Pronunciation 2

As I have mentioned before, part of our course is pronunciation. While doing pronunciation exercises might help you to some extent, they become tedious after a while and they are only partly effective as most of us do them alone and have no one to correct us. Luckily, I have friends and relatives in and from several English speaking countries. They have helped me a lot when it comes to improving my pronunciation. Whether it is skyping with my kiwi friend or Canadian relatives or meeting up with my American friend and talking for hours. It is always fun and really helpful as they can correct me whenever I pronounce words wrong or help me with the pronunciation of new or complicated words. With them, it doesn't really feel like learning at all. :)

Pronunciation 1

A part of our English course this semester is pronunciation. I actually quite liked it as I had done a course before at the Anglistik. It was part of my first semester there and taught by one of the native speakers working there. So we met once a week and went over the "most difficult" sounds for German native speakers. Basically s-z, t-d, th (voiced and unvoiced). We also had to pick a scene from a movie or series in English and write our own transcript. Then we had to listen to it over and over again in order to write down how the native speakers pronounced different words. At the end of the semester we had to read a text out loud and also present our transcript, sounding as much as the native speakers as we managed to. I really liked this course and I feel it has helped me quite a bit; especially when it comes to the voiced and unvoiced sound dilemma. I'll add a couple of examples of my notes and if you want to know more about the pronunciation exercises we did, feel free to ask. :)

• Zorro's sorrows were over after he had rescued Sue from the zoo.
• Just outside the village there's a very dangerous bridge. Two jeeps crashed there in January. George Churchill was driving the larger jeep. He was driving very dangerously. The other jeep went over the bridge, and two children and another passenger were badly injured.
• Dare-there, doze-those, day-they, ladder-lather, mutter-mother
• tree-three, true-through, tin-thin, tick-thick, tie-thigh
• sin-thin, sick-thick, sigh-thigh, worse-worth, face-faith, pass-path
• deaf-death, oaf-oath, roof-Ruth, reef-wreath, free-three