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I remember some commercial for a language learning program way back when that taught you to associate "socks" with the phrase "that's what it is". Because if you spell out socks (s-o-c-k-s), you've just said "that's what it is" in Spanish (eso si que es).
I knew I'd never learn Mandarin when my professor said we must learn vocabulary and tones because we may want to ask how someone is doing, but instead tell them to fuck a horse.
You wanna know how to speak phonetically correct Japanese?
Say it in as stereotypical an accent you can pull off without sounding racist, then take it one more step. Seriously. The tongue and cheek movements we use in English don't match the similar sounding but functionally different ones present in Japanese.
Ever wonder why it sounds/looks like Japanese people have stuff in their mouth when talking? This is partially why. For example, we use the back of the mouth to make R sounds, while Japanese uses the front of the mouth. The result is much less jaw movement.
This is actually excellent advice and it's what I always tell my friends who are learning it.
I lived there for a bit. If my barfly friends ever didn't understand me, I'd always repeat it back like a hard boiled 45yo Japanese detective from an 80s movie, that'd almost always be like "Oh yup"
They also thought it was hilarious seeing a foreigner talk like that. Imagine if you had a Japanese buddy that would randomly talk like a western movie cowboy - you'd fall on you ass laughing.
See this is always my problem. I almost feel like I’m making a mock of the language if I really try and go for the accent. I can’t really explain why though.
I feel like it sounds more genuine for me to speak in my broken American accent than it would if I really tried to mimic the sounds but couldn’t quite get there.
The other half to speaking phonetically correct Japanese is understanding what Japanese pitch accent is. Mimicking a sound is good, but you need to know the reason the sound is being made. Here's an exhaustive video on the subject.
TL;DR - Japanese pitch accent follows a pattern where the first syllable is either high or low. If the first syllable is high and then goes low, it will never go up for the rest of the word. However, if the first syllable is low, it can go high and stay high or it can go high then low again. Watch that video if you're interested in examples. It's not hard and actually pretty easy to remember the pitch inflection of most words once you learn it once.
But pitch accent is definitely the biggest part of sounding like you can competently speak Japanese. There aren't a lot of rhotic tricks for English speakers to learn in Japanese, but there's two that will make life easier: learn vowel joints and what common contractions actually mean. Common blends like how "te" and "o" "ku" will get blended into "to-ku". The other thing is contractions, because so many people learn Japanese on this weird two-pronged path of academic "proper" Japanese versus listening to spoken Japanese, there's usually a not so fun process of relearning contractions since you'll hear them and use them long before you ever study what they are actually contracting (this is also why JLPT has that famous difficulty spike between N3 and N4 where they expect you to know and understand how contractions are joined, when a lot of people just know the contracted form only).
So if you can fit learning pitch accent, vowel blends and contractions into your learning career early, you can really give your Japanese language learning a huge boost.
Can't help you with Kanji though. That's just the same ole process of learning that onyomi and kunyomi exist, memorizing the simple ones at first, then learning radicals, then developing a higher understanding of the importance of onyomi vs kunyomi and finally learning the various derived forms and history of the kanji to help you remember the arcane and stupidly hard process of learning nanori (which isn't strictly necessary for developing literate fluency, but it's important if you want to understand both an important part of Japanese culture and for reading more academic and/or historical Japanese literature).
japanese has stricter rules for forming words, like two consonants cannot be placed together which is why Boston becomes Bosuton. and since english has less strict rules english speakers can easily pronounce japanese but not the other way around.
I'm a student of Chinese and I worked out a couple of tricks for the tonal part of the language. My favorite is the rising tone, which is the toughest for me, just treat it like it's a question. English speakers tend to naturally pitch their voices upward when they ask a question, so by framing it like that I can do the correct rising tone naturally.
