Smoothing out our language

When we spend a lot of time learning language, we can spend just a little more time to "smooth out" our language skills. This is like planing some wood and sandpapering it to make the wood smooth and look nice.

 

Why should we try to smooth out our language skills? Because we can make the language we speak and write more interesting and attractive to ourselves, and hopefully for anyone reading our writing or listening to us speak.

 

How do we smooth out our language skills? Here are a few ideas:

 

1. Speak about 5% slower than you want to. This gives us 5% more time for thinking out more interesting words or a grammar point.

 

2. Check through your written texts one sentence at a time, and read it out loud. This is good speaking practice, but also you can hear how the language flows and see if all the sentences make sense.

 

3. Take care with vowel sounds. A E I O U.  Try saying these words so that you can hear a difference between them: "cap" "cup" "see" "say" "look" "luke" "lick" "like" "not" "nut" "mad" "made" "silk" "sulk"

 

4. Take care with consonants. Make sure that words are ended well. Try saying these words: "see" "seeD" "seal" "sealed" "seeN" "seaT" "sieVe" "seaP" "seeTH" "siFT" "seeR" "cieliNG" (don't say the G sound too much, just slightly)

 

5. Take care with syllables. Make sure you don't add them.

 

tel e vis ion (4 syllables(

 

Rum ple stilts kin (4 syllables)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumpelstiltskin

 

com mun i ty (4 syllables)

 

Aus tra li a  (4 syllables)

 

se ren di pi ty (5 syllables) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity

 

6. Start some ideas with a friendly link words "well," "ok" "So," "now"

 

ok, now we can discuss... ok, now we will go shopping

 

well, it's a nice idea

 

so, what do you think?

 

now, what shall we do?

 

7. Take notice of the intonation of words. Small two syllable words are the most important: toDAY, weekEND, ice CREAM, FIRE works, APril.

 

Enjoy smoothing out language!

 

Alan