How to Improve Spoken American English - Sound like a Native Speaker

အေမရိကန္အဂၤလိပ္စာကုိ မိခင္ဘာသာစကားကဲ့သုိ႕ တုိးတက္ေအာင္လုပ္နည္း

A lot of people ask me if it's possible to sound like a native speaker if you weren't

လူအမ်ားက က်မကုိ ေမးၾကတယ္။ အေမရိကန္မွာ မေမြးဘဲနဲ႕ အေမရိကန္လူမ်ဳိးကဲ့သုိ႕ စကားေျပာႏုိင္သလားတဲ႕။

born in the US. They want to know how long it will take. That, of course, depends entirely

အဲဒီလုိေျပာႏုိင္ဘုိ႕ ဘယ္ေလာက္ၾကာမလဲဆုိတာ သိခ်င္ၾကတယ္။ အဲဒါက လူတဦးခ်င္းေပၚမွာ မူတည္တယ္ဆုိတာ ဟုတ္ပါတယ္။

upon the individual. Really focused pronunciation practice can yield great results. In this

တကယ္ေတာ့ အသံထြက္ကုိ အာရုံစုိက္ေလ့က်င့္မယ္ဆုိရင္ ႀကီးမားတဲ့ရလာဒ္ ရမွာပါ။

video, I'm going to go over two different ways to study English to perfect your pronunciation.

ဒီဗြီဒီယုိမွာ မင္းရဲ႕အသံထြက္ေကာင္းဘုိ႕အတြက္ အဂၤလိပ္စာေလ့လာနည္း (၂)ခုကုိ တင္ျပသြားပါမယ္။

All you need is the audio or video of a native speaker speaking.

မင္းလုိအပ္တာက အဂၤလိပ္စကားေျပာတဲ့ အသံဖုိင္၊ ဒါမဟုတ္ ဗြီဒီယုိဖုိင္တခုပါပဲ။

First, we're going to do a Ben Franklin exercise. This is when you write down everything you

ပထမဆုံး Ben Franklin ေလ့က်င့္ခန္းကုိ စလုပ္ပါမယ္။ ဒါက မင္းၾကားတဲ့အရာအားလုံးကုိ ခ်ေရးပါ။

can about what you hear: whether or not you hear words being linked, or if you hear something

ဥပမာအေနနဲ႕ စကားလုံးေတြက ဆက္စပ္ထားသလား၊ မဆက္စပ္ထားဘူးလားဆုိတာ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ မင္းၾကားတဲ့စကားဟာ အသံနိမ့္ေျပာသလားဆုိတာကုိေပါ့။

being reduced, for example. Now, we'll do this together to help you get

အခု မင္းၾကားတဲ့စကားကုိ ဘယ္လုိနားေထာင္ၿပီး စမ္းစစ္ရမယ္ဆုိတဲ့နည္းကုိရဘုိ႕ အတူတူ လုပ္ၾကည့္ၾကစုိ႕။

an idea of how to listen to and analyze what you hear. "A lot of people ask me if it's

"A lot of people ask me if it's

possible to sound like a native speaker-- A lot of people ask me." So the first thing

possible to sound like a native speaker-- A lot of people ask me." အင္း...မထမဆုံး သတိထားမိတာတခုက

I notice is that this T is a flap T, it sounds like a D, "a lot of," that's because it's

T အသံက D အသံေျပာင္းသြားတယ္။ "a lot of," ဒီလုိဘာေၾကာင့္ျဖစ္သြားတာလဲဆုိေတာ့

coming between two vowel sounds. I also notice that I hear these three words as one unit:

သရသံ ႏွစ္ခုၾကားထဲ T ကေရာက္သြားလုိ႕ပါ။ ဒီစကားလုံး(၃)ခုဟာ တစုတည္းအသံထြက္တယ္ဆုိတာ သတိထားမိလုိက္ေသးတယ္...

"a lot of, a lot of," with the stress happening on the middle word. "A lot of, a lot of people

အလယ္စကားလုံးကုိ အသံဖိရြတ္ၿပီးေတာ့...။ "A lot of, a lot of people

ask me--" I also notice that this word ends in a consonant, this word begins with a vowel,

ask me--" ေနာက္တခုလဲ သတိထားမိေသးတယ္။ စကားလုံးတခုက ဗ်ည္းနဲ႕ဆုံးၿပီး သရနဲ႕စထားတယ္။

there's no punctuation in-between, "a lot of people ask," and I do hear that L as really

