Another way of describing speech that could be called “choppy” would be to say speech that is not smooth, or comes out in pieces, such as one word or even one syllable at a time. If you’ve ever been concerned that this might describe your speech, don’t worry! There is nothing wrong with the way you’re speaking that can’t be fixed. It’s very possible that there are elements of your natural way of speaking, based mostly on your first language, that need to be adjusted when you are speaking English.
If you are just beginning to speak English, then before doing anything else, it might be a good idea to congratulate yourself on all of the progress you have already made. You are speaking another language. That is truly amazing. You’re already doing something that many people can’t do. And the same is true if you’ve been speaking English longer, but feel there are things about your speech that you would like to improve. Congratulate and thank yourself for everything that you’ve already done. It has been an amazing accomplishment. The fact that you want to go further and make improvements in your speech is wonderful.
If you’ve started to wonder if your speech might be “choppy,” “uneven,” or “not smooth,” it just means that you’re ready to go to the next level in your English speaking. All learning is a process. The same way there was a day you couldn’t speak any English and now you can, you can see continued growth as you move forward on your journey to refine your speech and make it smoother.
Here are 3 areas to consider in making your speech flow with a smoother and more natural sound to it:
1. Word Connection (also called Linking or Liaison)
2. Intonation
3. Phrasing
These are all important areas to explore. If these are new ideas to you, or even if you have already heard of these concepts but never practiced getting them into your speech, you can expect to significantly change your speech and move towards finding your own true voice, speaking the way you would like to speak. This article will primarily explain these concepts and get you started practicing them.
Remember that speech work, much like learning to play a musical instrument, is experiential. It’s important that once you understand these ideas you get them into your speech and into your body by speaking out loud. Sound and word drills and concept-related practice exercises and sentences have great value in targeting specific areas of learning with the most precision. In addition you can keep things interesting by reading out loud articles, books, scripts, and anything that interests you. Engage in conversation in English frequently. Record yourself, at least occasionally, and listen back to get a sense of how you sound and to gage your progress.
Word Connection:
“Choppy” speech usually means that there are too many spaces of non-sound within someone’s speaking. Of course, pause and silence is part of speech. We shouldn’t feel that we always need to be making sound when speaking English. What about in your speech? Are you connecting words in your sentences or do you think that you are saying one word at a time? Not every word needs to be connected to the word before and after it. A good place to start is in looking at words within phrases.
In English we tend to speak on a constant stream of sound. If instead of allowing words to connect together you say one word at a time, this is likely to sound “choppy.” The main issue here is probably just the spaces of silence between each word, but there could be a dynamic issue as well, as each word might have a slight rise in volume at its onset. The comparison in musical terms would be staccato and legato. Staccato notes in music are written with a dot underneath them — they are meant to be played shorter than other notes. Notes that are played smoothly are called legato. If you have ever played piano, think of playing the notes smoothly as you move up: C, D, E, F, G.
Okay, “legato,” “staccato”…. Are we talking about music or English? Well, in some ways we’re talking about both. Intonation is sometimes described as the music of a language. In music the terms staccato and legato fall into the category of articulation, a word which is also used in the study of speech.
Good articulation is desirable in good speech. Good articulation means that your words are not blurring together in a way that could be hard to understand, or make it hard for the listener to tell one word from another.
But while clear articulation is a good quality to have, we want to avoid over-articulation. If words are over-articulated, they stand out too much and take away from the rest of the sentence. A way to prevent over-articulation is to soften the words a bit and let them blend with the other words around them.
Words within phrases will tend to connect when:
One word ends with a consonant and the next word begins with a vowel:
In order to practice this, think of moving the final consonant of the first word into the beginning of the next word. And then say the two words on a constant stream of sound. So instead of saying:
Hold. It.
Try saying:
Hol Dit.
If you are trying to change an old pattern in your speaking, a good approach in practicing this new way is to take it very slowly at first. You can stretch out the sound “Hol” and then say “Dit” when you are ready. The important thing is not to have a space of silence between the two. If you find you run out of breath when you try this, make sure to either take enough breath in the beginning, or not let out too much breath as you speak.
You might find this to be fairly easy right away. If it’s challenging, just stick with it. Know that once you get past the challenging part, it will become much easier.
Here are some short phrases to practice the same way as you did with the phrase “Hold it.” Move the consonant over into the beginning of the second word and practice speaking on a constant stream of sound.
GEEEEHHHHHHHH DIT………. (Get it.)
FIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNN DIT …….. (Find it.)
TAAAAAAAAAAAAY KIT ………. (Take it.)
2. One word ends with a vowel and the next word begins with a vowel sound. The words will connect by adding a Y or a W sound between them.
(Note: if you are already connecting vowel-vowel sounds, then you might not need to think about this at all. You wouldn’t want to add extra sounds or make the Y or W sounds longer. In fact in some cases, such as very fast speech by newscasters or narration in film and television, very precise and crisp articulation is created by avoiding glide (Y,W) sounds between words. Everyday speech is usually made with words smoothly connected. This sounds most natural to most listeners.)
Front vowels (EE, IH, AY) connect with a Y sound to vowel sounds after them. Back vowels (UU, OH) connect with a W sound to vowel sounds after them. Rather than memorizing this as a rule, a simpler way of thinking of this is to keep making sound for the first word until the second word is sounded. Let’s look at the phrase “She opened…”
Say the word “she” and extend it. While still making the sound EE, make the sound OH of “open.”
SHEEEEEEEEE (y)OOOOOpened.
You will probably notice that in between EEEEE and OOOO you made the sound “Y” which is made with the arch of the tongue.
