Pronunciation Diary

Pronunciation Diary

After doing not so well on the pronunciation task we did in class two weeks ago, I decided to reflect on my mistakes. I have to say that my mistakes were mostly caused by my fast reading. I was a little late realizing that it was my turn, so I tried to be as fast as possible. Words like "carrying handle" should be rather easy to pronounce for, if I pace myself. My mistake with "aluminum" and "aluminium" however was due to really sloppy reading and the naive anticipation that there wouldn't be any tricky words in the text. To improve my pronunciation I read every vocabulary question I answered on vocabulary.com out loud. Then I checked its pronunciation online. This turned out to be really interesting because listening to a word pronounced in many different accents gives you the feeling that you could mispronounce the word in all possible ways and still sound, of course only by accident, like a native speaker. The accents in the North of Great Britain are quite something (Scottish, the Northern part of England).
I'm not particularly looking forward to the because of one simple reason: related words. I knew the word "ambiguous" and its correct pronunciation, but I had never heard the corresponding noun pronounced correctly (without background noise and properly pronounced.There is also a difference between knowing the right pronunciation and actually pronouncing a word clearly in a sentence. This becomes even more difficult when one is forced to speak fast and without time to reflect on the correct pronunciation of words. So, obviously I need not only a better pronunciation, but also a lot of time to study the "corresponding" words.