How to pronounce words correctly like a native speaker?

General questions

asked by
Cara Rossa
published
over 3 years ago
How to pronounce it like native?
2 answers
answered by
Davi
published
over 3 years ago

Hi! Well that's a quite wide topic. If you want to pronounce words like a native you have to mimic them and you'll get mostly quite close to the correct pronunciation, or receive some feedback about your pronunciation but let's break an accent a little down:

There is phonetics and intonation.

If you want to learn the basics of "pronouncing words" you have to learn the phonetics, namely all the sounds that are present in a language. A simple way to do so is by writing the name of the language followed by IPA (which stands for internation phonetic alphabet). You need to learn all of them if you want to start pronouncing words like a native speaker. It's like getting the right notes in a song.

After that you need to learn the intonation, which is the hardest part. Intonation is how voice moves "up and down" during a conversation. Even if you pronounce words correctly phonetically, remember that intonation is also inside of each word, if you're intonation is off, you won't sound like a native.

This takes a lot of time and effort to fix and you definitely have to go through some accent reduction lessons with a professional teacher in order to fix it. But if sounding completely like a native is not your goal, just listen and mimic as much as possible and get some direct feedback about your accent.

Good luck 😀

answered by
Pawel
published
over 3 years ago

I came across a decent advice Cara that you also can follow.

Basically you have a lesson (preferably normal but online will help as well) with a native speaker and try to mimic exactly the pronunciation of words and phrases. You repeat after the speaker untill he cannot hear any difference and you pronounce things as native speaker.

I have never tried it but this seems to make sense and I hope it will help you.

How good is your spoken Italian? Do you learn to speak it?

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