ၾကားမွာ ပုဒ္ျဖတ္သေကၤတလဲ မရွိဘူး။ " a lot of people ask," တကယ္ေတာ့ L ဟာ

linking to the beginning vowel sound: "people ask." Another thing you'll want to note as

ေနာက္က သရအသံနဲ႕ ဆက္စပ္ထားတာကုိ ၾကားရမယ္။ "people ask." ေနာက္တခု နားေထာင္တဲ့အခါမွာ

you listen is any sounds that you know are difficult for you. For example, many of my

မင္းသိထားတဲ့ စကားသံမ်ားဟာ မင္းအတြက္ နားလည္ဘုိ႕ ခက္ေနပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ဥပမာအေနနဲ႕

students have problems integrating the AA sound into their speech. They know how to

ငါ့ရဲ႕ေက်ာင္းသားအမ်ားစုဟာ သူတုိ႕စကားေျပာတဲ့အခါ 'အ'သရသံႏွစ္ခုကုိ ေပါင္းၿပီးေျပာရတဲ့အခါ အခက္အခဲျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။ သရေတြ ဗ်ည္းေတြ ဘယ္လုိေပါင္းအသံထြက္တယ္ဆုိတာ သူတုိ႕သိပါတယ္။

do it, but they just don't use it in speech. So I would definitely, if was one of them,

ဒါေပမယ့္ အေျပာထဲမွာ ထည့္မသုံးႏုိင္ဘူး။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ အဲဒီလုိျဖစ္ေနတယ္ဆုိရင္

mark this AA vowel, so that I'll be sure to note it, and then will hopefully begin to

သတိထားမိေစဘုိ႕ သရသံႏွစ္ခု မ်ဥ္းသားလုိက္ပါ။ ဒါဆုိ ငါ့စကားေျပာထဲမွာ

integrate AA into my speech when I see this word 'ask.' "A lot of people ask me." Let's

'ask' ဆုိတဲ့စကားလုံးကုိ ျမင္ရင္ သရသံႏွစ္ခု ေပါင္းရမယ္ဆုိတာ သတိထားမိပါမယ္။ "A lot of people ask me."

keep going. "A lot of people ask me if it's possible to

ေရွ႕ဆက္ဦးစုိ႕။ "A lot of people ask me if it's possible to

sound like a native speaker-- if it's possible to sound, if it's possible to sound--" So,

sound like a native speaker-- if it's possible to sound, if it's possible to sound--"

I notice the stress here: possible, first syllable is stressed, "to sound," I notice

ဒါဆုိ ဒီေနရာမွာ ဖိသံကုိ သတိထားမိတယ္။ ပထမ possible ကုိ ဖိသံနဲ႕ေျပာတယ္။ "to sound"လဲ ဖိၿပီးေျပာတာကုိ သတိထားပါ။

that has stress too. "--if it's possible to sound--" The word 'to' is definitely reduced

"--if it's possible to sound--" 'to' စကားလုံးကေတာ့ 'အ' တ၀က္သံ(ရႊ)နဲ႕ ထြက္ရပါတယ္။

to the schwa, so I may mark that so I don't forget to reduce it. "Possible to sound."

ဒါေၾကာင့္ အဲဒီ 'အ' တ၀က္သံကုိ ေလ်ာ့ေျပာဘုိ႕ မေမ့ရန္ မွတ္ထားပါ။ "Possible to sound."

"If it's, if it's." Here's another case where one word ends in a consonant sound, the next

"If it's, if it's." ဒီမွာ ေနာက္အဆင့္တခုက စကားလုံးတခုဟာ ဗ်ည္းသံနဲ႕ဆုံးၿပီး

word begins with a vowel sound, "if it's, if it's," and I do definitely hear those connecting

ေနာက္စကားလုံးက သရသံနဲ႕စရင္ "If it's, if it's," အဲဒီစကားလုံးေတြက ခ်ိတ္ေျပာတဲ့အသံကုိ အေသအခ်ာ ၾကားရမယ္။

together. "If it's possible to sound." "A lot of people ask me if it's possible to

"If it's possible to sound." "A lot of people ask me if it's possible to

sound like a native speaker-- like a native speaker--" I notice my voice goes up at the

sound like a native speaker-- like a native speaker--" "speaker" စကားလုံးေျပာၿပီးတဲ့အခါ ငါ့စကားသံက ျမင့္သြားတာ သတိထားပါ။

end here, "speaker." That's because the sentence isn't over, the next word is "if." I also

ဒါဟာ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆုိေတာ့ ေနာက္က "if" စကားလုံးဟာ ၀ါက်မၿပီးေသးတာကုိ ျပတာေလ။

notice the stress is big, small, big, small, big, small. "Like a native speaker." DA da

