hey mambo, mambo Italiano. He can kind of say ‘hey mambo’. But he cannot say ‘mambo italian’. Instead he says something like “___”.

He really gets the intonation and stress down. It’s the feeling of the sentence. As he gets better with sounds, and as he learns them, he’ll go back and fill them in (if he still loves the song). Hey Mambo, uhh. This is something I encourage my students to do. Think about not just the individual sounds but also think about the overall feeling of the sentence. How are you? Uh. How are you. The feeling is, everything connected, the pitch changes smooth, scooping up and then down.

Practice sentences this way to practice the feeling. Uh, how are you? Uh, how are you. Are you will to practice phrases just on ‘uh’? Babies are laying a foundation of the feeling of English for months before they put in all of the details, the finer pieces of the tongue movements and the sounds.

Tip #2: When I’m holding Stoney in my arm and his face is right here, I’ve noticed something. He looks at me like this. Concentration, focused in, staring at my mouth. My mom noticed this too. She said, he watches my mouth so slowly when I speak. He’s so curious, he wants the combination of the visual information along with what he’s hearing. I think it can be incredibly helpful to study native speaker’s mouths when learning.

Every one of my sound videos has close ups of the mouth in slow motion, and lots of my other videos do too, like one I did on linking with the TH. I’ll put links to those videos in the description, or you can see them by clicking this “I”. Sometimes I tell students to watch themselves in a mirror or make a video and watch that. One of my students in my online school just posted a video to our Facebook group where there was very little mouth movement happening. And it’s hard for your English to be natural and clear when you’re hardly moving your mouth at all. When she went back and looked at it, she saw, oh yeah, I understand, I’m cheating the mouth position of some of the sounds that use more jaw drop or lip rounding. Tip #3: What do toddlers to that

Tip #3: What do toddlers to that is incredibly annoying? They say and do the same thing over and over and over. In the park by our house, there’s a play structure with a fake raccoon face carved into a tree. Stoney calls it ‘aa-coon’ and asks for it constantly. There are times where he probably says the word 20 times in a row. Any parent or caregiver out there knows how much children repeat themselves. This is part of learning, of building muscle memory and developing the fine and subtle changes in mouth position, for speaking a language.

Repetition can not only help adults speak better English, but I think it’s essential. Let’s say your pronunciation isn’t very good. You can learn how to pronounce something better, or how something should be pronounced, for example, by watching videos on my channel. But knowing something does nothing to change your body and your habit. You already have strong muscle memory established as an adult. Creating a sound that you don’t have in your native language, or creating the new feeling of English is impossible without repetition. Before I started teaching English, I sang opera.

In practicing, it would make no sense to sing the song from start to finish over and over. You work in sections. You pick out specific lines that are tricky, and you do them over and over and over. Maybe you take the text away from the music and you practice that. The point is, you break it down, and you work with it over and over. You take a break, you sleep, and your body, your mind, does something with all that work. It saves it. And then the next day you come back and you work again. So be like a toddler and practice the same thing over and over. Let’s say comfortable is a tricky word for you. First, learn how to pronounce it. I have a video on that. Then play it and say it, play it and say it over and over again. You can use a site like forvo.com, where lots of native speakers have uploaded word pronunciations. Play the native speaker, say it out loud. Do this 10, 20 times in row. Once it gets really good, don’t stop. That’s when you need to keep going! To solidify the correct, natural way of doing it. So as a teacher of language, I realize I have so much to learn about teaching a language by watching my son, a native speaker, learn from the beginning. At one point in this video, I mentioned my online school. It’s called Rachel’s English Academy, and I have thousands of audio files broken up and slowed down so that my students can practice little bits of conversation with the play it, say it method. It’s amazing. I’ll watch a student doing this, and I don’t even have to tell him what to fix. By just playing it and saying it over and over without stopping, subtle changes happen, and it starts to sound so good. If you’re interested in learning more about the school, please visit RachelsEnglishAcademy.com. If you want to see my absolute latest video, click here. If you’re new, click here for a where to start playlist. Click here to subscribe – I make new videos on American English every Tuesday. To be sure we can keep in touch, click here to sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get free English lessons sent to your inbox every week.

To solidify the correct, natural way of doing it. So as a teacher of language, I realize I have so much to learn about teaching a language by watching my son, a native speaker, learn from the beginning. At one point in this video, I mentioned my online school. It’s called Rachel’s English Academy, and I have thousands of audio files broken up and slowed down so that my students can practice little bits of conversation with the play it, say it method. It’s amazing. I’ll watch a student doing this, and I don’t even have to tell him what to fix. By just playing it and saying it over and over without stopping, subtle changes happen, and it starts to sound so good. If you’re interested in learning more about the school, please visit RachelsEnglishAcademy.com. If you want to see my absolute latest video, click here. If you’re new, click here for a where to start playlist. Click here to subscribe – I make new videos on American English every Tuesday. To be sure we can keep in touch, click here to sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get free English lessons sent to your inbox every week.

If you’re interested in learning more about the school, please visit RachelsEnglishAcademy.com. If you want to see my absolute latest video, click here. If you’re new, click here for a where to start playlist. Click here to subscribe – I make new videos on American English every Tuesday. To be sure we can keep in touch, click here to sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get free English lessons sent to your inbox every week.

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