“No thanks, Adam. I don’t need any Viagra. Hahaha”

Well that was the last email I expected to get from my wife’s uncle.

I wondered why he thought I was trying to sell him Viagra. I don’t sell Viagra.

Honestly.

Then I noticed that his email to me was a reply from an email I’d sent him.

“I don’t remember sending him an email”, I thought.

I scrolled down to the original message, where it said:

“Hi! Check out this Viagra! It’s great! It’s completely changed my life!”, with a link underneath to some apparent pharmaceutical company.

“Oh dear…”

I’d been hacked.

I looked in my sent email folder and saw that my entire contact list had received this email from me.

Not good.

A valuable lesson was learnt that day on the importance of having a good password.

This is the meaning of hack as you probably understand the word. However, it does have another meaning. One that has become a bit of a buzzword in the Internet world.

A hack is essentially a quick, easy way to achieve something that would otherwise take a lot more time if you followed conventional advice.

It promises maximum results in minimum time.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

Naturally, people buy into things that promise big returns with little investment, and so the Internet is awash with a million different hacks on all manner of things: diet hacks, productivity hacks, fitness hacks. I even searched for hack your dog, and got 25,000,000 results.

That’s the Internet for you…

I’m not a fan of these kinds of hacks. Call me old-fashioned but I’m a firm believer in hard work, persistence, and long-term goal setting if you want real results.

So of course, being a hypocrite, I titled this post “The perfect pronunciation hack in English”.

I couldn’t call it anything else. It really does only require minimum effort and gives maximum results almost instantly.

Almost too easy.

When I teach this in class, I call the lesson “The number one tip for never being misunderstood in English”.

So often, people tell me stories of when they were in the UK or US, in a restaurant maybe, trying to order something that they knew they were pronouncing correctly, but no matter how many times they said it, the waiter just wouldn’t understand them.

Has this happened to you? Frustrating, isn’t it?

I can tell you now, if you were pronouncing the word more or less correctly and the grammar was correct, I can almost guarantee that they didn’t understand you because you weren’t implementing the perfect pronunciation hack in English.

What is the number one tip for never being misunderstood in English?

EMPHASISE THE CONSONANTS

Let me tell you a quick story. When I first arrived in Spain with my basic Spanish, one of the most difficult language skills for me was listening.

Everything just sounded like a long string of vowels, without any consonants. Spanish sounded something like this: uh-ah-ah-eh-ih-eh-oh-ah.

I remember when my wife said the word washing machine in Spanish (lavadora) in a conversation, and she literally had to repeat it ten times before I understood what she was trying to say to me.

All I could hear was ah-ah-oh-ah. I couldn’t hear the consonants, only the vowels.

If you really listen to spoken English, and really listen to the sound of the language, you’ll notice that it’s very consonant-heavy.The consonants sound strong.

Consonants in English are the most important sounds of the language. They are the sounds that carry the meaning of the word being said.

This means that if you’re having a conversation with a native English speaker, their English-speaking brain will be subconsciously listening for the consonants, as it knows that these are the sounds that make up words.

Spanish, on the other hand, is the opposite. Their five vowel sounds are sacred, and are always pronounced in the same way in all the Spanish-speaking world. Contrary to English, the vowel sounds in Spanish are the most important sounds.

As a result, consonants don’t sound as strong in spoken Spanish, as it’s the vowel sounds that carry most meaning.

When my wife was saying lavadora, my English brain couldn’t detect the consonants because they were weak compared to how they would be pronounced in English, so my brain couldn’t detect the word.

This is why it was difficult for me to listen to and understand spoken Spanish when I first arrived in Spain.

The opposite happens when Spanish speakers travel to English-speaking countries. The consonants aren’t strong when they speak, so English speakers will have difficulty understanding.

If an English speaker can’t hear the consonants clearly, they simply won’t understand.

To stop this from happening, all you need to do is make the consonants stronger. When I explain this, most people start speaking more loudly. That doesn’t work, though.

It’s not about speaking more loudly, it’s about making the consonants stronger.

Make sure you are pronouncing each and every consonant that is supposed to be pronounced in a word. The consonants need to resonate.

This means that if the word ends in -ed, you should clearly pronounce the letter d, and it should resonate on the roof of your mouth. The -s in third person singular and plurals should be strong and clearly audible. There should be a clear difference in pronunciation between the letters v and b, the hard g and the c, and j and y. And each should sound strong and clear.

If you pronounce these letters in more or less the same way, people are going to misunderstand you.

If you can produce each consonant sound clearly, nobody will misunderstand you.

Guaranteed.

Now for the practice exercise.

Listen to some spoken English after reading this post and make a conscious effort to really listen to the sound of the language, paying attention to the sound of the consonants as the person speaks. Don’t worry about understanding what the person is saying, that’s not the exercise. Just listen to the sound of it, and listen to how the consonants resonate and sound strong.

Now try this. Take a paragraph of text in English. It can be anything, it doesn’t matter. Read it slowly, unnaturally slowly, and make the consonants sound as strong as possible. It will sound unnatural, and that’s ok. It’s only practice. The idea is get your brain to focus on the consonants more, and train the mouth and tongue to produce strong consonants. Really exaggerate them for this practice exercise and train the physicality of producing these sounds.

It will feel strange in the beginning as you’ve probably never paid any attention to these sounds before, but the more you practise, the easier it will feel, and you’ll begin to adopt this pronunciation in normal conversation.

Practice makes permanent.

Do this for 5 minutes every day with any text you have in front of you in English, exaggerating the consonants. Listen to something in English every day, and listen to how each consonant is pronounced.

Another fantastic way to do this is by looking up words containing problematic consonants on wordreference.com, where you can click to hear the word in a variety of accents to hear how it is pronounced. You’ll hear that the consonants resonate.

After a few days, you’ll become much more aware of the sounds that you’re making when you speak in English.

More importantly, you will never be misunderstood.

This is the key to speaking clearly.

Try it and let me know how you get on. Send me an email with your results. If I reply to your email offering to sell you Viagra, just ignore it…

[thrive_leads id=’1049′]