ၿပီးေတာ့ ဖိသံဟာ ျမင့္လုိက္ နိမ့္လုိက္ ျမင့္လုိက္ နိမ့္လုိက္ဆုိတာ သတိထားမိတယ္။ "Like a native speaker." ဒါ ဒ

DA da DA da. "Like a native speaker." Also, again here we have ending consonant sound/beginning

ဒါ ဒ ဒါ ဒ။ "Like a native speaker." ၿပီးေတာ့ ဗ်ည္းသံနဲ႕ဆုံးၿပီး သရသံစတာကုိ ေတြ႕ရပါမယ္။

vowel sound: like a, like a. I hear the K linking to the schwa. "Like a. Like a native

like a, like a. ေက(K)သံက 'အ'တ၀က္သံကုိ ခ်ိတ္သြားတာ ၾကားရမယ္။ Like a native

speaker." Native -- I hear this T as a D because again, it's a T coming between two vowel sounds:

speaker." Native -- တီ (T) ကုိ ဒီ (D)သံနဲ႕ထြက္ပါတယ္။ ဘာေၾကာင့္လဲဆုိေတာ့ တီ (T) ဟာ သရသံႏွစ္ခုၾကားမွာ ရွိလုိ႕ေလ။

will be a flap T, sounds like a D. "Like a native speaker." In the entire sentence, I

T က D အသံကုိ ေျပာင္းသြားတယ္။ "Like a native speaker." ဒီ၀ါက်မွာ

don't hear and gaps or pauses between words. So in some cases, there's a very obvious link,

စကားလုံးေတြၾကားမွာ ဟာသြားတာ ရပ္သြားတာ မၾကားရဘူး။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ အျခားျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြမွာ သိသာတဲ့ခ်ိတ္ဆက္မႈရွိပါတယ္။

like when one word ends with a consonant and the next word begins with a vowel. But even

စကားလုံးတခုက ဗ်ည္းနဲ႕ဆုံးၿပီး ေနာက္စကားလုံးက သရနဲ႕ဆုံးတဲ့အခါမ်ဳိးေပါ့။

when there's not a very obvious linking sound, there's never a gap between the words.

ဒါေပမယ့္ သိသာတဲ့ခ်ိတ္ဆက္မႈမရွိဘူးဆုိေတာင္မွ စကားလုံးေတြၾကားမွာ ဟာကြက္(သုိ႕) ရပ္သြားတာ မရွိပါဘူး။

"A lot of people ask me if it's possible to sound like a native speaker--" We've been

"A lot of people ask me if it's possible to sound like a native speaker--" ငါတုိ႕

working for several minutes, and here we are only half way through one sentence. This is

အႀကိမ္မ်ားစြာ ေလ့က်င့္ၿပီးၿပီ။ ဒီမွာ ငါတုိ႕ဟာ ၀ါက်တခုရဲ႕ တ၀က္ကုိ ေရာက္ေနပါၿပီ။

just an example of how you might take notes from the audio or video clip of your choice.

ဒါက မင္းေရြးခ်ယ္ထားတဲ့ အသံဖုိင္/ဗြီဒီယုိဖုိင္မွ မွတ္စုမ်ားကုိ မင္းဘယ္လုိထုတ္မလဲဆုိတဲ့ ဥပမာတခုမွ်သာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

After you've listened several times and taken thorough notes, you then put the audio or

မွတ္စုမ်ားထုတ္ၿပီး ႀကိမ္ဖန္မ်ားစြာ နားေထာင္ၿပီးေနာက္ အသံဖုိင္/ဗြီဒီယုိဖုိင္ကုိ ေဘးဖယ္ထားလုိက္ပါ။

video away and, from your notes, try to speak the way the native speaker was speaking. If

မင္းရဲ႕မွတ္စုကုိၾကည့္ၿပီး မိခင္ဘာသာစကားကဲ့သုိ႕ ေျပာၾကည့္ပါ။

you can, record yourself, and then compare this to the native speaker. This is how you

ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ရင္ အသံသြင္းထားပါ။ ၿပီးေတာ့ မိခင္ဘာသာေျပာသူအသံနဲ႕ ႏႈိင္းယွဥ္ၾကည့္ပါ။

can figure out where you still need to work. And now we'll do an imitation exercise. In

ဒါက ဘယ္ေနရာမွာ လုိအပ္သလဲဆုိတာ ရွာေဖြနည္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အခု တုပနည္းသခၤန္းစာကုိ ေလ့လာၾကစုိ႕။

this video, you don't look at the text. You're not concerned with the actual words because

