English is not my native language and while I’m good at reading and writing it I lack good pronunciation. Other non-native speakers, what did help you get better at speaking English?
Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
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Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#2Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#3I'm a native English speaker but have a linguistics degree and have been a tutor. My mental model is that there are three broad things you need.
Knowing what it's supposed to sound like: for this I recommend radio and TV. This will help with aural comprehension as well.
Knowing how to make the sounds: for this, learning the IPA and looking at IPA pronunciation guides is very useful.
Putting it into practice: Find a native speaker who is learning your native language. Get coffee once a week. Speak English half the time and your native language half the time. If you can't make that work, try dictating to your phone/computer in English. If your pronunciation is good, you'll get better accuracy. Gamify it for yourself if you can.
Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#4Playing video games, which have a voice chat, or joining a discord server and playing together with others are what has helped me and many friends of mine (in Europe) with practicing English.
Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#5I'm going through the opposite situation, but hopefully my experience will help. English is my mother tongue, and I immigrated to Israel where the only people who consistently speak English are high-tech workers, cab drivers, and 1 out of every 4 police officers. Of those, only the high-tech workers are in any way fluent. I completed a six-month language program, but I still couldn't speak or even read more than basic signs with any confidence. After 2 years here, I moved from a job for English-speaking immigrants to a job in Hebrew where everyone understood English.
I started working on a few projects with one engineer who reads English but cannot speak it. In a matter of weeks, my Hebrew pronunciation, comprehension, and fluency went through the roof. Since then, I've been started making friends with people at stores near my house, making phone calls to solve things that could be solved with an online form (and Google Translate). I'm still nowhere near fluent, but I gained confidence from being forced to speak and write.
The main thing is, just be prepared to speak, not be understood entirely, and make mistakes. The other day, I accidentally told the clerk at a store near my house that I didn't need a bag because I had large cunts instead of large pockets. We laughed, I survived, and I'll never get those words confused again.
Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#6Starting early trumps everything else.
You can still try and be competent in a year or two, but you'll sound weird saying certain words.
Read more, speak more, and try to not translate from your native language to english.
Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#7Speak as much as possible, even if your only conversation partner is your dog.
Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#8There are many apps now that can check, validate and rate your language speaking and pronunciations for example ELSA Speak [1],[2]. They provide virtual personal tutor experiences for speaking English correctly. Never tried it myself and not affiliated with the app in any way, but ELSA has some good reviews on some videos that I've seen. I think it can be very good practice assistant for people in the country that learn English by default from the very young age but the language is not spoken widely in the country like Japan. But as a caveat, the app can be very biased towards a particular version of English for example ELSA Speak is biased towards American English not British.
[1]5 Awesome Apps to Help Your Students Improve Their English Pronunciation (2019):
https://ellii.com/blog/5-awesome-apps-to-help-your-students-...
[2]Meet ELSA - Your personal AI-powered English speaking coach:
Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#9A great way to passively improve for >= B1/2 level is to listen to English-language podcasts (or whatever other language you want to learn). It doesn't matter if you actually pay attention or care about the subject matter - the point is to program your "lizard brain" as to what native pronunciation sounds like for different words, the part of your brain that works when you're speaking without thinking about it.
Of course, it won't magically make your pronunciation perfect, but it will help your "speaking without thinking" pronunciation and it's Easy to do
Re: Ask HN: How to get better at spoken English?
#10I'm a native English speaker and one thing that helped me with other languages (let's say French) was the simple-in-retrospect idea of trying to speak French with a French accent. I.e. I know what French-accented English sounds like and I can imitate it, but it was sort of an epiphany to realize that the accent came from native French pronunciation habits. So if I pronounced French words with that same accent, rather than sounding silly and affected, it sounded like was supposed to.
My French is pretty limited but native speakers have told me that my pronunciation is good. I credit it to this one simple trick. To use it for English though, I guess it helps to have encountered native English speakers trying to speak your language, so you know what their accent is like.
Other than that, I guess it could help to work with a coach with ESL training, maybe for an hour per week or whatever. I'm sure you can find someone on Craigslist like that.