Why Pronunciation Matters in Learning a Foreign Language

I found this video on Youtube a few weeks ago, while trying to fix my own pronunciation of Japanese. My wife has repeatedly told me that if I pronounced Japanese better, I could speak Japanese well. I understand what she’s talking about, I can hear the difference between a native Japanese accent and an American one. However it’s hard for me to know when I am doing it right, and when I am not. Frankly, sometimes I am also just tired or lazy, and don’t try. That’s my fault of course.

Watching this video reminds me why pronunciation is so important. I don’t know if this video is intended to be serious or not, but it shows how Japanese people sound when speaking English. A native English speaker can understand it most of the time (the word “either” was hard to understand), but a native listener has to spend more mental energy than usual. It causes friction and makes the listener tired.

So, if you think about it, this what you as a Westerner might sound like when you speak Japanese or other Asian languages!

When I was in college, I studied Vietnamese for 2 years before studying in Hanoi. My teacher in college was pretty strict about pronunciation because Vietnamese has a lot of sounds that don’t exist in English, and also she explained that if you really focus on your accent, native speakers will think your language skills are better and are more willing to talk to you.

This advice really helped because when I was in Hanoi, I studied with students from other colleges in the US. Some had come from pretty elite universities, but their Vietnamese was terrible. They knew a lot of words and grammar, but because their pronunciation was so bad, I could see their instructors cringing a little trying to understand what they said without being rude. I was fortunate that my teacher had been really strict about pronunciation.

So it’s important to develop correct pronunciation habits as soon as possible. Bad habits take more effort to fix later. This is one reason why I started learning Korean: I wanted to experiment and see if I can learn to pronounce a language early on and does it help? We’ll see.

Anyway, if you listen to Japanese speakers, TV or podcasts carefully, they sounds very flat and monotone. Every syllable is pronounced pretty evenly. So, recently I try to imitate this monotone “accent” when I speak Japanese and I noticed that it seems to be more effective. The trouble is that when I am excited or nervous,¹ I forget to pay attention. This takes time and investment, but I really do want to improve my communication skills, so I have to do it until it becomes natural.

Good luck to everyone else doing the same thing!

¹ I often get nervous or self-conscious when speaking to Japanese people I just met. My wife notes that I actually tend to over-compensate by being too polite (too much keigo, etc), so it doesn’t really sound natural.