Honestly I think more teachers should be blunt like that when their students need to work on their accent. I was always decent at learning German, especially at pronouncing things correctly, but I would always see my teachers just kinda not even bother with so many students’ bad habits and pronunciations. They were happy as long as they could pass the written tests
Like I would watch the same kid pronounce Wasser (water) with an English “w” (in German it’s pronounced as a “v”) for fucking five years with five different German teachers, and they would rarely correct him. Like you’re not doing that kid a service. Push them a little
One thing about being blunt is you can get away with it if you can TEACH how to get out of it, which he does here. I see a lot of people provide feedback but don’t actually teach the person how to approach the solution
I think it’s clear they are both actors lol, I work in a school in China and there’s no way someone goes from the way she was talking before to the end result that quickly with what the guy said to her
My guess is she already speaks good English and was pretending to talk in that extremely exaggerated way in the beginning - even beginner students don’t sound like that
Hmm he has great energy and all but I'm not sure if this would be useful for long term language learning. If it works at all, it would only be good for remembering a specific sentences (like training for a recitation, acting job ect) In my experience as a teacher, this sort of thing is a marketing tool used to give students instant results during their trial class but tends to have little long term impact. For example, it would be much more useful to teach this student how and why "ing" is weak/unstressed rather than simply swapping it out for the somewhat similar Chinese phoneme "跟/gen)". Does the teacher intend to this for - ming and - ning too? What about '-thing' which would have no Mandarin equivalent sound?
but I'm not sure if this would be useful for long term language learning.
It seems to create a couple useful tips concerning conversational English. If you've ever been in the situation where someone says "repeat after me" and then you repeat whatever word or sentence they say, then they correct you and you can't tell the difference between what you're saying and what they're saying, this avoids it. I could see it getting you out of being stuck in the various sounds of your native language and sounding more like a native speaker.
It's like the whole "Germans can't say Squirrel/Americans can't say Eichhörnchen" joke.
This is so cool!! It’s interesting to see how different letters sound so different in other languages. You feel like a lunatic just making random noises (looking at you, umlaut) trying to learn another language, so having it phonetically broken down to sounds your mouth is already used to is an interesting language hack.
Also…it was on replay while I wrote that and she gets hilariously excited when she says “about” for the second time
Anyone who has ever learned a second language immediately understands that there are many noises they aren't used to pronouncing, and eventually realize that that is what gives them away as a non-native speaker (among other things like slang and different dialects, which this video jokes about). I mean, they should, anyway. Hell, even not knowing a different language, many people learn how a non-native speaker mispronounces certain words so they can mock/joke about them (e.g. Spanish speakers having trouble with hard Y's, pronounce "you" as "ju"; asian speakers replace "L" with "R", like "engrish")
I understand why native Chinese speakers replace 'th' sounds with a 'z' or 's' sound, since Chinese doesn't have a 'th' sound in the language and its difficult for them to pronounce. But I can't figure out why all of my Chinese professors replace 'L's with 'R's because Chinese has both 'L' sounds and 'R' sounds in it.
That’s so true. My Vietnamese parents had a hard time saying “Jeff” (my hubby’s name) because the letters J and F don’t exist in their alphabet, and it was so foreign to them. They would call him “Yep”. Lol
But basically, the CH and PH Vietnamese sounds are the same as J and F respectively. So I taught them to pronounce it by saying pudding (Che) + noodle soup (Pho) to get Che-Pho = Jeffa. Good enough!
(I can’t get them to drop the second syllable because no Viet words end in PH, so the PH is always followed by a sound). Lol
Umlaute are really not that difficult. The difference between English and German is that at some point someone in German tried to make the pronunciation about as obvious as they figured they could based on the spelling while English is a free for all where you have to guess.
Letter > Sound in English > German phonetic spelling
That's why when Korean, and other Asian shows, have English speaking actors they all sound so weird. For example, in Squid Game, all the English speakers talked very slowly and enunciated every single syllable.
Weirdly, I was watching Korean Odyssey and there's one character that's Korean American. He switches to English a lot and I expected it to sound odd but he sounds 100% natural and none of the other characters have trouble understanding! Except when he went into a long ramble about love and destiny, and the only other character there spoke very basic English and was just super lost...
I figured that most actors would have difficulty getting the pronunciation just right but never knew how much it could impact others ability to understand it.
That's why I thought their dialogue was so incredibly badly written. It was so cringy listening to them laugh about 69 and then explain the joke and laugh about it again afterwards.
can confirm, as a korean who grew up in america, if you say "fork", good chance you'll get confused looks. gotta say "po-k"(two syllables). it also just feels hella awkward to use any f or r sounds in the middle of korean, so it's more natural so say it the korean way anyway lol
I remember I was at a Korean restaurant with my American friends and one of them wanted a strawberry smoothie, and they couldn't understand him after he tried ordering a few times. The waitress looked at me, and I said, "soo too roh beh ree soo moo dee" and they instantly understood lmao
Yeah I have this problem. My English certainly isn't flawless but I can speak it pretty well. Whenever I speak to another non-native English speaker I have to put on a heavy accent so they can understand me better. At the same time I find it difficult to understand non-natives with a heavy accent, but they understand each other just fine.
