Focus on Famous ESL Speakers: Vladimir Putin #1
I thought it would be fun to look at some of our famous ESL speakers around the world. The first person I’m going to evaluate is Vladimir Putin.
He has a speech in English about the 2014 Winter Olympics. He’s a real guy with a busy life, like a lot of you, and he has a lot of people around him who can ensure he speaks perfectly (ensure = make sure). However, he does not.
Vladi, I have to tell you that you need some help with your pronunciation!
I’ve worked with a lot of Russian speakers and Vladimir Putin is very hard to understand compared to many of my students. However, his biggest problem is very common for Russian speakers. His mouth and tongue muscles are too tight. He’s got to take it easy (to take it easy = to relax). Because he’s over-pronouncing everything, he doesn’t stress important words more than unimportant words and he makes every syllable too strong.
The other big problem is his pronunciation of vowels, particularly the soft vowel sounds for i, a, u and o. Look at his soft ‘i’ sound. He says it like eeee. How can he correct this? His mouth stretches as it does if someone smiles wide. For the ‘i’ sound, you shouldn’t move your mouth much. Try to say ‘beach’ and ‘bitch’ - these should sound very different or you may have some problems. For ‘beach’, your mouth stretches and makes a smile. For ‘bitch’, your mouth should barely move (barely = almost not).
For ‘a’, he doesn’t open his mouth enough, but I suppose it is closer to a British soft ‘a’ sound than an American soft ‘a’ sound, which requires quite a big mouth.
For ‘o’, he uses the hard ‘o’ sound when he should be using the soft ‘o’ sound. In other words, he pronounces it as ‘oa’ instead of ‘ah’.
He doesn’t make many grammar mistakes. He has a good speech writer. However, he says, “Would you believe it?” He should say, “Can you believe it?”
Here he is. Learn from his mistakes and maybe you will be the President of Russia one fine day (one fine day = sometime in the future).
Hi dear kim,
First of all, thank you so much for your practical blog.I have seen all your videos and it helps me a lot,especially for speaking.
I watched this video but I could not understand even one word.I think his accent is terrible and if we talked like him in our school , we would be failed!
I think this video is quite good for listening and I will listen to it later once again.Maybe I can understand.
Good luck,
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