What a Viral Tweet Can Teach Us About English Pronunciation

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Last year, a tweet from Japan went viral. It featured a picture of a piece of paper that had English words on one side and Japanese approximations of those words on the other.

初めて英語を聞いた小学生の耳がすごい。この感覚を大切にしてほしいな。 pic.twitter.com/CcZThucAvm
— こあたん🇦🇺こあらの学校 (@KoalaEnglish180) July 16, 2022

It turns out the words were written by a primary school student – most likely the child of the person who posted the tweet.

According to the caption, this was the student's first time hearing English. Yet they were able to accurately capture the sounds they heard much more accurately than most Japanese adults, which is why the post gained so much attention.

So, why was this the case? And what can we learn from this as English tutors?

How a primary school student beat adults

Kids have an easier time learning the sounds of a new language, which helps explain why our primary school student did so well. But that's not the whole story.

Japanese uses a lot of loanwords, which are words borrowed from other languages, such as English. A classic example is the word "salad" – you might have students who keep saying "salada" even though you keep correcting them. That's because they think "salada" is the true English word!

If I got a dollar every time someone said “salada,” I’d be a millionaire!
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Japanese also has a system for spelling Japanese words in English, which can give Japanese people the wrong idea of how English letters are pronounced.

Adults, who are used to loanwords and this spelling system, have to put in more effort to learn the proper pronunciation of English words. But children have the advantage of starting fresh, making it easier for them to learn the correct sounds.

Lessons for us as tutors

There are actually a lot of interesting aspects of pronunciation that our primary school student picked up on. We’ll focus on two main lessons we can take away.

1. Pre-vocalic R sound

A “pre-vocalic R” is an R sound that comes before a vowel. There are two words in the list which have pre-vocalic R sounds: “really” and “pretty.” Many Japanese students pronounce them like this:

Really: Lee-yah-lee
Pretty: Plee-tee

Interestingly, the primary school student approximated the words like this:

Really: Wee-lee
Pretty: Pwee-lee

So while adults tend to pronounce R’s as L’s, the child chose to pronounce them as W’s instead.

This is also how some English-speaking children their age pronounce their R’s: e.g. “pwetty pwease.”

While this isn’t correct either, it’s still more accurate-sounding and easy-to-understand than the adult versions.

Teaching insights

Obviously, we don’t want our adult students to pronounce their R’s like W’s! However, we can use W sounds to help them pronounce R sounds correctly.

This is because the W sound prepares your mouth to pronounce R sounds. Say the following pairs of words to see for yourself:

Wade, raid
Whale, rail
Wide, ride
Wing, ring
Won, Ron

You may have noticed that when you make W sounds, you stick out your lips and make them round as if you were making an “ooh” sound. Then, all you need to do is to curl up the tip of our tongue and you’ll be able to make an R sound.

For more help teaching the R sound, check out these free resources:

2. Connected speech

”Connected speech” is when we pronounce a group of two or more words as if they were one word. In other words, we connect them together.

In general, English learners are not aware of connected speech and pronounce each word separately, resulting in pronunciations that sound like the ones in the middle column below.

Phrase	What learners sound like	What these phrases should sound like
A lot of	“A. Lot. Of.”	“alotof” or “a-lo-tof”
Not at all	“Not. At. All.”	“notatall” or “no-ta-tall”
I don’t know	“I. Don’t. Know.”	“Idonknow” or “I-don-know” or even “I dunno”

Interestingly, our primary school student picked up on connected speech, linking the words correctly in their approximations. They even seemed to pick up on two different kinds of connected speech!

Catenation: This is when you connect two words, because the first one ends in a consonant and the second starts with a vowel. The primary school student did this with “a lot_⌴of” and “not_⌴at_⌴all.”
Disappearing sounds: This is when D and T sounds disappear in between other consonant sounds. The primary school student successfully skipped the T sound in “I don’t know,” spelling it out as something closer to “I dunno.”

Teaching insights

You can watch these short British Council videos to learn more about the different types of connected speech.

Next time you notice your students saying each word separately, let them know about connected speech! Teaching them about it will improve their pronunciation and their listening skills at the same time.

That’s it for now!

There’s a lot more pronunciation tips we can share related to this tweet, but we’ll let you get back to your lessons for now!

For more information on why students struggle with pronunciation and how you can help, check out these blog posts:

If you found this post helpful and would like to see more posts on pronunciation, let us know through Tutor Support. Happy tutoring!