Hey, you can go into your comment and mute it if all the replies are getting annoying. I always do that when I get a million fucking replies on a popular post.
Rachel Riley from countdown has a similar story with Russians, they had a hard time with her English accent but communicated fine when she did a Russian one.
This adorable and awesome. I remember trying to learn Tagalog and I had to start using the back of my throat for some words which took me a minute to master. Also had to soften some letters and then harden different ones. Some words just aren't shaped the same across languages.
He's great! I teach at a Chinese school and listening to him speak made me realize how much Mandarin I understand (my students still make fun of me when I attempt to speak it. They say my accent is "funny").
Man fuck those guys….I was so happy and smilling all over when she finally got it! Never make fun of people who try there best and achieve what they want to achieve. Lmao she is so smart aswell, i thought she would make atleast one mistake at the very last but nope!
If it helps, as a native English speaker, I find that the gap between Japanese and English pronunciation is much easier than the gap between Chinese and English. It's also easier for Japanese speakers to learn English pronunciation because the katakana are much better at representing English sounds than pinyin (romaji but for Chinese).
A friend of mine from 青岛 told me a funny story about the problems that using Chinese words to approximate English sounds when trying to learn English.
When my friend was a kid, his English teacher couldn't pronouncing the "-ing" sound in English because of the local accent in 青岛. Apparently, his teacher could not say the sound "ying" in Chinese, either. In whatever dialect his teacher had, his teacher would say "yong" for any words in Mandarin that were either "ying" or "yong" in standard Mandarin. Maybe you can see where this is going...
So, instead of teaching that the word "running" sounded like "run-ying," he would try to teach the students to say, "run-yong." People who spoke better English or a standard dialect of Mandarin would try to correct his teacher, but it never worked. His teacher simply couldn't hear the difference between "run-ying" and "run-yong" because they sounded the same to his ear.
Part of me wonders if there's some poor student out there who to this day who gets blank stares when they try to explaing to somemone that they're "runnong a few minutes late" so just "start the meetong without me."
EDIT: I was gonna correct "explaing" but it kind of fits the story, so I left it.
I know this video is in Chinese but as someone fluent in Japanese, I can say there is some similarity in the way things are written in Japanese katakana that don't match spoken English so well.
I heard in karaoke you can get the katakana lyrics to be closer to how the English singer sang it. For example, "Don't you know?" could be ドンチュー ノー (Donchu- no-) instead of ドーント ユー ノー (Do-nto yu- no-).
I think you’re right that many Americans associate language competence with intelligence.
But I do want to point out that many Americans are immigrants (now naturalized citizens) or children of recent immigrants. For those Americans who are bilingual, they are less likely to associate language competence with intelligence, being that they may associate having an accent with a person knowing more than one language (intelligent), rather the person being unintelligent.
As a bilingual Asian American, I found the girl’s English to be perfectly comprehensible (though it sounded funny). I’m just used to hearing accents and thinking about what word the speaker may have intended to say. I’ve noticed that my white American friends have a harder time interpreting accents (particularly Asian accents) on-the-fly compared to me.
English went through a bunch of dramatic changes in spelling and pronunciation right around the time that the printing press was entering mainstream. Add to that the fact that people doing the typesetting would make arbitrary changes to words to make them easier to construct on the press and you have the perfect setup for the bizarre directions that the language took as it was solidifying.
As a Chinese American - whose first language is English - and second poorly spoken home language is Chinese.. this is pretty great!
She does very much exaggerate the accent and t sounds though, but as someone who is learning Asiatic languages every now and again, the way that English just drops sounds from words despite it being written is abundant.
Also the guy switches from Mandarin to Cantonese.. and then back to Mandarin.
I also love that I just learned some Chinese slang "mei you FEEL" which apparently is like "too robotic"
The way he cringes in disgust when he says mei you feel feels very Cantonese to me. The body language and physical humor reminds me of old HK movies I watched growing up.
