The Vietnamese Accent Reduction program is ready!

Published: 28 May 2021 Tagged: Accent ReductionCentral Queensland UniversityCommunicationconversationSpeakablespeakingVARVietnamVietnamese Accent Reduction

As announced some weeks ago, Speakable was preparing its VAR (Vietnamese Accent Reduction program) to star in July for both face-to-face and online sessions. This is the product from a successful partnership between Speakable and Central Queensland University to develop this 10-week program designed to improve English pronunciation for Vietnamese speakers, improving clarity and fluency.

Among the many topics approached and stimulated towards the attendees’ oral communication, some of the most important ones that usually affect Vietnamese people when speaking English are:

• TH /ð/. This sound doesn’t exist in the Vietnamese oral language, so this is one of the initial challenges faced. Speaking this sound instead of /d/ is fundamental, especially because of very common words such as this, those, mother, though and so many others.
• CH /tʃ/. Another common sound which is not used in the Vietnamese oral language. Words like chat, purchase, Architecture, pitch have this sound, and are difficult to be correctly pronounced by Vietnamese people.
• Consonant clusters. Consonant clusters, or blends, might represent more complexity to the Vietnamese speaker because of the accumulated letters to reproduce a sound the speaker isn’t expecting. Among the examples, there are smell, bread, anthropology and athlete.
• Final consonant sounds. Sounds such as “z”, “s”, “t”, “v”, “ed”, “ks” and “st” tend to be ignored by Vietnamese people when speaking English because these sounds don’t have equivalents in Vietnamese. It’s important to train the pronunciation of them when speaking words which end with one of them.
• Multi-syllabic words. The Vietnamese language is composed by many small words, while the English language is used to words such as multiplication, meteorological, assimilation or counterargument. It’s important for a Vietnamese person to learn solutions such as identifying prefixes and suffixes, as well as chunking the word into understandable syllables and sounds. The understanding about word stress is extremely important when speaking such multi-syllabic words.
• Intonation. This trait is very relevant to help guide the ideas towards the comprehension of the other person you are talking to, since sometimes the different intonation might become a distraction and hinder the true understanding of the tone. Vietnamese is a tonal language, but English is not, so it’s important to notice how to change properly the intonation when speaking each language.
• Verb “to be”. English uses this verb for many purposes, including to link the subject and a predicative adjective, which is not used by the Vietnamese verb là. For examples, for the translation of “He is hungry”, it is said Nó đói, which literally means “He hungry”. Therefore, this use for verb to be tends to be challenging.
• Articles. While English has definite and indefinite articles, Vietnamese simply has no articles. Therefore, the selection of the article for the best situation, or even whether it’s necessary or not to insert an article, is an extra challenge.
• Verb tenses. English tenses can modify the verb itself, especially in cases of irregular verbs. However, Vietnamese uses a particle in front of the main verb to denote the tense. Because of this, Vietnamese people might have difficulties when using tenses other than simple ones, making the conversation more confusing time-wise.

For all of these traits and many more, Speakable is open to start new sessions for both face-to-face and online sessions, in such a way it will help not only Vietnamese people living nearby the clinic, but people in the whole Australia and even overseas. Get in contact to know more and don’t forget to inform Vietnamese friends and family members who would benefit from this special program!