When we are in concern of words (in a language), many things come to our minds at once, many things take a place to talk in our minds. Some of them are the literal spelling of the word, the property of the word, the meaning of the word, and so many things. Such a similar thing which also comes in our minds is pronunciation of the word, which we consider for sure, without any hesitation. Pronunciation means the standard way when any word is made to be spoken or sounded in order to talk or chat or speech. There are many easy words and many hard words, therefore, from the point of view of pronunciation. People often find it hard when they do not know how to pronounce a word. Some people even do not know the pronunciation of the word 'apple'. They pronounce it as 'appul'. Isn't this enough to consider the value of pronunciation? Yes, we cannot ignore the fact that really, pronunciation is very important and without the knowledge of correct pronunciation of words in English, we cannot be a good English user.
There are some tips which I would like to give to help you improve your pronunciation.
Write, Compare and Spell out - There are many words which confuse people. Let me give you an example. There is a reason why many people say that though English is the biggest global language but still it is one of the worst languages.
Let me give you an example and explain why this is called so. Take two words for instance - 'but' and 'put'. Now spell them. A native English user will pronounce both of them as 'boo - t" and "poo - t". But then in reality, the pronunciation of 'put' is as it is written as it has been said by me in the last sentence, but then 'but' is not as same. It is a bit different to understand and pronounce as per the normal vowel sounding rules. But, there are a wide variety of words which are spelled out as 'oo' sound as well as 'aa' sound with the vowel sound 'u' which we pronounce as 'you'. So what can we do actually?
There is a way out to this problem. First take a word. Write it's spelling on the paper. Now, compare the different pronunciations which come into your mind. Now spell each of them one by one. If you do this, you will at least get a list of more prominent pronunciations. This works most of the times, however, let me tell you that it does not work all the times.
Listen to the Television - I don't think that less than 70% of the people living in the urban places might not be having televisions. We often watch television and can we lie saying that we don't? We can't. Often we like to hear news and some of us also watch the English movies. So, if you are actually reading this post with full enthusiasm and confidence that you are going to follow that, I am sure you might at least agree me that watching English news channels and watching English movies sometimes may be benefiting. How may be it benefiting?
Well, we all know that the editors of movies and the onscreen news-tellers are no so stupid when it comes to English usage. They are all experts. When we listen to the news in English, we can easily learn many words which are not in our own vocabulary, plus, we can learn well the pronunciation of many difficult words. In movies, too it is the same case.
Listen to Songs - Listening of English songs can be of various benefits. They are compulsory to be with perfect English which also includes perfect pronunciation of the words. We can't ignore that the English lyricists are as fine and professional as Hindi lyricists. They often include words which are not usual in their lyrics, at least not usual for many, if not for all. When they pronounce it, it is for sure that it will be perfect otherwise, it may not be a success.
So, listening to songs from good artists maybe of great use.
Online Dictionaries  - There are many online dictionaries. One of them is dictionary.com and it does not only give the meaning in text, but to prove it's fineness, it also gives a voice pronunciation. So we can easily refer to dictionaries as such.
Sample Usage
Let me now give you some words which are hard to be pronounced by many people.
Psychology - Sy - ko - lojy
Education - Edu - ke - shun
Dictionary - Dik - shonary
Pronunciation - Pro - nun - sie - shun
Machine - Ma - shee - n
Virtual - Vir - chu - al
Picturesque - Pic - churus
Cocoa - Co - co
Jewellery - Ju - llery
Hierarchy - Hi - rar - ky
I will be adding some more difficult words to be pronounced in some of the future posts, or maybe, in just a series of them.
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