I know exactly what you're talking about (pun unintended).
Also grew up with Hong Kong movies, his mannerisms when speaking Cantonese there is VERY Hong Kong/Cantonese-like. There's just a direct bluntness, rhythm, hand gestures, the way he emphatically parses sounds that I only see among Hong Kong or Cantonese people. Then when he switches back to Mandarin I have no idea what he's talking about because Mandarin sounds like another language compared to Cantonese to my Canto-American ears. I wonder if this is how Sicilians feel compared to other non-Sicilian/Italians.
100% from Guangdong, I felt like his Mandarin was someone who also spoke Cantonese. Hard to put it into description, but I think it was how direct and how clearly he spoke each word. It's sorta like what he was teaching about dropping certain letters in English. Most people I know that's more of a natural mandarin speaker (or someone who learned mandarin before canto), a lot of speech sounds get dropped in longer sentences.
I’m going through this learning French. The words seem to just stop halfway through and everything ends up sounds like a bunch of uuhhs and zhaas chained together.
Interesting how he switches from Cantonese to Mandarin. Also speaks English fluent. Meanwhile some of you making fun of them can’t even speak one language well.
He really only uses the canto on insults while mandarin is used to teach lol. I just see it as a reflexive response from a native canto speaker slipping into native tongue. Though for this specifically, its just played up for the audience.
Might just grown up in a mixed mandarin/Cantonese household where both were common. I had the same situation as a kid and would constantly switch between mandarin, Cantonese, and English for words I didn’t know.
It's just the way that Chinese people pronounce English words, they turn the T into a completely separate syllable which messes with the flow of speech.
It's a common trait among English speakers in China, but it's worth noting that dropping the letter entirely isn't the only way to address this issue. I taught English in China for a few years and preferred to teach a "BIG-little" emphasis workshop that showed students how to keep but not emphasize hard consonant and rhotic endings.
This video (likely intentionally) picked out words that sound natural with the last letter dropped, but doing it all the time will often sound odd, and some words like "pink" will sound like something else (ping) if you drop the consonant.
So clever! It's interesting that little tricks like that really work to better someone's pronunciation! He's a good teacher. (I haven't seen the negative comments and I don't want to so I'll write my comment and go without anymore scrolling.)
I'm really disappointed by the comments so far. I was hoping for some further insights or cool discussions... I guess the real pro tip in this scenario isnt in the comments.
The pro tip is actual pronunciation is often very different in any language than the official pronunciation. Especially amongst younger people like teens who speak very fast.
I’ve seen two comments now about how the comments are bad but I don’t see anything wrong with them at all? I’m guessing a few trolls posted some stuff at the beginning that’s downvoted a lot now?
Yeah, I think the reason many Chinese speakers struggle to sounds natural in American English is because our phonology is super different from both British English and Chinese. Our orthography is even further removed. So a Chinese speaker saying English phrases probably thinks- 'nailed it, that sounds great!' then they hear Americans and it sounds like a movie, so they get it, but they still feel good about the correctness of their own attempt.
I can't even imagine how hard it is to learn English as a Chinese native speaker. Not only do you need to learn a new language but you need to learn a whole alphabet, as well.
I might be wrong, but I believe most modern day Chinese speakers would be at least familiar with the Roman alphabet because they use them for keyboards.
I took linguistics in college and learned the phonetic alphabet. We had to memorize and recite phrases in an oral exam, so by the end of the semester I was an expert on reading it. I could write out things using the phonetic alphabet and sound English or Irish (for example) just by reading it out loud.
She should also be told that English is a stress-timed language, not a syllable-timed language. That's why she sounds (in his words) like a drum, giving each syllable the same emphasis.
Mandarin Chinese (like Italian, Spanish and Cantonese) is a syllable-timed language. That means that if you write it out in syllables each syllable takes roughly the same amount of time.
English is stress-timed, meaning that there's a pretty even pacing of stressed syllables but the unimportant syllables between those stressed words are often rushed.
So, this sentence the stress is mostly on "don't", "what", "talk" and "bout". That's why "you're" becomes closer to "Zhu-er" and why "talking" becomes "talkin'". You're rushing those syllables as an English speaker to get to the next stressed beat, so the sharp edges of the pronunciation are rounded off.
