Rhythm: the secret to great English pronunciation

And I can teach you that rhythm in a few weeks.

If you’re interested, here’s some background information on the importance of rhythm, especially for Spanish speakers.

Spanish is what’s called a syllable-timed language, which means that when Spanish speakers speak, they give each syllable more or less the same amount of time. This is why people say Spanish has a machine-gun rhythm.

English is what’s called a stress-timed language, which means that when English speakers speak, they spend more time on key words, and on stressed syllables in those words. They rush over the other words, and even change the pronunciation of many of their vowels. This is why English has much more varied rhythm.

If you speak English with a Spanish rhythm, you can be pronouncing all your syllables perfectly and making grammatically correct sentences, but native English speakers will have to work very hard to understand you. And so they have very little energy left to take in your message.

You see, the stress-timed rhythm of English is English speakers' way of signaling new or important information in a sentence. When learners of English don’t do it, they put a big responsibility on the listener’s shoulders — “Here are all these words, you figure out what’s important and what’s not”. Natives aren’t used to doing that, so when you make a native do it, there's a immediate barrier between you.

Simply put: if you want to communicate in a way that is listener-friendly, you have to learn to speak English in the rhythm of English.

But don’t worry, with me, you can do so.

And while doing so we will also change any habits of mispronouncing sounds that you may have. As any musician will tell you, rhythm is the base of sound, and once you fix the base, the rest is much easier to adjust.

Also, when you learn to speak English in the rhythms of English, not only will your comprehensibility improve, but your comprehension will too. Once you are tuned into the rhythms of English, you will understand so much more of what you hear, and so many more nuances and subtle shades of meaning. The same sentence with a different stressed word can have a totally different meaning.

So take these classes if you want to be better understood, to be easier to understand, and to understand more of the English you hear.