Why is intonation important? What is intonation? How does it influence your speech and the impression you make on others? I will answer all these questions in this blog post.

Intonation is the rise and fall of pitch in a phrase or a sentence. Each person will unconsciously copy the speech patterns of his native language or dialect, starting from the time he first begins to talk.

Inflection refers to the gentle rise and fall of the voice in a word or syllable. There are six main inflections in English. In this blog post, I would like to discuss the two most basic inflections:1

1. Simple Rising
This inflection is used when asking questions. It sounds light and positive.

2. Simple Falling
This inflection is typical to use for a statement.

I am Russian, and in Russia, we tend to use simple falling a lot. When I had just arrived from Russia and was not aware of the differences in intonation in English and Russian, I was perceived as too direct. When I asked someone to do something for me it sounded as if I was giving orders. I was using polite words like "please" and "could you", but my intonation was inappropriate for requests. I felt people hated me. Then I took elocution lessons with one of the top London speech tutors Linda James. Linda taught me that I should use a simple rising to sound polite when asking people to do something for me. It was amazing to experience the change in my life after I had adjusted my intonation for English, people started to treat me with respect and warmth because I appeared polite with my new intonation.

Another problem I had all my life was that I sounded very monotonous. My speech was boring and people would not listen to me. I had management positions in big corporations and had to speak to my team, but I felt then when I was speaking, I could not maintain people's interest. Linda also helped me with this problem. She taught me how to use sentence stress and stress the most important messages in each sentence. I felt that there are so many people like me in London who would benefit from the knowledge I gained from Linda and decided to share it in our books and apps. You can practice English intonation and sentence stress with the app Fluent English speech and with the book Get Rid of your Accent, Part Two, Advanced level.

Accent reduction blog