Why Foreigners Struggle to Speak English Fluently

We as foreign speakers assume English is spoken in the same way as our mother tongue. This makes it difficult to carry on conversation in English over longer periods of time even for people who know English quite well. The fact is English is spoken quite differently and none of the Indian/Asian language bears any resemblance. English has its own set of phrases, idioms, and collocations and its very own song-like way of speech. You see, English has a certain rhythm and not all words are pronounced equally. Some words are shortened, some words change form in Spoken English.

For ex:

1. It is hell of a game. spoken as: isheləvəgame (notice ‘It’s’ became ‘Is’, ‘Of’ became ‘əv’, ‘a’ became ‘ə’)

2. The discount price is $10. Spoken as: thədiscoumpricis$10 (notice ‘nt’ became ‘m’) 3. I’m not used to this kind of weather. Spoken as: əmnochoostothiskindəweather (notice ‘I’m’ became ‘əm’, ‘not used’ became ‘nochoosed’, ‘used to’ became ‘use to’, etc.)

That brings us to:

Syllables

Every word in English has one or more syllables. A syllable is a vowel sound in a word. For ex: “Moon” has only 1 syllable “English” has 2 syllables viz. Eng, lish “Syllable” has 3 syllables viz. Sy, lla, ble “Ability” has 4 syllables viz. A, bi, li, ty

And only one syllable is always stressed and other syllables are unstressed. The syllable which receives stress can be in any position. “Moon” should be always stressed as it’s the only syllable there. “English” has 2 syllables and stress falls only on first syllable and second syllable is unstressed: pronounced like “ENGlish”

Stressed syllable gets longer time and unstressed syllables are rushed over. For ex, in “Impressive”, the stress falls on second syllable and it’s pronounced as “imPRESSive”. You should spend more time on “PRESS” and stress it and just glide over “im” and “ive” and shouldn’t stress them.

“Schwa”

In unstressed syllables, vowels often get reduced to a semi-vowel sound called ‘Schwa’. It’s written as inverted ‘e’ (“ə”). It’s the the sound between ‘s’ and ‘p’ in ‘supply’. the sound between ‘p’ and ’n’ in ‘company’.

So in connected speech, “am” gets reduced to “əm”, “and” to “ən”, “was” to “wəs”, etc.

Of course, there’s much more to fluency than understanding syllables and stress, I hope this article underlines one of the most basic aspects of fluency.

Reference:

The Fluency Development Course by Prof. Kev Nair