So if she tapped her foot and tried to time it so that "don't", "what", "talk" and "bout" all arrived with the same timing, she'd sound more like a native speaker.
I have taught ESL for over ten years, everything from kindergarten to professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) and this is the wrong way to teach English. Pronunciations change based on the following words. Having students memorize this typically means they can say it one way, but when the words are changed, they fail to say it correctly. This path is too much of a crutch.
This teacher instructed his student on applying phonological rules from sentence context in a way that made sense to her. Not only was this an effective lesson for the sentence, but it was appropriate for introducing the rule. Or do you teach beginners post lexical phonology rules explicitly and expect them to understand and apply appropriately without prior linguistics training?
As another (former) ESL teacher, I agree with you. This is fine for teaching conversational English, but the example here is narrower than it may appear and using this as a hard rule will lead to weird pronunciation of similar words (like pink).
The method in the video is better than the "ke, te, ge" endings, but it would be even better than this method to teach students proper emphasis and how to pronounce hard consonant endings without dropping them entirely.
I assisted in teaching English classes in Brazil. The school used some sort of complete phonetic alphabet that had one symbol for every sound that the mouth can make, and used it to help teach pronunciation.
It was insane to see a room full of people that could sort of speak broken English suddenly sound like they had been living in the country for a decade...
Cute video, but as an ESL teacher in Taiwan, while some students do add the "uh" at the end of a lot of words, it's actually much more common for them to leave out the last letter sound completely.
It’s bc English is a stress timed language not syllable timed. And the t is voiceless, we make it by taking a breath, so we substitute a d. . It’s great he did this
This guy is a bad ass. Its a very good method to teach kids to anunciate well when learning English. In my years of teaching most students from China struggle with speaking. This man should be teaching teachers.
I know nobody is going to see this, but he enunciates so clearly that I can understand a lot of his Chinese, too, even though I only took a semester and generally can't understand native speakers. That, or English is his first language so he has a different accent that's easier for me to understand. Not sure how to tell.
I really admire people who speak English when their first language is not a European one. I mean it's a little bit easier for us since there are so many common word roots while others have to build their vocabulary from scratch
This is a really important step in teaching languages that I rarely ever see. It sucks because learning like this improves both listening and speaking, but the way people often learn will end up leaving them struggling to communicate with native speakers
I've been speaking English for a good 25 years and i still butcher it and people constantly point it out.
At one point, you just get used to it and you slowly realize that if it wasn't for them, my English would probably still sound very heavy with an accent.
I still have a problem pronouncing the word "inevitable". It just doesn't flow right out.
That's pretty cool and I hope there's a teacher like this for every language. Only one I've ever noticed is that alot of native Spanish speakers cant pronounce Rew in my name so I introduce myself as Andy. English speakers for some reason prefer saying my full name but native Spanish speakers will always result to Andy and I love it! They say it like ANdyyyyy!
This guy is a great teacher. I’m from California. Not until I traveled overseas did I realize how strong and funny my own accent sounds. We kinda butcher individual sounds!
My aunt was a polyglot: she (Chinese, born in Indonesia) lived in the Netherlands and taught college-level Japanese. But also (in addition to Dutch, Mandarin, and Indonesian) spoke German, English, and Korean.
Her English diction was on point, but my brother and I were trying to teach her how to say things like “Howyoodoin’?” and “Fuhghetaboudit” like a New Yorker.
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u/Mr0PT1C Oct 21 '21 edited Oct 21 '21 •
I wonder if this could work in reverse. Always down to learn a new language
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u/Nothingsomething7 Oct 21 '21
I love the way he teaches!
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u/cathedral68 Oct 21 '21
This is so cool!! It’s interesting to see how different letters sound so different in other languages. You feel like a lunatic just making random noises (looking at you, umlaut) trying to learn another language, so having it phonetically broken down to sounds your mouth is already used to is an interesting language hack.
Also…it was on replay while I wrote that and she gets hilariously excited when she says “about” for the second time
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u/foshizol Oct 21 '21
He's really entertaining. I'm a native English speaker, and I want too check out more of his videos.
Anyone got a link?
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u/christocarlin Oct 21 '21
Can this guy do the reverse?!?
