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.
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.