Use of Minimal Pairs: Your Secret Weapon to Master English Pronunciation
Most of us focus on improving our grammar to improve our English speaking skills. At least, that’s what has been taught to us in schools and most tend to follow that when speaking the language.
While grammar is important to build your foundation, speech clarity or rather fluency in English comes with right pronunciation. Nowadays, we can find many online pronunciation exercises on YouTube or language learning apps to practise and improve our pronunciation.
At Multiedsupport, you can even find courses that help individuals work on their English pronunciation. Nevertheless, the importance of mastering pronunciation cannot be overstated, which is why we bring you a little secret to hone this skill.
In this blog, we give you a quick guidance of how using minimal pairs helps in your pronunciation practice. Let’s dig in!
What Is Meant By Minimal Pairs?
Minimal pairs are those confusing words that have the same pronunciation. The only thing separating them is a singular sound. Some of the examples of minimal pairs are –
- Slip and Sleep
- Three and Tree
- Sip and Ship
It is a pretty simple concept. Using minimal pairs for pronunciation practice online or offline lets you focus on problematic sound areas in context. Once you get familiarised and master them then there’s no need to worry about jumbling with phonetic alphabets.
A Simple Strategy to Use Minimal Pairs
Minimal pairs are effective tools but for it to work properly in your favour, you need a good strategy. Let’s give you a brief outline of it —
- Step 1: Identifying Your Problem Areas
The first foot forward in mastering your pronunciation by using minimal pairs is to find out your problem area. Take help from online and get a list of minimal pair words.
Read the words, make sure to record yourself when uttering them. Once you are done, listen to the recording and analyse to find the pain points in your pronunciation. Be sure to listen thoroughly and prioritise the sounds of how you say each word.
- Step 2: Be Sure to Know The Right Pronunciation
You may listen to your recording and even find the problem, but you won’t move forward in your learning until you know the right pronunciation. So, make sure to know how to make the sounds.
A great help that you can find for this is to look for tutorial videos where they demonstrate correct mouth positions to make the sound.
- Step 3: Follow 3-Way Rule to Practise Minimal Pairs
Once you master the first-two steps, it’s finally time to move onward using minimal pairs. There are basically 3 ways you can use them effectively. They are –
- Practising to say each word in a pair slowly.
- Practising to say each word in a pair at a normal pace.
- Practising to say the primary word in a sentence.
Don’t forget to record yourself while doing this exercise. Play it back and evaluate yourself.
If you are in need of further assistance in learning pronunciation then be sure to check out our course at Multiedsupport. We have tailored lessons curated by professionals to give you an effective learning opportunity.
