While practicing to pronounce all American sounds correctly, I found out that for me the most difficult part of American pronunciation seem to be certain voiced (and therefore rather soft) consonants. As I am from Tyrol and our dialect is a rather harsh one with lots of voiceless consonants, it’s kind of hard to get used to words like “aDJusted”. I tried saying this word a couple of times, but pronouncing this “d” as soft as possible just seems weird to me :D. I guess I’ll have to say words like this a thousand of times so that I get used to it.
As I’ve already told you, I often skyped with my American friends, and asked them what I could improve in order to sound more American. I remember this one time when my friend from NJ asked me to say “my dad is dead”. I know this is a rather weird example sentence but in the beginning, he always started laughing because of my pronunciation. He repeated this sentence multiple times and I had to repeat it too. I knew that there was such a tiny difference between our pronunciation of the words “dad” and “dead” that it actually didn’t really matter- everyone would understand me. But I also realized that these tiny differences in pronunciation differentiate a native speaker from a non-native speaker. Therefore, I tried and I am still trying to get rid of these tiny differences.
When I
watched the youtube videos I told you about in my last blog entry, I realized
for the first time that Americans put their front teeth together when saying
sounds like “s” or “t”. The front teeth don’t necessarily touch each other, but
at least they come closer. I had never realized this before, so I tried saying “s”
the way I always said it (the teeth are pretty far apart) and then the way
Americans would say it. And although the difference is rather subtle, I believe
that again it’s this subtle difference that draws the line between native and
non-native speakers. 
Another
striking difference was the way the “a” was pronounced. In the videos, Rachel
touches the lower front teeth with her tongue. Again, I compared this to the
way I used to pronounce the “a”, and the tip of my tongue didn’t touch anything
– it was right there in the middle of the mouth :D.
So now I’m
aware of these differences, but putting the theory into practice is harder than
I thought. Once I start speaking normally again – like for example to friends –
I fall back into my old patterns. And when I try to pronounce every single
sound the way it should be pronounced, I start speaking like someone who can’t
speak English at all. So I guess getting my brain to forget the habits of
pronouncing sounds in a certain way will take some time and a lot of practice.
