Hello my fellow language nerds! I’m excited to announce that I’m offering free pronunciation lessons in August for anyone learning French, Spanish, Mandarin, and/or Gujarati. Pronunciation is my favourite part of learning languages and I love to work with others to improve their pronunciation.
Email me back with the city you live in and I’ll let you know the class schedule in your time zone.
While I have you, I’d like to share a few quick tips you can do at home to improve your pronunciation in another language:
Practice pronouncing difficult sounds for 10 minutes a day. Record yourself when you do this so that you can hear what you sound like and track progress over time.
Take lessons with someone with a background in speech therapy or phonetics. Most native speakers and tutors do not have the knowledge to help you improve your pronunciation. It’s also hard to perfect your pronunciation completely by yourself. For these reasons, taking lessons with someone who has a phonetics or speech therapy background (like me) will save you time and effort in the long run.
Understand the theory. If you don’t know what to do with your tongue and vocal cords to pronounce a difficult sound, it’s almost impossible to say it correctly.
Patience and practice are crucial. Perfecting pronunciation often takes longer to do compared to other language learning skills. If you are impatient, you will get frustrated. Be patient and practice regularly. Results will come, but remember that the progress will be incremental.
Thanks for reading this and I hope to see you in this month’s free pronunciation lessons!