Speak English Naturally: My pronunciation secret for difficult words

Video Overview & Insights

Learn the important pronunciation technique called BACKCHAINING, used by actors, singers, and public speakers to sound more natural and authentic in any language. Backchaining will retrain your ears to hear and your mouth to pronounce English words more easily and successfully. It is especially useful for those long, difficult English words, but it is also helpful with any word you are struggling with. Most English teachers do not have time to teach you this simple strategy, but you can apply it immediately after watching this lesson. Famous language courses are based on this powerful pronunciation technique; watch, listen, and solve your pronunciation problems today! https://www.engvid.com/speak-english-naturally-backchaining/

TRANSCRIPT

Hi. I'm Rebecca from engVid. In this lesson you're going to learn a pronunciation secret that will help you to say English words more easily and correctly, especially long, difficult ones. Okay? Now, this is actually a professional technique that's used by actors, and singers, and linguists, and lots of people who have learned many different languages and want to or need to pronounce words correctly and authentically. Okay? Now, the reason why pronunciation is difficult for everyone when you're learning a new language is because when we grow up speaking our native language, we get used to... Our ears get used to hearing certain sounds, and our mouths get used to making certain sounds. And when we learn a new language, like English, then you have to train both your ear and your mouth to work a little bit differently. Okay? Now, the other part is because English is not phonetic, it's not completely phonetic. A large part of it is. Some people say about 80 to 85% is phonetic, but a lot of it is not phonetic. What does that mean? That means when we see a word, the way we say it is not the way it looks. Right? So, there's also that factor to take into account. But this technique can help you with both of these difficulties. Okay? So, first let's look at what we normally do when you're learning how to pronounce a word. Okay? So normally what we do is we do something called frontchaining, and I'm going to explain to you exactly what that is, but what I'm going to teach you in this lesson, the secret is something called backchaining, and that's what we will practice. Now, let's take our first example and do what people normally do, even teachers, even ESL teachers. All right? When they're teaching classrooms, they don't normally spend that much time on pronunciation because they don't have time. There's so much to teach and the class is so big, there's so many students it's difficult to spend time on pronunciation. So naturally, people have a harder time learning that and mastering that. And if you think about it, when a child is born and when a child is growing up, it doesn't learn to read first, it just learns by listening. So this is an opportunity to listen afresh, like new in a different way to words so that you can reproduce the correct sound, the correct pronunciation. Okay? So let's take our first example, and our first example is the word "pronunciation". Okay? Because by the way, a lot of people do not say this word correctly. Now, let's do it in the standard way, frontchaining, and see what happens. So in frontchaining, we start pronouncing or saying the word from the front and going forward. So if I did that, if I was teaching you how to say this word by using frontchaining, I would say to you: "You need to say it like this: pro-nun-ci-a-tion." Okay? I've divided up here just to make it a little bit easier for you to see and hear the syllables. Okay? This long word happens to have five parts, five syllables. Right? So it's quite long. Pronunciation. So when a student hears that, they're like: "Oh my god, I have to learn so many different sounds", and it's a little bit scary because there are five sounds, you know, that have to follow. So, what happens when you feel scared or nervous about something? Your brain shuts down. You don't learn as effectively. You don't learn as well as when you're happy and relaxed. So the advantage of learning in... Through the other system, the other technique called backchaining is that you feel much more relaxed because when we did it from the front we had to learn one, two, three, four, five different sounds. But look what happens when we use backchaining. So, backchaining is a technique that teaches you how to pronounce words starting from the end. So let's do that now and see what happens. So let's just take this last syllable, and we can say: "tion". So all you have to learn right now is the word "tion". Not word, part of the word. Next: "ation". You can repeat it after me. "ation, ciation, ciation, nunciation, nunciation". And last: "pronunciation, pronunciation".