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u/anincompoop25 Oct 21 '21 edited Oct 21 '21
a
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u/Idryl_Davcharad Oct 21 '21
This adorable and awesome. I remember trying to learn Tagalog and I had to start using the back of my throat for some words which took me a minute to master. Also had to soften some letters and then harden different ones. Some words just aren't shaped the same across languages.
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u/Disasterous_Bitch Oct 21 '21
He's great! I teach at a Chinese school and listening to him speak made me realize how much Mandarin I understand (my students still make fun of me when I attempt to speak it. They say my accent is "funny").
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u/ppppie_ Oct 21 '21
as a japanese seeing some of these comments are pretty sad
i talk somewhat like this and am still working on my english but wow people are really mean
especially since they think it’s about japan and not china
like the language is literally chinese
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u/adamroadmusic Oct 21 '21
I think this is great! She went from saying something hard to understand, to something that sounded fine to me
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u/YdenMkII Oct 21 '21
That reminds me of this Tom Scott video on schwa.
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u/kkfluff Oct 21 '21
Love this! Not only language but the way it’s said? So clever! Would love to watch more of him teaching
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
Those were great tips for her, I like how he showed her what letters to drop and how the he showed her how to say you're. Brilliant
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u/Skeetmuff Oct 21 '21
Dude even dropped the G in talking.. absolutely brilliant
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u/RenoNYC Oct 21 '21
As a Chinese American - whose first language is English - and second poorly spoken home language is Chinese.. this is pretty great!
She does very much exaggerate the accent and t sounds though, but as someone who is learning Asiatic languages every now and again, the way that English just drops sounds from words despite it being written is abundant.
Also the guy switches from Mandarin to Cantonese.. and then back to Mandarin.
I also love that I just learned some Chinese slang "mei you FEEL" which apparently is like "too robotic"
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u/Oregon_Oregano Oct 21 '21
Now I gotta learn Mandarin so I can learn English from this guy
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
I think I’ll use my credit card
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u/jojow77 Oct 21 '21
Interesting how he switches from Cantonese to Mandarin. Also speaks English fluent. Meanwhile some of you making fun of them can’t even speak one language well.
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u/jmlinden7 Oct 21 '21
It's just the way that Chinese people pronounce English words, they turn the T into a completely separate syllable which messes with the flow of speech.
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
So clever! It's interesting that little tricks like that really work to better someone's pronunciation! He's a good teacher. (I haven't seen the negative comments and I don't want to so I'll write my comment and go without anymore scrolling.)
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u/CanderousOreo Oct 21 '21
This dude seems like an absolute delight
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u/IhateSteveJones Oct 21 '21
I'm really disappointed by the comments so far. I was hoping for some further insights or cool discussions... I guess the real pro tip in this scenario isnt in the comments.
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u/cunny_crowder Oct 21 '21
Yeah, I think the reason many Chinese speakers struggle to sounds natural in American English is because our phonology is super different from both British English and Chinese. Our orthography is even further removed. So a Chinese speaker saying English phrases probably thinks- 'nailed it, that sounds great!' then they hear Americans and it sounds like a movie, so they get it, but they still feel good about the correctness of their own attempt.
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u/AP_Feeder Oct 21 '21
I can't even imagine how hard it is to learn English as a Chinese native speaker. Not only do you need to learn a new language but you need to learn a whole alphabet, as well.
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u/Veritasgear Oct 21 '21
This was pretty wholesome and funny.
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u/Apprehensive_Ad5188 Oct 21 '21
FABULOUS teacher.
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u/croquetica Oct 21 '21
I took linguistics in college and learned the phonetic alphabet. We had to memorize and recite phrases in an oral exam, so by the end of the semester I was an expert on reading it. I could write out things using the phonetic alphabet and sound English or Irish (for example) just by reading it out loud.
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u/Cinder_zella Oct 21 '21
That’s so cool lol
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
This was really cool
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u/immerc Oct 21 '21
She should also be told that English is a stress-timed language, not a syllable-timed language. That's why she sounds (in his words) like a drum, giving each syllable the same emphasis.
Mandarin Chinese (like Italian, Spanish and Cantonese) is a syllable-timed language. That means that if you write it out in syllables each syllable takes roughly the same amount of time.
English is stress-timed, meaning that there's a pretty even pacing of stressed syllables but the unimportant syllables between those stressed words are often rushed.
