Teach English in DatangzhuAng Zhen - Tianjin

Pronunciation problems inHaving married into a Thai family and spent 4 months living in thailand I have experienced many different areas of pronunciation where Thai people tend to struggle. The most obvious is a situation common throughout all of Asia, a problem that most people are probably aware of without having been exposed to it themselves. This problem is the difference between the letters ?L? and ?R?. It is very difficult for Thai?s to say words such as ?really? or ?lyric? and next to impossible for them to say ?red lorry, yellow lorry?. The difficulty appears to be in changing the position of the tongue fast enough for the 2 different sounds and also the pronunciation of the letter ?R? as most R?s in the Thai language are pronounced as rolling R?s, which generally use the tongue instead of the bottom lip to the teeth, thus causing their tongues to be in use for both letters all the time. Another issue Thais have with english is the letter ?V?, which again requires the bottom lip to meet with the top teeth. The letter ?W? will often be used in its place, which, when combined with the earlier problem involving R?s, can make words like ?very? very hard to pronounce. The unusual thing about the difficulty over ?V? is that it is essentially the same letter as ?F? but is voiced instead and the Thai language has the same sound as ?F? so they should have no difficulty in pronouncing this correctly. Both these problems are quite easy to address and correct as they are fairly simple sounds to teach, requiring simple mouth diagrams or adjusting previously known sounds such as voicing the F to make V. One sound that is not so easy to teach is ?CH?, which is incredibly difficult for most Thais to pronounce. Having tried to teach this sound to many different Thai people I have found that they have different levels of success with different techniques. Some find it best to try combining ?T? and ?SH? whereas others find it easier to combine ?J? and ?SH?. When writing the Thai language in Roman phonetics the sound for J is often written using CH, most notably in the names of places in Bangkok, e.g. Chatuchak Market, Ploen Chit. In both names the CH is pronounced as a clear J. This spelling probably exacerbates things as many Thais will now incorrectly recognize the letters CH as being pronounced the same as J. The final problem I have noticed that is extensive is combining consonants, such as S+T or P+L. S+T has a personal effect on me as my name is never pronounced ?STEWART? but rather ?JEWART?. This is actually a slightly more lazy pronunciation than most combined consonants as most words involving S+T would have both sounds strongly pronounced, but separately. ?Steak? would still be understandable, but pronounced ?Ser Take? and the same is true with P+L, meaning ?Plate? is pronounced ?Per Late?. I have found an easy solution to the issues with S combined with other consonants that involves the student imitating a snake before voicing the second part of the word, then progressively shortening the snake sound. This method stops the student from saying ?Ser? and gets them to say ?Sss? instead which helps blend the S into the rest of the word. I have tested the method with both adults and children and all were successful, however I have not yet found such an easy solution for other letter combinations. Of all the problems I have found with pronunciation in thailand the most difficult by far is CH as the sound is so close to other different sounds and there appear to be several different ways of saying it with the same result. I have found solutions to all problems however and found the key to all of them, regardless of the solution, is to practice. Red lorry, Yellow lorry, Church, SSSSnake and all other solutions, simple examples and tongue twisters can be repeated over and over to get the mouth used to the shapes required. Repetition is definitely the key to improving pronunciation.