G'day mate. What's up? Today, I am going to talk about ways to overcome your weakness of consonants and the habit of omitting the ending of sentences and words. Some of my students and twitter followers were asking these sorts of concerns. So I'd like to give you some tips to solve the problems. Let's get started!
First and foremost, have you ever checked totally how many consonants and diphthongs, and whether you could pronounce them accurately?
This is simply critical to overcoming the weakness of your consonant sounds. Here are all the phonetic symbols:
Phonetic charts
Can you pronounce each symbol correctly? If not, then your weak consonant sounds might come from mispronunciation. From my learning process and teaching experience, commonly mispronounced symbols for those who tend to omit the ending of words or sentences are: t, d, f, v, s, g, z and w. You should work on these 8 sounds if you want to stop your bad habit of omitting the key consonants. If you think you are good at pronouncing all the consonants above, then you should try the next tip.
Next up, you might have to enunciate all the ending of words or sentences crystal clear to be heard
If you don't have any problem regarding pronunciation, then the reason behind might be stemming from just unconscious omission. It is, however, not easy to solve the problem. You should put so much effort into overcoming by exaggerating the very last word such as 'provided = -ded sound or 'provides' = -des or -dz sound. Noticing these omissions themselves is not easy. Ideally, you record yourself, or a professional teacher is needed to detect and sort out. It's going to take substantial time to rectify the situation where you often tend to omit. As far as I'm concerned, the best way is to stop or pause before the ending of the word, and say it a bit loudly. I understand it sounds a bit strange, but it's important to do so until you won't omit it.
Last but not least, if you don't have pronunciation problems and are not omitting any ending, then stop shadowing, but do repeat sentences, instead
As a last resort, repeating sentences might help improve your pronunciation of weaker consonants. When you listen to audio sentences, you try to intently understand each word correctly. And, you sort of try to use your very short working memory. For shadowing, you're not specifically using that memory, but you're purely imitating what the speaker is saying. This doesn't help at all.
And, even it's getting much worse, because just imitating means that you're highly likely to unconsciously omit the ending of the word or sentence, which is always the key consonant sounds whether your listener could understand what you want to say. If you omit the ending of the verb, then you're probably sending a wrong message = incorrect tense. Although some people say 'oh never mind it's just tense and people can understand you even if you make such mistakes, this is absolutely not good at all. Therefore, to this end, what you should do is to listen to a sentence carefully, use your short-term working memory, and then repeat the sentence word by word crystal clear until you are confidently able to repeat every single word exactly what the speaker is trying to say.
That's all for today. Thanks for reading! Should you have any further information or query, please feel free to contact me.
Have a great day!