Is there an optimal way to learn to pronounce a language?

Get to grips with the sounds of your target language by understanding phonetics.

Passive learning can’t teach you what you don’t even have the concept of.

It’s my firm belief that there is an optimal way for each person to learn to pronounce any language. It’s just a matter of knowing a little bit of the technical side of your target language.

A lot of people will disagree with me. The current way that pronunciation is generally approached by the majority of educational resources avoids the technical side of phonetics to avoid ‘scaring’ potential learners, and opts for a more passive learning style in which the learner is exposed to the sounds of the target language and is expected to ‘pick it up’ or ‘acquire’ pronunciation passively.

I would argue that while this approach may work for some language learners, it doesn’t work for many. The problem is that people are not ‘blank slates’ when it comes to phonetics - they are approaching the pronunciation of a new language from an understanding based on the sounds and rules of languages they already speak.

Sometimes, there are things happening in the phonetics of their target language that not only aren’t understood by the learner, but aren’t even concepts the learner has access to.

A good example of this is tone in Mandarin. Simply put, English speaking learners of Mandarin, like myself, tend to mince tones. I remember struggling immensely with this during my time studying in China - my Thai classmates couldn’t see why we found it so difficult. Our languages don’t have tone, so the idea that a word would change meaning depending on tone is completely alien to most people not exposed to the idea - to expect a learner to ‘acquire’ something they don’t have the concept of is a bit of a jump.

Another example is mutations in Welsh. Often, English speaking learners of Welsh mistake mutated words for different words entirely, and this entirely makes sense as the idea of the first consonant in a word changing without changing the meaning of the word is alien to the English language.

Phonetics as a tool.

The only way to teach someone how these things function is to explain the concept to them, clearly, and for them to naturalise it through practice. Any good Mandarin learner will tell you to learn and actively practice the tones early on if you want to be comprehensible.

This issue also extends into normal phonetics - many learners of English pronounce ‘th’ in ‘this’ with a ‘d’ or a ‘t’ sound - this is because the ‘th’ sounds in English are quite rare in other languages, and they are substituting it for a similar sound that feels right in their language. The same goes the other way - English speakers who learn other languages are terrible for aspirating stops at the start of words, even when the rule doesn’t apply in their target language. They are taking a rule from their first language and applying it to their target.

My suggestion for learners of languages is to get comfortable with IPA and to compare the sounds and phonetic structure of their target language with the languages they already know, to see where there is overlap, and thus where there are ‘easy wins’, and where there’s a new sound, which will require particular focus.

It’s also important to know that you will not sound perfect any time soon - your goal with pronunciation should be comprehensibility rather than having native-like pronunciation. Native-like pronunciation can be done, but will take time.

The woes of romanisation.

Many courses, such as the ‘Teach yourself’ series often provide a romanisation of the target language to learners in order to try and capitalise on this shared phonetic inventory. You often see examples like below:

ば - ba - like ‘ba’ in ‘bath’

And whilst this is useful as a start, it can contain some misleading information that can take a long time to fix going forward. A big issue with this that I have found is to do with one’s own dialect. To me, ‘bath’ and ‘trap’ both contain the same vowel (/æ/ for those who know where I’m going with this) so how do I pronounce this? In my dialect or in standard British English where the vowel is a longer a (/a:/). Which way is correct for ば?

And woe betide describing pronunciation of sounds that aren’t in your language. A classic example is below:

ch - like ‘ch’ in scottish ‘loch ness’

What? I’ve heard that pronounced three different ways by three different Scottish English speakers, is it like ‘ck’ in ‘lock’? or ‘h’ in ‘hello’ or is it something in between that many English speakers struggle to pronounce? (it’s the latter, /x/)

IPA for clear transcription.

This confusion can be easily cleared up with using the international phonetic alphabet, abbreviated to ‘IPA’, which provides a clear and scientific transcription of the sounds of a language, and I’d strongly advise anyone who is serious about language learning to get comfortable with it, as knowing it well will allow you to approach any language’s pronunciation with (relative) ease. You will even be able to spot certain sounds that you know you need to be careful of because of your own accent.

