We had many students from Japan and the main reason why their speech was difficult to understand is that they had bad articulation. What can they do to make their English clear?
We have identified six areas of English speech which are particularly difficult for them:
1. There are long and short vowels in English, in Japanese, all vowels have the same length.
2. They have difficulty pronouncing English diphthongs and they separate the two vowels in a diphthong.
3. English consonants are crisp and well-articulated. Japanese speakers of English often do not make a distinction between /l/ and /r/, /b/ and /v/, /n/ and /m/.
4. In good English speech, pronouncing/t/ and /d/ and /s/ and /z/ endings is important. Japanese often do not pronounce them at all.
5. They often separate words and do not know how to speak in a connected way and use liaisons.
6. Their intonation patterns are quite different from English and they often stress wrong syllables and words.
What can we recommend to overcome the difficulties mentioned above?
1. When learning English words, practice them with the correct pronunciation. Most online dictionaries and Google Translate offer the sound version of a word. A more advanced step would be to memorise the phonetic symbols of English sounds.
2. Practise pure English long and short vowels and diphthongs. Pay attention to word stress.
3. Do articulation exercises every day for 2-5 minutes. It takes time and effort to build your speech organs muscles for English consonants.
We suggest that you practise English vowels and consonants with the apps Elocution Lessons and Get Rid of your Accent and the accompanying video course Get Rid of your Accent Part 1. In all these apps, there is a link in “How to use this app” to the page: the difficult sounds typical for your nationality. Click on Japanese to work effectively with a more focused approach
4. Practise word endings, liaisons and sentence stress with the app Fluent English Speech and the accompanying video course Get rid of your Accent Part 2. The same apps are also available on Google Play. They are based on bestselling books in the series Get Rid of your Accent. Here, you will master all English sounds and intonation. The functionality is ideal: read, listen, record and compare your speech with the model. The apps have mouth diagrams to help you create the correct speech organ positions in words,
To get the best results we recommend that you book a few elocution lessons