Pronunciation for Chinese speakers
Pronunciation is a quarter of your Speaking band
- Speaking is marked on four criteria, and Pronunciation is one of them — a full quarter.
- Almost nobody prepares it, which makes it the cheapest quarter to improve.
- You are not marked on having a British or American accent. You are marked on whether a listener understands you without effort.
- Chinese-L1 pronunciation errors come from a small, enumerable set. Work through the five below and you have covered most of them.
Pronunciation is one of how many Speaking criteria?
Four — Fluency and coherence, Lexical resource, Grammatical range and accuracy, and Pronunciation. It is a full quarter of the band and almost nobody prepares it.
1. Final consonants — the biggest single win
- Mandarin syllables end in a vowel, -n or -ng. English ends in almost anything, and that is where the sounds go missing.
- Desk becomes des. Wanted becomes wan. Helped becomes help. Fifths disappears entirely.
- Fixing this one thing does more for intelligibility than anything else on the list, because English carries a lot of grammar on its final consonants.
- Practice: say cat, cats, cap, caps, cast, casts slowly, finishing every word. Then read a paragraph aloud and finish every word in it.
Why does dropping a final consonant cost more than it looks?
Tense, plural and possession all live at the end of the word. Dropping the consonant removes the grammar as well as the sound.
2. The -ed and -s endings are grammar too
- Drop them and you lose marks twice: once on Pronunciation and once on Grammatical range and accuracy, because the listener hears a tense or number error.
- -ed has three sounds: walked is /t/, needed is /ɪd/, lived is /d/. The rule is the sound before it, not the spelling.
- -s has three sounds too: cats /s/, dogs /z/, buses /ɪz/.
- Say the pairs: walk / walked, live / lived, need / needed, cat / cats, dog / dogs.
Match each word to the sound its -ed ending makes.
The rule is the sound before the ending, not the spelling: a voiceless sound takes /t/, a voiced one /d/, and /t/ or /d/ takes /ɪd/.
3. The sounds Mandarin does not have
- /θ/ and /ð/ — think, this. They usually become /s/ and /z/. Put the tongue tip lightly between the teeth. It feels exaggerated and sounds correct.
- /v/ and /w/ — very often becomes wery. /v/ is the top teeth on the lower lip.
- /l/, /n/ and /r/ at the start of a word — light / night, read / lead.
- /i:/ and /ɪ/ — sheep / ship, feel / fill. The short one is not just shorter; the tongue is lower.
- Pick the two that are worst for you and drill only those. Five at once is how people give up.
Where is the stress in 'photography'?
phoTOgraphy. Compare PHOtograph and photoGRAPHic — the stress moves when the suffix changes, which is where most errors live.
4. Word stress can make a word unrecognisable
- English words have one stressed syllable, and the wrong one is often not recognised at all, even when every sound is right.
- phoTOgraphy / PHOtograph / photoGRAPHic. eCONomy / ecoNOMic. DEvelop — no, deVELop.
- The stress moves when a suffix is added, and that is where most errors live.
- When you learn a long word, learn where the stress goes. The IPA line under every word in this site's vocabulary lists marks it with ˈ.
Speaking with flat, even stress on every word makes you easier to understand.
The opposite. English reduces its function words so the content words stand out; flattening everything removes the signal a listener uses to follow you.
5. Sentence stress and intonation
- English stresses the content words — nouns, main verbs, adjectives — and reduces the rest to almost nothing. I'd LIKE to GO to the LIbrary.
- A flat, evenly stressed delivery is heard as monotonous, and it is harder to follow, not easier.
- Rise through a list and fall on the last item. Fall at the end of a statement; rise on a genuine question.
- Record yourself for two minutes and listen back. It is uncomfortable and it is the fastest diagnostic available.