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Wednesday, October 28, 2009

My old mantra "Practise, practise,practise!"

I keep coming back to this. I went on leave for a month and was concerned about interrupting some of the pronunciation courses. One client in particular was struggling with physically pronouncing many of the sounds. He works in a large public education school and needs to improve his pronunciation for obvious reasons. Before I left, we made many audio and video files of pronunciation drills. He diligently practised them for a month and I was pleasantly surprised on my return. He still has a long way to go but there was some progression and his speech is definitely clearer.
In retrospect the time off was a bonus. Pronunciation change needs time as well as practice. Change is not going to happen over night.
I am very pleased with my client's progress and his confidence has taken a boost.

Verb or noun?


This cartoon strip doesn't really have anything to do with pronunciation but is more a reflection on the constant changes to our language, in particular jargon. Often business English terms change nouns into verbs or an action. We have become used to diarise, prioritise. Even 'blog' and 'google' are now verbs. As a second language learner it is hard to know what is 'correct' English and what is jargon. Language is dynamic and changes and fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view, a word that seems ridiculous at first soon becomes the norm.