Pronunciation and Ear Training will improve ALL areas of your English
I’ve taught a lot of students English and there’s one thing that surprises all of them: the value of mastering your tongue and, more importantly, opening your ears. Do you have trouble speaking? Do you have trouble understanding fast, natural speech? Maybe you have trouble remembering vocabulary words because you keep mixing up the sounds or maybe the stress pattern? Pronunciation and ear training is the one key solution to all of those problems.
Language learning is composed of five skills and two “knowledge areas”. The four skills that you usually think of are: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, but pronunciation/ear training is also a skill. The two knowledge areas are vocabulary and grammar. I call vocabulary a knowledge area because it’s just words and phrases. So either this word means this or it doesn’t. Grammar, which is usually a big focus in traditional classes (this has changed, but not enough), is really just a description of a language and it’s not the language itself. So, you want to be focusing on developing your skills, not grammar, and you probably know that, especially if you’ve seen a lot of my other content. But pronunciation/ear training in particular is so critically important and will help all areas of your English.
How Pronunciation/Ear Training Improves the Other Four Skills
It’ll help your listening skills, of course, because if you open your ears to hear the sounds and to hear the rhythm (the music of English), then you will better be able to understand naturally spoken speech at fast speed. In fact, there are probably sounds that you can’t even hear because when you were first born, your brain had the ability to hear every sound that a human could make. Over time — in the first six months to a year or so — it focused on hearing the sounds of your native language and it started focusing just on getting those and starting to be able to try to produce those sounds. And you don’t remember any of that because, well, you were a baby. But you played with the sounds and you focused on hearing and separating out the sounds and how they flow and how they connect. That’s all pronunciation and ear training is about. That’s all it is. There’s a lot of information to cover, but it’s actually not that bad and it can even be really fun.
Of course, pronunciation/ear training can help your speaking by allowing you to speak more clearly, more naturally, and help you speak faster. There are times when we want to enunciate and speak more clearly and then there are times, especially in informal situations, when we want to speak more quickly and we don’t have to be as clear.
You might not think that pronunciation and ear training would help your reading skills, but let me ask you a question: when you read, do you hear a voice in your head? For most people, the answer is yes. If you’re reading in English, you’re going to hear your own accent, right? So reading is very, very good (in fact, it’s one of the best ways to expand your vocabulary among other things), but if all the time that you’re reading you’re constantly hearing your own accent in your head, you’re just reinforcing bad pronunciation and bad listening skills, which makes it harder for you to communicate and understand others. Now, don’t let this scare you! It’s not about perfection, and you always have the ability to fix this, which is one thing that English Hacks is all about.
As for writing, there’s not as big of an impact. But, again, usually when you’re writing you’ll think as you write and those thoughts will be in your accent as you write, so it does have an effect.
How Pronunciation/Ear Training Improves the Two Knowledge Areas
With vocabulary, very often what happens is that you’ll hear a new word or you’ll find a new word. For example, the word “cat”. But because your ears and mouth aren’t trained, you can’t even hear the “a” in “cat”. Instead, it will most likely sound like a similar vowel in your language that probably doesn’t exist in English. So you try to say the word, but you pronounce it closer to “cut”, which is completely different, but you don’t notice. Ear training also includes hearing word stress and sentence stress, which is probably very different from your language. Instead of memorizing a bunch of word stress rules (as most learners do and most teacher teach). Just train your ears!
So, pronunciation and ear training can definitely help you learn vocabulary more quickly and easily. In addition, when I teach pronunciation and ear training (for example on YouTube, but I’ll probably post about it here, too), I give you common spelling patterns because English has a very horrible spelling system. That will actually allow you to remember how a word is spelled much more easily, but some sounds don’t have reliable patterns.
A lot of the time, grammar words, for example, “to”, aren’t pronounced the way you expect. Does this word have the sound “U”? In the full pronunciation of the word, yes, but we don’t usually use the full pronunciation. For example, “I want to go to the beach.” The word “to” (and also “the”) will almost always reduce in sound and become “tuh” (and “thuh”). You’re expecting “tu” and “thee”, so you might not notice the word when you hear it in a fast sentence! Pronunciation and ear training can actually help your grammar because when you’re listening and you’re getting exposure to English, you can actually start to recognize those words.
In fact, “want to”, as you probably know, becomes “wanna”. That’s a very common thing. And it’s not necessarily informal, it’s just part of how we speak. So, in that case, there’s not even a “T” there and notice the “UH” in “tuh” (to) actually remains. We spell “wanna”” with an “A”, but it’s the “uh” sound (never write “wanna” in formal situations). So, you can imagine the impact that this can have on your grammar because you’re actually able to hear the little words and changes that are there that you might not notice without this training.
Can you Sound like a Native? Should you?
Everything I just explained is the main reason why pronunciation/ear training is so very important. But what if you don’t want a perfect accent? That’s fine, you don’t have to. If you really want to, it is possible for almost any person, at any age, learning any language to sound either like a native or very close to a native. Some things might be harder to master than others. That depends on you, your native language, and other factors, so you might need more practice for certain sounds or for certain areas, but in general you can go as far as you want all the way up to sounding like a native. But the other side of this is, let’s say you’re not interested in having really, really good pronunciation. You just want to be understandable. I have a lot of students who don’t care if they don’t sound like a native speaker and that’s perfectly fine. However, if nothing else, you want to train your ears!
And as I said, there are probably certain sounds in English that you don’t even hear because when you were a baby, your brain didn’t need those sounds. A very common example of this would be “eat” and “it”. Most English learners pronounce these words the same. They are not pronounced the same.
Schools Teach you English Backwards!
You might notice that if this is so important, why hasn’t anybody told you about it? Well, in traditional classes — in a classroom, if you go to school — languages are often taught like academic subjects (such as history or math). Language classes have improved a lot in the last twenty years or so, but there’s still a lot that can be improved. The biggest thing is probably taking pronunciation and ear training much more seriously and making the foundation of any beginner English course. Then you likely wouldn’t be here reading this article.
Traditional classes generally teach you backwards. Pronunciation and ear training are often ignored while there’s too much focus on grammar, reading, and writing, and not enough emphasis on speaking and listening. Now, there’s no one right way to learn a language and I wrote a whole book about how to build your own language learning path. However, it’s better to start from the ground up in a natural way, especially in a language like English where the spelling system is just not reflective of the actual sounds because there are so many exceptions. You don’t have to learn naturally, but when you were a baby and you were growing up, as I said, your brain started focusing: “Okay, what are the sounds I need and how do I start making those sounds?” And when babies babble, they’re practicing pronunciation and ear training. So you did that as a baby in your native language, now you have to do it again. As a small child, you spent a lot of time listening, then you started speaking and trying to produce the language. You had lots of exposure to the grammar through your listening and you learned lots of words through interaction with people around you. And so it was very organic and very natural.
Pronunciation/ear training, listening, speaking, vocabulary, grammar — those all went together. Of course, this continues on through school so you can learn more specific things and learn how to write properly and all that stuff, but the reading and writing — you didn’t start doing that until you were four, five, or six. So it’s backwards, right? And this is one big reason why you’re here reading this article after 3, 5, or 10+ years of learning English instead of, you know, out having very nice conversations and being able to understand everything and express yourself fully. This stuff is no joke. That’s why you should open your ears and/or learn to master your mouth.
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below. I’ll see you guys in the next one!
This article is based on a YouTube lesson:
