5 Speaking Mistakes to AVOID in English (https:\/\/youtu.be\/5jGgcELhykc)<\/a><\/noscript><\/div>\nVideo Transcript:<\/h2>\n
Today we\u2019re going to go over 5 speaking mistakes to avoid to have clearer communication in English.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNumber one: avoid choppiness, go for smoothness. What do I mean by this? Well, let\u2019s take that phrase: \u201cWhat do I mean by this?\u201d. 6 words, but each word connects to the next word. No breaks. As if this whole phrase is one big word. We really hear this connection and this smoothness when we slow it down. Here, I already recorded the sentence. Let me play it for you.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat do I mean by this?\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNow let\u2019s slow it down.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat do I mean by this?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYou really hear how smooth it is. It doesn\u2019t feel like 6 separate words. Sometimes my students want each word to feel separate and clear, but that choppiness and separateness is not a characteristic of natural spoken English, so it can actually make things more difficult to understand, especially if some of the sounds are mixed up.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo in the phrase, \u201cWhat do I mean by this?\u201d,\u00a0 there are no breaks, the flow is constantly moving forward. Sometimes I tell students to think of the sound as a tube of toothpaste. Think of it coming out, equal pressure, one big line, one big long tube. Let\u2019s look just at the first three words.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat do I. What do I.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe first is stressed, and the other two aren\u2019t. What do I. Move your arm with me like that,\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat do I. What do I.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFeel that smoothness. It\u2019s just like a 3-syllable word with first syllable stress. It\u2019s the same feeling. What do I, harmony, pacify, happily, what do I, what do I.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWe link words in American English, so always look for the connection and how they link when you imitate native speakers. We\u2019re not saying \u2018what\u2019 \u2018do\u2019. We actually drop the T and connect to the D: wha-do. What-do.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThen the OO vowel of do, that links right into AI. do-ai, What-do-I. This is a vowel to vowel link. This is the label for any word that ends with a vowel or diphthong linking into any word that begins with a vowel or diphthong. These can feel the most sloppy, sometimes students say they feel drunk or lazy when they do this kind of link.<\/span> But that smoothness is what we\u2019re going for. Remember the tube of toothpaste. What do I. What do I. Mean by this. Three more words, again, the first one is stressed.\u00a0 Mean by this. Mean by. N right into B with no stop, break, or separation. This is a consonant to consonant link. N-by. Mean-by. Mean by this.\u00a0 And finally, right into the word \u2018this\u2019 with no break. Mean by this. Can you try this now?\u00a0 Feel the connection.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMean by this.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo connection, forward flow, tube of toothpaste.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBe sure to download my sounds of American English Cheat Sheet. It\u2019s free, it\u2019s an illustrated reference guide for you, for all the American English sounds including the phonetic symbols you need to know. Link here and in the video description.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnother thing to avoid is speaking too fast. Now, I know what you\u2019re thinking, \u201cBut Rachel, Americans speak very fast.\u201d That\u2019s true. But there\u2019s a particular way we do it. In the phrase \u201cwhat do I mean by this,\u201d two of the words were still long. The stressed words. One thing that can make people hard to understand is when they don\u2019t lean into their longer stressed syllables. I have noticed this with some of my Spanish-speaking students especially. Give them length. Think of English as looking like morse code. Except not flat. Long and short, with your long having a pitch change, usually up and down, sometimes down and up, more like a mountain, sometimes like a valley. So the syllables look like this. Short and long, with the short leading up to the stressed syllable or falling away from it. What do I mean by this.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIt\u2019s different than \u2018what do I mean by this\u2019 – where they are all short.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo, avoid choppiness, and give us long stressed syllables compared to short unstressed syllables.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNext, don\u2019t let your pitch be too flat. We want variation, that\u2019s where we get clarity.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIf I say everything on the same pitch it\u2019s less clear.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat variation really gives us some clarity. Of course, most of my students don\u2019t say everything on the same pitch, but there isn\u2019t enough variation. We don\u2019t want to see pitch changes like this. We want pitch changes like this.\u00a0 That is clear speaking.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nA lot of my students feel silly when I ask for more pitch variation. It just feels like too much. It feels fake, clownish, and that\u2019s very uncomfortable. But, depending on your habits, this might be the very thing you need to add to be more clear speaking English. I was working with a student in a live class once, and I was understanding everything until she got to the phrase \u2018data analytics\u2019. And I realized I didn\u2019t understand right away for two reasons: One, I needed longer stressed syllables, and two, I needed more pitch variation.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nData analytics. That was the first phrase that I had to really think about that I didn\u2019t immediately understand where my mind went wait, what did she say? and I figured it out but um, it wasn\u2019t immediate. And, it was sort of because, okay well a couple of things. I think we could use a little bit more ahuhahuhahuh. This structure helps us understand it . It was a little bit data analytics. Tatatatata. All a little bit staccato and short. And in American English, we have like almost we have very little staccato, we have a lot of like if I was taking a paintbrush it would be like valalalalah instead of tatatata. So, data analytics would become data analytics. Data analytics and there\u2019s more pitch change so data is sort of flat and I went daaaata. I\u2019ve sometimes just uh, any old random piece of audio from a native speaker. And when I slow it down to like 25 percent, 10 percent, it is crazy how slidey it is. There\u2019s just no jumpers, skip, it\u2019s so connected. So, let\u2019s do that with the word data and we\u2019re going to do it in slow motion. Data. You do it.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nData.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOkay, good. Here\u2019s what I got. Day, I want daaay. So you gave me this much pitch range. I want that much. Start lower. Daaaata.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDaaaata.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah. Let\u2019s do this. Duh, you copy me. Duh.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDuh.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m trying to take your pitch down.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDuuh.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDaay.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYes.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDaay.