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Thursday, January 24, 2013

Intonation practice

How to get rid of that pesky high rising terminal or in other words that rising intonation at the end of EVERYTHING. Neighbours and Home and Away have a lot to answer for. Some regional Australian accent variations do rise at the ed of every sentence or chunk of speech but really when newsreaders start doing it something has to change!

Try this little exercise which may  help your fluency, vocabulary and pausing as well as trying to understand good ol' Aussie English.

There are many good resources on the Internet and the podcast of the ABC morning current affairs show AM is one of them.

It has the audio as well as the script for each story. You will get a variety of speakers ranging from the presenter, to other journalists to 'Aussies" on site at various new incidents.

The trick is to grab the little moving audio cue and keep moving it back again and again until you get the same intonation as the speaker. Eventually you will be able to read the text at the speed (and with the same intonation) as the speaker.

Intonation practice using AM podcast

Good Luck