Accent Training for Vietnamese Born People

A lot of learning a language comes from learning what part of the mouth/throat is used to make each sound. Unfortunately English and Vietnamese come from different parts of the mouth so it is challenging for learners of one to master the pronunciation of the other.

I used to teach ESL in SG and have been learning Vietnamese on and off for a while. One big thing I see with many Vietnamese ESL learners is that they don't hit the consonant sounds at the end of words hard enough. It makes complete sense because hard consonant sounds in Vietnamese tend to come at the beginning of a word and the sounds at the end of a word are often "swallowed".

I would tell them to spend a little time each day really focusing on and even over-enunciating words with hard consonant sounds like "talk" or "Cut" because I found the ending t and k sounds were particularly difficult for my students. The idea is not to walk around over pronouncing words, but to build awareness of and control one's own diction.

Sorry for the wall of text. Hopefully some of that was helpful.

/r/Vietnamese Thread