I personally experienced the issues that confusing romanisation can cause when I began to learn Farsi after learning Hindi. Both languages have long and short ‘a’s, transcribed ‘a’ (short a) and ‘ā’ (long a).

Having learnt Hindi first, I had unconsciously conflated the two languages, and began pronouncing short ‘a’s in Farsi with an /ə/ and long ‘a’s as /a:/, leading to completely incorrect pronunciation - short a should be /æ/, a confusion that was caused by romanisation, and took me months to fix.

Likewise, knowing IPA has been a huge boon for me. I have recently begun learning Yoruba seriously, and I saved myself a lot of hassle by knowing that in my dialect, /o/ sounds like /u/ and I tend to pronounce it /ɔ/ or /u/. In Yoruba this would be disastrous as /ɔ/ and /o/ and /u/ are all completely different, non-mixable vowels - o and ọ. Not being clear on this point could have me saying ‘owó’ (money) as ‘ọwọ́’ (hand). Having a pocket full of owó when you enter a shop might be welcomed, but someone with a pocket full of ọwọ́ might come across a bit differently.

There are limitations to IPA of course. IPA has an issue with how broad or narrow a transcription may be (you pronounce ‘n’ in ‘ankle’ and ‘ng’, even though if you split the word up - an - kle, you pronounce the n as a n.). Also sometimes it struggles with subtler differences, but it’s still a far stronger base for learning phonetics than romanisation or passive learning, in my opinion.

And learning how you can bend phonetics is something that you can learn passively - it’s best to listen to the native speakers on this one!

Where to start as a learner.

Firstly, the most important thing - to separate in your mind the language’s ‘script’, that is, the way the language is normally written, from the ‘phonetics’ of the language, that is, the sounds within it. Too often, people make assumptions on pronunciation based on similarities with the script of their own language, but this can be avoided by being clear with yourself first - you can’t assume that a letter in your language carries the same pronunciation in another.

Step two is to get to know IPA a bit. Don’t worry about learning the entire thing, but it’s good to get familiar with it. There’s a really good overview of it here for reference, but the best way to learn it in my experience is to look around on Wikipedia for individual sounds as well as the IPA tables for the languages you already speak and are learning.

The full table is here

If you click any of the sounds, you will be taken to a page which gives a list of examples of the sound in various languages. It’s quite interesting to poke around until you have a rough idea of how it all works.

Thirdly, is to know your phonetic inventory. Know which of the above sounds you are familiar with because of languages you already speak, know which ones you use regularly, and know which sounds you have learnt from other languages.

The fourth step is to compare the sounds that you know, and the sounds that are in the language you are learning - make a note of the sounds that you are unfamiliar with, and especially make note of things that your languages completely lack - tones, clicks etc.

Finally, make sure you pay attention to intonation. Some languages have fixed intonation (such as Welsh, where stress almost always falls on the second to last syllable) or moving intonation, like Russian, which uses different stressed syllables to differentiate between two similar sounding words.

If your target language has tone, then it’s helpful to remember that there are different kinds of tones in languages - contrasting and contour tones. Contrast tones put each syllable on different levels (such as Yoruba’s 3 level system), and others focus on the change in tone rather than the tone itself (Thai’s rising, high, low, low falling and high falling tones, for example). Otherwise, just focus on it and be patient. Tones tend to be on a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 being your normal voice so it’s never going to be too complex.

IPA as a superpower

Ultimately, by getting comfortable with IPA, you can really supercharge your pronunciation of languages. Many dictionaries, including wiktionary, use IPA as a standard for transcribing words, and you can make really accurate notes of words you hear in the wild. Furthermore, by knowing the phonetics of the languages you speak and the languages you are learning, you can highlight potential trouble spots to focus on, you aren’t going in blind anymore.

Even more amazing, if you are planning to learn multiple languages, you can collate all the sounds in all the languages you want to know and map out your way forward in terms of pronunciation - a real game changer for us dabblers out there.