Improve your SPEAKING / That's why native speakers don't understand you @HannahKhoma

What can I do to improve my speaking?

Why don’t native speakers understand me?

Where should I start when working on my speaking skills?

What should I do to try to get rid of my accent?

Hey everybody! Thanks for joining me for this

video! If you’re new here then welcome! I’m Anna!

I get these types of questions literally every

other day. Speaking is important,

it’s this unique way for people

to communicate with each other and get their point across.

Speaking another language is hard.

Nonetheless speaking another language, specifically

English, because it’s an

international language, can open many doors for you.

It can help you with your career and your personal

life. We all know this. Then what we also

know is that we have to practice. We

actually have to get those words and sentences

out of our mouths every single day,

as much as possible. It’s key.

The thing that distinguishes a professional from an amateur

is that a professional never stops learning

and working to improve their skills.

Some people just don’t do this and complain that they can’t

speak. Some people are very

resistant to this whole idea of

practicing, because it is hard work and it has to be consistent.

But we’re not talking about those people

right now because and thankfully there are

those and you are one of them if you’re watching this video, that

do practice and learn. But sometimes you just hit

a plateau. It’s when you reach a certain level

and then you’re stuck, it’s like there’s no progress anymore.

Well based on my personal experience

and my experience working with my students

I’ll tell you - one thing that is

frequently overlooked and underestimated

but has a large impact on your speech is

stress - word stress and sentence stress.

I want to say a huge thanks

to SkillShare for sponsoring this video.

Stick around to hear what they have to offer.

Not getting the stress right messes with people’s pronunciation

big time. Maybe you have heard

that English is a stress-timed language,

which means some syllables will be longer

stressed ones and some shorter

unstressed ones, compared to syllable-timed

languages where each syllable takes

approximately the same amount of time. Putting the

in the wrong place makes it very difficult for native speakers

to understand that word let alone the whole sentence.

And it can even change the meaning of the word. However,

putting the stress in the right place usually helps us

with knowing where a true vowel has to be pronounced

and that all the rest of the syllables have to be

reduced, meaning those other

vowels have to be pronounced as a schwa.

And I said usually because we also

have words with a secondary stress

but it is weaker than the primary stress.

It will make your speech a lot more clearer.

I’ll give you a couple of examples.

but not

then we have

In Compound nouns for example the stress usually goes on the first word

Now consider these word pairs where changing the stress changes the meaning of a word.

I have the whole video with these words compared.

You can click the link above head to watch it. And I'll link it in the description.

The same goes for sentences. In a sentence,

we stress content words that are

important for a message, therefore we need them to

stick out. And we reduce function words,

those that serve their purpose of course

but we don’t need to pay our listeners attention directly

to them. That is what creates this nice

rhythm to the American pronunciation, that

contrast that non-native speakers really struggle with.

So when a native speaker is

listening to someone their ear hears those

important words and that’s how they get the gist of a message.

But when people stress

every single word, thinking that they are being

very clear or when they stress a wrong word

in a question or sentence it will

take a native speaker a second to think

and try to make out what those people are trying to say.

Consider these examples that I took from an accent

reduction introduction lecture from the University

of South Carolina. They will give you an idea

of stressed and reduced words.

When you say them you can clap to feel the rhythm.

It’s a great illustration of a stress-timed language.

Even though each sentence has a different amount of words,

it takes the same amount of time to say them

because of this contrast between stressed

and reduced words.

The cows have been eating the grass. Nobody talks like that

Now, listen to this example.

In this case we add one more descriptive word

that needs to be emphasized- one more content word.

And now the rhythm has changed.

And people oftentimes call this “fast speech”.

When this is just natural speech that is created

by this beautiful contrast between

stressed and reduced words. Now a very

effective method that I personally swear by

is shadowing or imitation.

It’s when you copy a native speaker’s speech.

Exactly what they say and how they say it,

stressing the words they stress, using the

intonation they use. You can click the link above my

head to watch a video on how to know that you’re imitating correctly.

And now, I want you to take a

look at a very good example of shadowing

Although there are certain guidelines

for word stressing and I don’t call them rules because

there are too many exceptions. Although

we have them and I’ll get to them in a second. I

personally recommend to listen a lot,

and pay attention to the way native speakers speak

and shadow them of course. When you come across

a word that you don’t know or are not sure how to pronounce

look it up! Check it’s meaning and check

it’s pronunciation. I like Dictionary.com

and Youglish. That’s a great resource.

You can type a word you need in the search box,

choose an accent and listen to that word being said by native speakers.

Now lets take a little break to talk about the sponsor of this video Skillshare.

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Now lets get back to our topic and lets talk about the rules.

these first two guidelines have many

exceptions to them and are applicable only to two-syllable words.

Now these following rules are more reliable.

Put the stress one syllable before the suffix if a word ends in these suffixes

Put the stress two syllables before the suffix if a words end in these suffixes

When you see these suffixes – stress the suffix

Well that was a lot of information to digest.

But, it’s a good thing that you can always watch it again if

you forget something. Hope you found it useful.

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and I’ll see in the next video.