Szymon's Blog

     For my final phonetics diary entry I watched another video from the mmmEnglish YouTube channel, which became my favorite place for content on English phonetics. I loved the video I watched for my fifth post so much that I decided to go back. This video is titled "These Pronunciation Mistakes REDUCE your English Level!" and talked about common pronunciation mistakes that ESL speakers make. Mispronouncing words might make it seem like your level of grammar is not as good as it actually is, which is why it's so important to pay attention to it. In this final post I wanted to summarize the video and reflect on what I learned from it.       The video went over a couple areas that non-native speakers often have issues with, but it actually started with a disclaimer that I found very important.  It is unlikely that someone has trouble with all these aspects of pronunciation at once, as they're often tightly connected to one's native language, but it is good to be mi

    For my sixth phonetics diary entry I decided to watch a video recommended to us on the Kampus platform. It is from the WIRED YouTube channel and it is called "Movie Accent Expert Breaks Down 32 Actors' Accents". In this video Erik Singer, a dialect coach, looks at clips from different movies to exemplify various accents and dialects. I thought this would be an opportunity to explore a different side of phonetics I have not inspected in any of my diary entries yet. In this post I wanted to share some of my favorite findings from the video and reflect on how pronunciation can be taught or presented in many different forms.      My favorite aspect of this video was going through different accents and hearing about how they're formed from the viewpoint of phonetics. The one that was discussed the most was the s outhern accent. Singer spoke about a couple characteristic features of this dialect and how it forms. The first one was called the 'goose fronting', wh

      On May 16th we attended our last seminar of the first year of studies, which was on the topic of 'Authentic Materials' . It was conducted by Ms. Paulina Andruszkiewicz-Glińska, who we previously had the pleasure of meeting during a different webinar. The experience lasted an hour and a half, consisted of a presentation, as well as practical activities, and inspired me a lot to include this topic in my own teaching. In my post I wanted to summarize the knowledge from the seminar, as well as provide my opinions on the topic and the overall experience.     Authentic materials are ones that were not created for the purpose of teaching English - they were created by the native speakers of the language for other native speakers and everyday use.  Many things can count as authentic materials - from songs and movies, through magazines and books, to even receipts or food labels. There's many ways to use authentic materials to teach different topics. A tube of toothpaste can be

     For this week's diary I explored another video from the mmmEnglish channel. This time the topic was " 10 English Words You're (probably) Mispronouncing". I found the title intriguing and I thought it could be an opportunity to learn something new. I always enjoy hearing interesting examples related to pronunciation that lead to bigger understandings about phonetics in general. The video showed a variety of tricky words to pronounce for reasons, such as silent letters or unvoiced sounds. In my reflection I wanted to share those examples and what I learned from them.      Vegetable -  The reason this word can be tricky is because it looks like it should have 4 syllables, but you actually only pronounce 3. The 'e' after the 'g' should not be voiced ( / ˈvedʒtəb(ə)l / ) and because of that the second syllable is not pronounced. The way this word is pronounced can be quite odd after just seeing the spelling, which is why it's so important to not tr

      For my fourth Phonetics Diary entry I decided to explore the mmmEnglish YouTube channel. The video that I decided to write about was about "English Pronunciation Training | Improve Your Accent & Speak Clearly". The title caught my attention and made me curious about the new information I could still learn about pronunciation. In this post I wanted to share what I learned from the video and my general reflection on this resource.      The presenter started the video by saying that she believes that there's two things needed to significantly improve one's accent and clear pronunciation - a native speaker and knowledge of the IPA alphabet.  Spelling can be misleading when trying to learn pronunciation. The same letter can be pronounced in different ways depending on the word. For example, the letter 'c' is voiced differently in words like 'cup' ( / k ʌp /)  and 'place' ( / pleɪ s / ) or 'chocolate' ( / ˈ tʃ ɒklət / ) and 'ach

      This week I watched the second part of the series about different English accents from the English with Lucy channel. This video focused on how different sounds are pronounced in three different English accents - British, American, and Canadian.  Sets of 3 sentences showcasing a specific rule or type of pronunciation  were presented to the representatives of the different accents and later contrasted. I had a lot of fun with this video, it was very eye-opening, and so I hope this reflection will interest some.     The first set of sentences was related to the different 'o' sounds. In the example of 'I bought a bot', the American and Canadian speakers pronounced the 'o' in the two words the same ( / baːt / ) , while the British speaker pronounced them differently ( / bɔːt / and  / bɒt /) . The first sound, present in words like 'taught' or 'bought' is much longer than the other one. It's interesting how British English distinguishes the