Pronunciation diary part 1

Our task for this week was to try out some exercises from our Pronunciation Practice Page and write about our experiences with them. I, personally, enjoyed these exercises very much since I like listening to native speakers and I have always been fascinated by the different accents of British and American English. This is why I started with the pronunciation practice page “antimoon.com”. This site provides a subpage called "Choosing between American and British pronunciation" that is really helpful to decide if you want to speak British or American English. I, for my part, prefer American English and therefore I focused on the American English pronunciation exercises.

I started with the pronunciation website “Rachel’s English”. I have to say I really enjoyed her videos called “Real life” because the focus of these videos is everyday communication and they also give an insight in the American Culture. Her perfect AE pronunciation was the reason I got stuck on her page for quite some time. After that, I watched the videos from Amy Walker. I really liked her accent tutorial because she’s a likeable person and, in my opinion, she explains the way how AE pronunciation works really well. Particularly her first video about the vowel sounds was really useful for me. It’s a lot easier to pronounce a sound if know how to do it concerning mouth, teeth and tongue. I think practicing pronunciation in front of a mirror is a really good idea! Another video that appealed to me was the one about consonants and letter combination. Since a lot of German native speakers have a problem with the “th” and “f/v” sounds I had a closer look at these exercises.

To sum up, I think that the exercises from our Pronunciation Practice Page are really helpful and I am planning on improving my pronunciation, in particular my “th” and “v/f” sound, by doing a lot more of these exercises.