I am a student teacher and I am teaching a pronunciation class for non-English speakers. I have a czech student who has a fairly strong accent in English. My job is to see if I can reduce her accent to make it easier to understand her. Does anyone know of any specific websites or have information on specific czech problems and solutions. I have lots of textbooks on pronunciation problems in general, but I am looking for specific information on the Czech language. Thank you very much
I've heard from some Czech students of English that they were told to speak English as though they had a hot potato in their mouth :lol:. I guess the point is that Czechs tend not to open their mouths much when they speak, as opposed to English speakers (especially Americans).
I spent some time teaching basic conversation classes in the Czech Republic and I found that the hardest sounds for most students to make were "th" (both the voiced and un-voiced forms) as well as our impure vowels such as uh, ih, ah, etc. I found it most helpful to write pronunciation guides for the students acording to the closest Czech equivalent, such as writing the word 'wait' or 'weight' as: ouejt the 'j' in czech after a vowel often closes the vowel into a sort of dipthong with an 'i' sound. For those impure vowels, the best way is to sort of skip over them, because a Czech student will often pronouce 'pull' like 'pool' but if you simply wrote it out: 'PL' and to lenghten the 'L' a bit they might have it. As for the difficult 'th' sounds which are often mispronouced as s,z,d,t,f, the best way I found to teach it was to lightly bite the tounge between the front teeth and then let air escape while the lips are slightly parted. Well I hope this helps.