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI did this thing when I compared Chinese to American by taking it into a program that analyzes pitch and I haven\u2019t done it with Hungarian but I noticed for Chinese, the pitch range was smaller and higher like this is where most Chinese was and this is where most of the American English was. We had a lot more lower pitches. It wasn\u2019t that we had a lot more higher pitches. So you might want to think about that. Your pitch range is here and what I actually want is not this but what I want is this. I want you to bring in more lower pitches so instead of data, it\u2019s daaata. Of course I\u2019m exaggerating right now but like let\u2019s feel that. Duh, duh. Let me hear you do that really low.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDuh.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nDay.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nData.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s right. Data. And of course we\u2019re slowing it down, we\u2019re exaggerating but we have to do that to get away from data. You know, it helps to slow things down and to exaggerate them and usually my students, it feels so different and weird that they never uh, go all the way to the exaggeration right. It feels too silly, too strange. But the more we can pull in that direction, the more comfortable we get with it in general.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMy fourth tip is mouth movement. I was listening to the audio book \u201cInside voice\u201d by voiceover artist Lake Bell and she talks about studying the shape of mouths. She has done so much research and collected so much knowledge on how to imitate people and create characters with accents. And I heard her talking about the shape of mouths and I was like \u2018Yes!\u2019 This is something I talk about with my students a lot. I see really minimal mouth movements. But in American English, we have quite a lot of movement. More jaw drop, more lip rounding than my students sometimes want to do. When you speak English with minimal mouth movements, it can be really mumbly and hard to understand.\u00a0 But just like pitch variation, this is something that students sometimes shy away from, because their native language doesn\u2019t require as much movement. So to really move that jaw feels uncomfortable and, again, clownish. But study the mouth movement of native speakers. Imitate it, even if it feels exaggerated in your own mouth.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI was working on this once with a Russian student, and I said, have you ever seen an American speaking Russian with a thick American accent? And she thought, \u201cOh my gosh, yes I have, and it was so funny how much their mouths moved. That is your clue. That movement is what you need when you speak American English.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe last tip is to lower your pitch. I\u2019ve found that many students, when they speak English, their pitch is just a little bit high. And I don\u2019t notice it when I\u2019m hearing them, but I do notice it when I imitate them.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve found that when students lower their pitch a little bit, it helps them sound more natural and capture that American sound with their own voice. And that can, mixed with other factors, make them easier to understand. This is a clip of me working with a student in a live class on lowering pitch. Follow along and play with lowering yours.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo I wanted to work on smoothness but I think I actually want to work on your pitch. Monday, I wake up at seven. And there is nothing honestly, it takes me a while to figure out that\u2019s part of what feels strange because Americans were so used to other people speaking American English with that higher pitch that I think a lot of us don\u2019t really notice it. But then if I sit down and I really start imitating students I\u2019m like \u201cwait, hold on that is so high.\u201d Um, for me so, Monday, I wake up at seven. Monday, let\u2019s bring it down.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMonday\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight. And part of I think bringing it down is sort of thinking of like a wide open heaviness to the body, to the neck, to the throat. It\u2019s going to help bring that down and have that more natural feeling. Monday I wake up at seven.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMonday I wake up at seven.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOkay, hold on. Monday, Monday. That\u2019s not bad. Monday but Monday, Monday. Can we bring it down a little bit? Monday. Monday I wake up at seven.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah. Monday I wake up at seven.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nLet\u2019s do the whole phrase without a break. Instead of Monday, we\u2019re just going to do \u2018Monday I wake up at seven.\u2019\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMonday I wake up at seven.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah, good. Now, hold on. Monday I wake up at, wake up at. Wake up at. Wake up at.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWake up at. Okay. Monday I wake up at seven.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOkay, that was good. I still would say \u2018wake up at\u2019 I like that. I liked the sounds you gave them but I would like them even faster so wake up at.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWake up at.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWake up at becomes wake-up-at. It\u2019s so funny, it sounds like way, I\u2019m just going to type it so other people can think about it this way. kuh-pit’. Right, it\u2019s like that linking, makes it feel like the ending consonant is beginning the next uhm, syllable way-kuh-pit.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nway-kuh-pit. Uhmm.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWake up at seven.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHmmhm, exactly. Let\u2019s get a little bit more volume, wake up at seven.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWake up at seven.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHmmhm.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOkay, I\u2019m lowering my voice again.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWake up at seven.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah, good. And I can see how lowering your voice is going to make you lower your volume too, try not to do that. Try do find a place where you can bring your pitch down a little bit but now bring your volume all the way back.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m going to put in another clip from my lesson with the first student you saw. Earlier in this video you saw us working on \u2018data\u2019. Now we\u2019ll work on \u2018analytics\u2019. And you\u2019ll see us talking about many of these 5 factors: smoothness, mouth movement, pitch variation, longer stressed syllables. They just make such a difference.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo now we\u2019re going to take the next word. So, data has first syllable stress. Now we\u2019re going to do \u2018Analytics\u2019. So it\u2019s okay for \u2018ana\u2019 to be flap but I don\u2019t want ana. I want ana, ana.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAna, ana.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight. Smooth.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAna\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight. Now let\u2019s do \u2018analy\u2019<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnaly<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nRight, right.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnaly\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nA little bit more space between to tongue, ih, ih.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnaly, ih, ih, analy.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nSo I see that your teeth are not parting at all. Analy, I think I want analy, ih.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnaly, ih\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nYeah. There\u2019s just a little bit more space.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHmhm, that\u2019s it\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnaly<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHmmhm. And now we\u2019re going to have a flap T, analytics.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAnalytics.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n