SPEECH TIP  for Saturday, August 01, 2020

Feeling Stuck?  Are you bothered or annoyed by some speech sounds which are  not accurate American English?

Of all the things you can do now to make those sounds accurate, what should you concentrate on?

The answer is muscles and coordination of muscles.

These are the mouth muscles of tongue, lips and jaw along with  the action  in the throat at the vocal folds for “voice”.

Let’s talk about the lowly “n” sound. Why this speech sound?  Because this is a high error speech sound. And because the humble “n” is the consonant that is the highest frequently occurring consonant in English words.

Think about this?  Do you get the accurate “n” sound every single time?

Perhaps you notice that sometimes-listeners are not sure whether you said “thirty”  or” thirteen.” or “fifty” or “fifteen”?

The road to success in these words is to make the “y” written letter pronounced as the English long  vowel ‘e” sound (like in “see”).  Make that long “e” vowel sound  slow and loud enough  for the listener to hear easily. 

The biggest secret is to make the “n” sound slow and loud.  Do this: push the tip of your tongue up to the roof or top of your mouth, just behind the front teeth.  Get  your  brain  to send the instruction to the vocal folds to be loud and make an enduring or lengthy  voice for this ”n” sound.

To circle back to where we started.  Do you feel stuck with speech errors you don’t like?  Then dDo direct practice of those sounds in words. Direct practice is  like homework.

And now do you understand what to do to get rid of your feeling stuck?

You’ve got to do practice.  You’ve got to coordinate the muscles in your mouth—your tongue, lips and jaw  — with your muscles at the vocal folds – and your lung muscles to get the air flow for speaking.

You know this—“It is not practice makes perfect but perfect practice makes perfect.”

And you know this—it takes a lot of practice—perhaps up to 1000  or up to 10,000 times of practice to learn a new pattern or to  change a habit.  Just do it. Do the work.

If you are interested in finding out more on this specific topic , go to our Blog #177 in the Blog section  or page on our website, www.ClearTalkMastery.com/

Meanwhile, here’s our Clear Talk #23 speech tutorial for the “n” speech sound for the word “environmental.” .  It is also on YouTube with  80 other little speech tutorials.

Youtube Clear Talk Mastery tutorial for “n” here. https://youtu.be/O2INjqtXTEYhttps://youtu.be/O2INjqtXTEY

Copyright Clear Talk Mastery , Inc. 2020