If you’re not sure if you made the sound “Y,” then practice saying the two vowels, being certain to connect them with the sound Y:
EEEE–YYYYYY–OOOOO
To practice the W glide, let’s look at the two-word partial phrase “who are.” (If the R sound is challenging for you, then for now practice with a different phrase such as “who is” or “who ate.” It’s good to focus on one concept at a time when learning something new, especially if you are changing old reflexes.)
WHOOOOOOOO (w) AAAAARE
Again, you could get even more precise, and practice just the two vowels with the “w” sound in between:
UUUUU-WWWW-AAAAAH
INTONATION AND PHRASING
Almost everyone who learns a second language starts by learning individual words.
It’s important to be able to move from thinking of and saying single words, one at a time, to groups of words. Groups of related words are called phrases. A phrase usually means essentially one thing, or conveys one meaning to the listener. Within a phrase we often have one or two key words. These are the words that have the most meaning or feeling. They are usually nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs. These words are also called content words. The other words in the sentence are called function words. They have less meaning and are less important, but they are necessary to hold the sentence together.
Content words are usually spoken on a higher pitch. In addition, the stressed syllable of key words usually contains what is called a vowel peak. The pitch of the vowel goes slightly up and then down. This pitch change is so subtle that most native speakers are unaware they are doing it.
If you are learning English as a second language, it’s possible that you are already replicating this vowel peak just by ear, especially if your first language has a similar intonation to English. But for most learners, if the vowel peak isn’t directly addressed and practiced, it’s very possible that it won’t ever become part of the their normal speech, at least not as comprehensively as it could be.
Depending on what your first language is, this idea could be somewhat or even very challenging. Take it slowly. Experiment with moving the pitch of a vowel up very slightly. Some languages use tones to completely change the meaning of a word. If your first language is one of many tonal languages, getting used to the vowel peak might take some focused attention. But you will really enjoy hearing the way you sound when you start to incorporate these changes into your speech. As usual, we want to use the concept of muscle memory. Work slowly – very slowly – and you will start to develop the new speaking patterns, which will eventually override the old reflexes. Once the muscles learn what to do, you can pick up the speed.
Let’s look at a vowel peak in a very simple sentence – the sentence “I do.” Let’s assume in this case that the important word is “do,” (although the same sentence could instead stress the word “I,” which would convey a different meaning.
Let’s practice the vowel peak with the sound UU of the word “do.” (Make sure you are using the right vowel for this word, which has an irregular spelling. We might expect this word to rhyme with “go,” “so,” “no,” and “show.” But it doesn’t. This word rhyme with “you,” “shoe,” and “true.”)
Let’s break the vowel peak in half by first practicing going up. You are starting on a certain note that is comfortably within your speaking range, and going up in pitch slightly. If you are already familiar with the terms rising and falling tones, this is a rising tone. If you are comfortable saying something like “here?” as a question, then you are probably already familiar with the sound. Now try asking the one word question, “you?” Now do the same thing again, only this time let’s get rid of the initial “Y” sound and just use a rising tone for the vowel UU. Repeat that a few times to get comfortable with it.
For the second half of the vowel peak, we’ll use a falling tone. A falling tone is used to make a statement, as opposed to a question. Practicing with a single word is a good idea because longer sentence can sometimes be spoken with different tones than we might expect. A question like “is it here?” might be said with a rising or falling tone, and it would still be heard as a question. But if we just say the word “here,” the right tone is crucial to convey to the listeners whether we are asking the question, “here?”, or making the statement, “here.”
Practice saying “you” with a falling tone. Then, as you did before, get rid of the initial Y sound and practice a few times just with the vowel Uu.
The next step is to practice a rising tone, followed by a falling tone. But we are still going very slowly to introduce these sounds into our body consciously. While all of us learned so much of our own native languages unconsciously, it is possible to learn a second language by implementing patterns like these in a conscious way. The key really is to work very slowly at first.
Practice several times saying UU with a rising tone, followed by UU with a falling tone. At first there’s no need to make it all one continuous sound. In fact, it’s probably best to keep them separate to really make sure you have a good rising tone and a good falling tone.
Once that feels comfortable, practice saying the rise-fall UU as one continuous sound. Repeat it a number of times to get it more and more comfortable in your body.
The next step is to make the sound shorter, while making sure the vowel peak is still being spoken. Duration-wise, if you had been saying a sound that was about a half second long, now you might cut the length of the sound in half, or make it even shorter.
Now put the consonant “d” in front of the vowel UU and we’re back to the word “do.” Practice this stressed word “do” a couple of times. Imagine someone is half way across the room and send this word over to them.
Next let’s go back to our sentence, “I do.” Is the vowel peak feeling natural at this point? If not, that’s okay. You can probably already see and feel that you know a lot more about this idea than you did before. If you keep at it, you will incorporate this into your speaking. If it is feeling natural already, that’s great! Now you can probably make the sound without even thinking about the fact that the pitch is going up and down. Instead you might just be thinking that you want to stress the idea “do.” And by having that thought, the vowel peak just happens on its own. Your goal is to have this become incorporated into your speech in such a way that when you are thinking and expressing an idea, the intonation just happens on its own. In other words, you have a strong thought with the conviction “I do,” and when you share that with someone your intention makes your body stress that word. The result is a vowel peak and the listener understands exactly what you are communicating to them.
Remember that getting comfortable with the different tones that can exist within a syllable is part of the foundation of our speech. A little bit of improvement in this area will greatly help your overall speech. This idea is one that you can revisit frequently. You don’t have to try to get these sounds perfect in one sitting before you move on to study other material.