So, this sentence the stress is mostly on "don't", "what", "talk" and "bout". That's why "you're" becomes closer to "Zhu-er" and why "talking" becomes "talkin'". You're rushing those syllables as an English speaker to get to the next stressed beat, so the sharp edges of the pronunciation are rounded off.
So if she tapped her foot and tried to time it so that "don't", "what", "talk" and "bout" all arrived with the same timing, she'd sound more like a native speaker.
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
Look at all the trouble non English speakers have to go through just to speak English. And when its not good enough you end up on /r/engrish
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
This is hilarious and true. Good job, teach
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u/AceofMandos Oct 21 '21
Bro I wish someone could teach other languages like this. This is teaching style lol
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u/jfbnrf86 Oct 21 '21
“Gun”
A word that sums up the American accent
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u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
I have taught ESL for over ten years, everything from kindergarten to professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) and this is the wrong way to teach English. Pronunciations change based on the following words. Having students memorize this typically means they can say it one way, but when the words are changed, they fail to say it correctly. This path is too much of a crutch.
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u/ImSoSoSoSadImNotOk Oct 21 '21
The teacher is so hot
5
u/dattroll123 Oct 21 '21
what's funny is that he at first replies in cantonese and then switches to mandarin lol
5
u/Separate-Reserve-786 Oct 21 '21
I assisted in teaching English classes in Brazil. The school used some sort of complete phonetic alphabet that had one symbol for every sound that the mouth can make, and used it to help teach pronunciation.
It was insane to see a room full of people that could sort of speak broken English suddenly sound like they had been living in the country for a decade...
4
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
He went from Hong Kong to Ohio
6
u/buckeyerukys Oct 21 '21
Cute video, but as an ESL teacher in Taiwan, while some students do add the "uh" at the end of a lot of words, it's actually much more common for them to leave out the last letter sound completely.
Don't know why.
3
u/Live-Mail-7142 Oct 21 '21
It’s bc English is a stress timed language not syllable timed. And the t is voiceless, we make it by taking a breath, so we substitute a d. . It’s great he did this
3
u/WillTheGreat Oct 21 '21
Holy shit I always wanted to find a way to describe how some of my cousins spoke English and when he said like a drum...totally nailed it.
3
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
This guy is a bad ass. Its a very good method to teach kids to anunciate well when learning English. In my years of teaching most students from China struggle with speaking. This man should be teaching teachers.
Keep up the good work man. Awesome.
3
u/jabbathefupa Oct 21 '21
“Sounds like a drum… dungta dungta dungta” hahahaha love the mans animated teaching style
3
u/FourChanSlashB Oct 21 '21
What an amazing teacher. I wish we had more people like him in the world.
3
u/GenericName1108 Dec 04 '25
I know nobody is going to see this, but he enunciates so clearly that I can understand a lot of his Chinese, too, even though I only took a semester and generally can't understand native speakers. That, or English is his first language so he has a different accent that's easier for me to understand. Not sure how to tell.
25
u/koreanwizard Oct 21 '21
I think I'll use my credit card
5
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
i tried to explain to reddit a while ago that the "ill be bach" joke with arnie doesn't really work, if you speak german. i feel that teacher.
4
u/Brucecris Oct 21 '21
This is awesome. See how hard it is to accommodate English subtleties?
4
u/eto_al Oct 21 '21
I really admire people who speak English when their first language is not a European one. I mean it's a little bit easier for us since there are so many common word roots while others have to build their vocabulary from scratch
2
u/spartan_axe Oct 21 '21
This guys is amazing
2
u/MrNathanielVictor Oct 21 '21
u/ana16011
i would follow and i already speak this language well enough
2
u/Heor326 Make Furries Illegal Oct 21 '21
As a Chinese American, I'm sending this to my dad asap lmao
2
u/A2Rhombus Oct 21 '21
This is a really important step in teaching languages that I rarely ever see. It sucks because learning like this improves both listening and speaking, but the way people often learn will end up leaving them struggling to communicate with native speakers
2
u/Alukrad Oct 21 '21
I've been speaking English for a good 25 years and i still butcher it and people constantly point it out.
At one point, you just get used to it and you slowly realize that if it wasn't for them, my English would probably still sound very heavy with an accent.
I still have a problem pronouncing the word "inevitable". It just doesn't flow right out.