ဒီဗြီဒီယုိမွာ စာသားကုိ မၾကည့္ပါနဲ႕။ စကားလုံးေတြရဲ႕အဓိပၸါယ္ကုိ မသိမွာ စိတ္မပူပါနဲ႕။

you do already have ideas about how words should be pronounced. So in this exercise

စကားလုံးေတြ ဘယ္လုိအသံထြက္တယ္ဆုိတာ မင္းသိထားၿပီးျဖစ္လုိ႕ေလ။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဒီသခၤန္းစာမွာ

you're just listening. And I loop things three times in an imitation exercise so that you

နားေထာင္ရုံသက္သက္ပါပဲ။ ေနာက္ၿပီး ဒီတုပနည္းေလ့က်င့္ခန္းမွာ သုံးႀကိမ္ေျပာထားပါတယ္။

begin to think about the pitch changes and the musicality of the speech, rather than

စကားလုံးတခုခ်င္းရဲ႕အသံထက္ စကားေျပာရဲ႕ စည္းခ်က္ႏွင့္ အသံအနိမ့္အျမင့္ ေျပာင္းသြားတာကုိ စဥ္းစားသတိထားမိဘုိ႕ပါ။

the individual words themselves. Repeat it back exactly as you hear it, even if you're

စကားလုံးတခုခ်င္း မသဲကြဲေသးဘူးဆုိရင္ မင္းေသေသခ်ာခ်ာနားလည္တဲ့အထိ ထပ္ခါထပ္ခါနားေထာင္ပါ။

not sure of the individual words. It's ok, that's not what we're going for in this particular

အဆင္ေျပပါတယ္။ ဒါက ဒီသခၤန္းစာအတြက္ လုပ္ေနတာမဟုတ္ဘူးေလ။

exercise. A lot of people ask me [x3]

A lot of people ask me. (၃)ေခါက္။

A lot of people ask me if it's possible to sound like a native speaker [3x]

A lot of people ask me if it's possible to sound like a native speaker. (၃)ေခါက္။

if it's possible to sound like a native speaker

if it's possible to sound like a native speaker

if you weren't born in the US. [x3]

if you weren't born in the US. (၃)ေခါက္။

Because of the internet, there really is an

အင္တာနက္ေၾကာင့္

endless supply of audio and video where English is being spoken by native speakers. I know

မိခင္ဘာသာစကားေျပာသူေတြရဲ႕ အဂၤလိပ္စကားေျပာ အသံဖုိင္ႏွင့္ ဗြီဒီယုိဖုိင္ အမ်ားအျပားရွိပါတယ္။

looping something over and over, as in the imitation exercise, can be more of a hassle

တုပနည္းသခၤန္းစာအတုိင္း တခုခုကုိ မင္းကုိယ္တုိင္ ရစ္ၿပီးခဏခဏနားေထာင္ရင္ ကယိကထမ်ားမယ္ဆုိတာ သိပါတယ္။

on your own. That's why, on my website, I do have both Ben Franklin and imitation exercises

ဒါေၾကာင့္မုိ႕ ငါ့၀က္(ဖ္)ဆုိဒ္မွာ Ben Franklin ႏွင့္ တုပနည္းေလ့က်င့္ခန္းႏွစ္ခုစလုံးေလ့က်င့္ဘုိ႕

ready for you. So I encourage you to take a look at these, or any other audio or video

မင္းအတြက္ အဆင္သင့္လုပ္ထားပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ အဲဒါေတြကုိ ၾကည့္ဘုိ႕ ဒါမွမဟုတ္ မင္းစိတ္၀င္စားတဲ့

clip that interests you, and turn it into a pronunciation exercise: study it this way.

အသံ/ဗြီဒီယုိဖုိင္ေတြကုိ ၾကည့္ဘုိ႕တုိက္တြန္းပါတယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ အသံထြက္နည္းေလ့က်င့္ခန္းကုိ ေျပာင္းၾကည့္ပါ။ ဒီနည္းလမ္းျဖင့္ ေလ့လာပါ။

It will really take you far in your practice. That's it, and thanks so much for using Rachel's English.

ဒီနည္းလမ္းက မင္းရဲ႕ေလ့က်င့္မႈမွာ မ်ားစြာထိေရာက္မွာပါ။ ဒါပါပဲ။ Rachel's English ကုိ ၾကည့္တဲ့အတြက္ ေက်းဇူးအမ်ားႀကီး တင္ပါတယ္။