Pronouncing english!!

[granca]

My wife is learning english from a teacher who uses a german text book, which I think is stupid but my wife likes the teacher. Sadly her dominican education did not include grammar. Is there an easy and foolproof way of getting her to understand the difference and use of pronoun, third person singular( which nearly always takes an "s" added to the infinitive) seeing that she does not know the word infinitive!? The other problem is pronunciation, seeing that many dominicans either don't pronounce an "s" such as pecados instead of pescados and want to put a "e" in front of any word beginning with "s". Such as "e"ship or "e"stephanie. The " first shall be last" comes out of her mouth as "the fur eshall be laa". Any bright ideas anybody??

 

[Matilda]

I wouldn't worry about the s on the third person singular as the Dominicans never pronounce it anyway! I have taught Dominicans English and it is always hard getting them to pronounce the whole word, it is just a question of practice really. As far as the 's' at the beginning of the word is concerned, again very hard not to get an 'e' in front of it, and then when you keep working at it the 's' often ends up in the wrong place - ie sleeping becomes esleeping then you keep working to get rid of the 'e' and it becomes leesping lol! Good luck, but it is great she is learning. Just keep talking in English to her - she will get it in the end.

Matilda

 

[KateP]

The "e"s seems to be a tradition in this country. I used to get my students to repeat and repeat and repeat sshhhh or sstttt or ssoooo until it came out properly and correct them again as soon as they went back to "e"s. Patience! That's all I can recommend.

 

[PeterInBrat]

Try to get her to say "junkyard"

After getting the basics in a couple languages, I prefer to learn as much as possible without using books and then turn to books to improve my grammar. I still get tripped up in Spanish with words I learned that start with "h."

Here is a good site for audiobooks. They have several other English language programs.
ORIGINAL

 

[Maria P]

she should try BBC Learning English

 

[jrhartley]

i dont think bbc english works here unless you are using expat shield on your computer- some parts of it work maybe

 

[bob saunders]

Send her back to school to learn her Spanish grammar, then she can learn the English grammar. She already knows how a sentence works in Spanish, she probably just doesn't know the parts of the sentence. My name, BOB, is about as easy has it gets for pronunciation but I get called Bos, Bot, Bod, Bo....etc.

 

[drstock]

i dont think bbc english works here unless you are using expat shield on your computer- some parts of it work maybe

I just tried it and it seemed to work fine: Learning English - Home

I would be interested to hear a Dominican speaking English with a BBC accent!

 

[Chirimoya]

Does my son count? He is half Dominican and speaks English with an RP (BBC) accent.

Not all words with S are difficult to pronounce, eSpanish espeakers have problems pronouncing words where the S is followed by another consonant.

 

[granca]

Thanks all. I shall try the suggestions out, the interesting thing is that I have spoken english with our 5 year old daughter since she began to talk. She can't read yet but she makes none of the above mis-pronunciations, I ask her something in english or ask het to tell her Mother something but her answers or messages always come out in perfectly translated spanish!

 

[rubio_higuey]

Does my son count? He is half Dominican and speaks English with an RP (BBC) accent.

Not all words with S are difficult to pronounce, eSpanish espeakers have problems pronouncing words where the S is followed by another consonant.

yeah thinking of it, you are right, they have no problems saying samuel, samba, sacerdote, saliva, secreto, sinaloa, soborno, etc.
but yes (e)spanish, (e)stephanie, so the spanish accomodated it into e-spanol, e-sclavo (slave), e-scala (scale), e-stres (stress)

 

[Chirimoya]

From Language differences: English - Spanish

Producing English consonant sounds is not so problematic for many Spanish learners, but difficult enough! They may have problems in the following aspects:

- failure to pronounce the end consonant accurately or strongly enough ; e.g. cart for the English word card or brish for bridge or thing for think
- problems with the /v/ in words such as vowel or revive difficulties in sufficently distinguishing words such as see/she or jeep/sheep/cheap
- the tendency to prefix words beginning with a consonant cluster on s- with an /ε/ sound; so, for example, school becomes eschool and strip becomes estrip
- the swallowing of sounds in other consonant clusters; examples: next becomes nes and instead becomes istead.

I've noticed Dominicans pronouncing 'pizza' as 'pixa', 'Betsy' as 'Becksy'.