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The Top 5 Secrets to Clear Speech

It can seem quite daunting to change the way you speak and improve your pronunciation. In reality, there are some very simple changes you can make to increase your clarity (and confidence) when speaking English. Here are my Top 5 Secrets to Clear Speech that you can start putting to use today!

1. Let loose and have fun

Whether you like it or not, you have to make pretty funny-looking faces to pronounce some English sounds correctly. As long as you are self-conscious about the way you look, it will be hard to pronounce these sounds clearly.

Have you ever wondered why photographers tell you to say CHEESE? It’s because to make the long EE sound, you have to pull the corners of your lips out to your cheeks as far as you can. When you say the word correctly, you’re just about making a smile.

To pronounce the TH sound correctly, you might just have to go against your mother’s teachings and stick your tongue out at people! In order to make this sound correctly, your tongue needs to come out between your teeth. If you feel your tongue touching the back of your top teeth, you’re most likely making a D or T sound instead.

If English is a foreign language for you, certain English sounds will feel really strange to make, and might even make you feel uncomfortable. Don’t worry. We all look silly, and the more you practise your pronunciation, the more natural these faces will feel.

2. Watch your stress

As concerned as we should be about our heart rates and overall health, the stress I’m talking about here isn’t what you keep blaming on your boss. When it comes to proper pronunciation, using consistent word stress is key.

Some commonly mispronounced words in Asia include:

purCHASE

collEAGE

eCONomic

photoGRAPHy

In international English, we would place our stress (emphasis) on a different syllable of these words:

PURchase

COLLeague

ecoNOMic

phoTOGraphy

I’ve written a couple other articles with more detailed explanations of words stress. You can find them on my articles page: www.hansencommlab.com/articles.html.

3. Don’t say EVERYTHING

Remember that, in English, we don’t always pronounce every letter that we see on a page. There are many words with silent letters, and if you pronounce the words the way they are spelled, you’ll raise the hair on the back of every native English speaker’s neck who can hear you!

Here are some examples:

Salmon = Sammon (no L)

Debt = Det (no B)

Fasten = Fassen (no T)

Plumber = Plummer (no B)

Yacht = Yaht (no CH or K sound in the middle)

4. Use the right words

Be aware of differences in your own variety of English and other varieties of English. This is just as important for the American meeting the Brit as it is for the Singaporean speaking with a non-native English speaking European. There may be words or phrases that are normal and appropriate in your linguistic circles, but don’t make sense, or worse, are really embarrassing to say in other circles.

Some examples from Singapore English include and translated to international English:

choked pipes = clogged pipes

chopping (a passport, for example) = stamping

slippers = sandals

Being aware of these simple differences can make things a lot easier when your listener looks at you like you’re speaking Greek when you’re talking about something you think is pretty common.

5. Pretend you’re perfect – and don’t care when you aren’t

Part of speaking a foreign language is making mistakes. Once you accept this fact and just speak without constantly worrying about the mistakes you’re most certainly making, you’ll find that your grasp of the language will soar. Every time you make a mistake and it’s drawn to your attention, you’ll commit it to memory and learn something new. If you never make a mistake, how will you ever move forward?

There are only two things you can do when you make a mistake: laugh about it and learn from it!

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