Yesterday night I stayed up late until almost 3 a.m. learning how to pronounce the L sound in English. I used to pronounce L to N mistakenly, finally, I made it. The knack is to lower the jaw and let the breath out of the mouth instead of the nose.I would say it is a huge progress. L was the last phonetic in English I could not pronounce correctly, and from now on, I can freely read a word out loud without worrying if I make some big mistakes. For example, if I say night when I meant to say light, it can be really confusing.Of course, there will still be accents, but speaking like a native speaker is not my first pursuit; making myself understood well is enough; it would be a waste of time and effort trying to be perfect.
Edited Verison:
Yesterday I stayed up until 3 a.m. learning how to pronounce the L sound in English. I used to mistakenly pronounce the "L" like an "N", but finally, I made it. The trick is to lower the jaw and breathe out of the mouth instead of the nose. I would say it is huge progress. "L" was the last phoneme I could not correctly pronounce, and from now on, I can freely read a word out loud without worrying about making some big mistakes. For example, if I say "night" when I mean to say "light", it can be really confusing. Of course, slight mispronunciations will still be there, but my primary pursuit is making myself well understood, instead of trying to speak like a native speaker, which I think would be a waste of time and effort.
This is well-written, and I could easily deduce what you were trying to say! A lot of my suggestions were personal preferences, and a lot of the things I commented on were still grammatically correct, so you did very well. Good job!
@HeyJude Hi, welcome to Journaly. Great job with your pronunciation training. It can be tricky at first, but you will develop muscle memory for it if you keep practicing. That is true, /n/ is a nasal phoneme while /l/ is not. Excellent observation.
@zmmccormick3 You knocked your comments out of the park! (If you're American, it's likely that you know this idiom.) Thorough and diplomatic. @CocoPop Get a load of these corrections!
Thank you @JGComm and @zmmccormick3, I've learned a lot from your comments.
@HeyJude You’re so welcome! I’m happy to hear that!
@JGComm @zmmccormick3 Is the knack in The knack is to lower the jaw and... appropriate?
@I'm not 100% certain. I'll research it.
@HeyJude If you're practicing American pronunciation, I suggest you check out this website
Sign up for free and you should have full access to the all the contents of the website.
It focuses on Italian, French, Spanish, European Portuguese, Brazilian Porteguese, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German and American English.
This is a great website, don't ignore it.
@Simone- Thanks for your advice, it seems a helpful website. Speaking of which, could you please tell me which word is more appropriate there?
I'm not a native speaker, so take my words with a pinch of salt. I would've used trick or secret. As far as I know, knack isn't a synonym of these two words.
Here is the Oxford dictionary definition of knack.
As you can see, knack has an altogether different meaning. But as I said, I'm not a native.
I would also have used "trick" or "secret," but perhaps by some technicality "knack" is also acceptable. I'm not sure. Also, @Simone- don't rely on native speakers to answer these kinds of questions. There's a lot we don't know.
@JGComm 👍
haha, thank you both, then I'd use trick instead of knack there