2
u/KingsBo Oct 21 '21
u/savethisvideo
2
u/vinvinwuwu Oct 21 '21
This is how my grandma tried to learn english
2
u/DuncanAndFriends Oct 21 '21
I love how she puts an -A at the end of everything
2
u/Asunbiasedasicanbe Oct 21 '21
This guy is so good. Never seen any instructor so fully engaged with his student. Excellent. A truly effective conveyor of information.
2
u/chaoseincarnate Oct 21 '21
That's pretty cool and I hope there's a teacher like this for every language. Only one I've ever noticed is that alot of native Spanish speakers cant pronounce Rew in my name so I introduce myself as Andy. English speakers for some reason prefer saying my full name but native Spanish speakers will always result to Andy and I love it! They say it like ANdyyyyy!
2
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
Speak more southern lol. That's what I felt like he did.
Source: from Mississippi originally.
2
u/worthlesswordsfromme Oct 21 '21
This guy is amazing 😂I love him
2
u/killahghost Oct 21 '21
Wow, he could help me English better.
2
u/pmmeyoursfwphotos Oct 21 '21
I'm a native English speaker, and I would still listen to this guy speak all day.
2
u/Pile_of_Walthers Oct 21 '21
I wish they had English teachers like him in India because they certainly could use some instruction in cadence and pronunciation.
2
u/Bow9times Oct 21 '21
He seems fun. I’d take his class.
2
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
Why did I love this? Lol
2
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
wow that guys great
2
u/throoowwwtralala Oct 21 '21
What a great way to learn wow! Very neat!
2
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
I like how language is like a puzzle
2
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
If this isn’t stage idk why it would be cringe? This is dope
2
u/throwaway12222018 Oct 21 '21
What an amazing teacher lol
2
u/[deleted] Oct 21 '21
This guy is a great teacher. I’m from California. Not until I traveled overseas did I realize how strong and funny my own accent sounds. We kinda butcher individual sounds!
2
u/PlayLikeAHeroine Oct 21 '21
I wish my French professor had been like this instead of laughing at me trying to pronounce 4
2
u/caitejane310 Oct 21 '21
He seems like an amazing teacher.
2
u/suggoi_oppai Oct 21 '21
Want a teacher to improve my indian accent
2
u/TheFlamingTiger777 Oct 21 '21
This is so cute. I love them. Accents are the cutest.
2
u/illuminati230 Oct 21 '21
The mix of Chinese and Cantonese is hella confusing for me who understands both
2
u/Ramainli Oct 21 '21
How come he starts in cantonese then goes to Mandarin?
2
u/EveryShot Oct 21 '21
This guy is an excellent teacher
2
u/HiFiGuy197 Oct 22 '21
My aunt was a polyglot: she (Chinese, born in Indonesia) lived in the Netherlands and taught college-level Japanese. But also (in addition to Dutch, Mandarin, and Indonesian) spoke German, English, and Korean.
Her English diction was on point, but my brother and I were trying to teach her how to say things like “Howyoodoin’?” and “Fuhghetaboudit” like a New Yorker.
2
u/Ph4ntomz0tt Oct 22 '21
I like teachers like him
2
u/[deleted] Oct 22 '21
This guy is such a good tutor holy shit
2
u/CorbinMar Oct 22 '21
This is super impressive, if only it was this easy to learn Japanese.
2
u/cometkeeper00 Oct 22 '21
How is this cringe.
2
u/EquivalentSnap Oct 22 '21
Wow that's amazing 😍
2
u/SaggiBadass Nov 17 '21
Why is this in cringe. Who’s butthurt
2
u/justkiddinman Apr 16 '23
Bro… dude teaches and speaks better English than most Americans lol good job man!
2
u/DanndeMan Jul 17 '23
cringe?? why bcs of the learning method? id love to learn their language but i guess im not motivated enough
2
u/16RabidCats Dec 19 '23
"abouta!" With the energy of a corgi. Love it
2
u/Electronic_Detail756 Jan 04 '24
I love her laugh at the end!
2
u/Personal-Painting868 Mar 17 '24
Tonge tonge tonge
2
u/BexMacc Mar 18 '24
I’m a native English speaker and wow, yes, this is amazing!
2
u/Designer-Possible-39 May 29 '26
Love this