The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

Today’s blog post will be about how you can achieve native-like pronunciation when learning and speaking a foreign language.

1. The first step to achieve native-like pronunciation in your target language is to get a feel for the ‘rhythm’ of your target language, i.e. for the intonation of the words in a sentence, which words are stressed and where (stress), and for the sounds of the language in general. For this, listening attentively to your target language regularly and frequently, especially when you are starting a new language, is essential. Try to imitate the pattern of the rhythm of the language as closely as possible.
2. Another very important part of developing a native-like pronunciation has to do with phonetics, namely where exactly the vowels and consonants are formed in the mouth and which position your tongue is in when you pronounce a given sound in your target language. So how can you find out how to pronounce a given sound? Listen to a word, which contains a sound you have difficulty with, several times. Try to imitate the correct pronunciation of the vowel or consonant by trying to pronounce the sound with different positions of your tongue or in different areas of your mouth until you get it exactly right. Once you know the correct position of your tongue to form the sound in question, practice it until you really master the correct pronunciation of the vowel, consonant or syllable.
3. Apart from the correct pronunciation of the sounds themselves, how long the vowels and consonants are spoken also matters a lot (= vowel length and consonant length). For example, languages like Finnish or Polish have very short vowels, and when consonants or vowels are doubled, they have to be spoken much longer; likewise, Czech and Slovak have very short vowels and long vowels and these have to be clearly articulated and differentiated. By contrast, languages like English, French or German have medium-length vowels, and if you pronounced them very short, it would sound strange (to a native speaker).

So basically, native-like pronunciation can be achieved by paying attention to and practising the combination of the particular rhythm of the target language, its word stress, its phonetics and the length and ‘quality’ (e.g. aspirated or non-aspirated) of its vowels and consonants. The best way to achieve this aim is to listen to your target language(s) as often as possible, in every possible way (audio recordings, music, movies, radio, conversation) and trying to imitate what you hear. 🙂