#pronunciation

A foreign accent is often described as a problem of pronunciation.

The learner produces one vowel incorrectly, softens the wrong consonant or struggles with a particular sound. These details are audible, but they are not always what makes speech feel foreign.

A speaker may pronounce every individual sound reasonably well and still organize the sentence according to the rhythm of another language.

The stress falls in an unexpected place. A pause divides ideas that should remain connected. The voice rises where a native speaker would let it fall. Important and unimportant words receive equal weight.

Nothing is grammatically wrong, yet the listener has to work harder.

This is the hidden role of prosody.

Prosody determines how speech moves through time. It tells us which information is new, which idea is being contrasted and whether the speaker is certain, doubtful, ironic, impatient or surprised.

That is why natural speech cannot be built by correcting isolated sounds alone.

Learners also need to hear the larger pattern:

Where does the phrase begin?

Which word carries the message?

What becomes shorter?

Where does the voice change direction?

Fluency develops when vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and rhythm begin working as one system.

The goal is not to imitate a native speaker’s identity. It is to make the intended meaning audible.

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I'm sick of people who say "two-thousands" (nearly everybody) to refer to the '00s decade. Pronounce it AUGHTS or AUGHTIES. PLEASE.

Same goes for the 1900s, 1800s, etc. ALSO when abbreviating the decade, the apostrophe comes BEFORE the numbers (e.g. '00s, not 00's) Saying 90's makes it possessive, as if said thing belongs to the number 90. When you drop letters/numbers at the beginning of the word, use the apostrophe at the beginning.

GET IT RIGHT FUCKING NOOBS.

AUGHTS. '00s. It might feel awkward to say at first, because you might be like "People might look at me funny if I say aughts instead of two-thousands!" Fuck it. Be brave. It'll catch on. If they ask you to clarify, tell them confidently and matter-of-factly.

You can say "TWENTY-AUGHTS" to distinguish from the "NINETEEN-AUGHTS" (1900s) and "EIGHTEEN-AUGHTS" (1800s). "2000s" basically refers to the entire millennium, 2000-2999.

Then the next decade is pronounced "TENS" ('10s). Don't say "teens" because then you're only referring to the years 2013-2019. That's not a decade.

If you want to take an even more impressive step forward, you can say "twenty-_" for the years 2000-2009, e.g. "twenty-oh-three" for 2003. I conform to mainstream pronunciation in this case, saying "two-thousand-nine" until the '10s where I say "twenty-ten". It's funny how people didn't start referring to the '10s decade in terms of "twenty-_" until the next decade. It wasn't until 2020 when I finally started hearing most people refer to the previous decade as "twenty-eighteen, twenty-nineteen". During the entire decade, people said "two-thousand-thirteen" and "two-thousand-sixteen". Now everybody says "twenty-_". I always said "twenty-_" since the year 2010, because I'm extremely awesome and consistent.

AND also, you're not a '90s kid if you were born in the '90s. People born in the '90s are '90s BABIES. Being in preschool in the '90s doesn't mean you grew up in them. I was born in 1993, and I'm a '00s kid. In order to say you "grew up" in a certain decade, I think those years should include your coming-of-age years, i.e. early adolescence. In order to have been 11-12 in the '90s, you would have had to have been born no later than 1989. Rule of thumb: you grew up in the decade AFTER you were born. It's just that on Tinder, I keep running into these fools who use "'90s kid" as a tag for their profile when it says their age is 28. I remember the late '90s, as I was in preschool/early elementary school, but that's not enough to say I'm a '90s kid. I didn't know anything about '90s pop-culture or any world events at the time. I liked the Backstreet Boys, that was about the only iconic late '90s thing I liked. Well, VHS tapes and compact audio cassettes were things I was pretty into, but those things persisted throughout the '00s.

JUST PRONOUNCE THE YEARS CORRECTLY. DUMBFUCKS.