LEVEL TWO:
SOME CONFUSION
In this category, we find errors that might temporarily confuse, amuse, delight or annoy your listeners, but probably don't inhibit them from understanding you overall--they just might not
want to listen to you very long if they find your sound to be uncomfortable, irritating monotonous, or difficult to follow. If you are a public speaker, you should get control of these issues also.
Category One: incorrect pronunciations
of "r", which are often transferred from one's first language.
Category Two: mispronunciations of the TH-sounds; often these are replacements by the closest sound you have in your first language.
Category Three: neighboring-vowel mispronunciations, for example, clear differentiation between the different vowel sounds in "fool", "fuel", "foot", "food","full", "foal", and "fought".
Category Four: misuse, or lack of use of weakened and contracted forms of speech. Skill is this area will not only make you more accessible as an English speaker, but will also give you surprising insights into the reasons why you can't understand American speakers in informal settings.
Category Five: lack of phrasal intonation. Americans don't listen to individual words or speak word-by-word. They speak in, and listen to, idea groups, and your intonation is like a series of sign-posts that give them auditory direction. Without the appropriate intonation, your listeners will quickly "fade away", since they will only be hearing to discrete words, one by one, which they must then "restring", like pearls scattered on a table, in order to understand what the over-arching "design" was meant to be.
Category Six: lack of understanding in the uses of tonic pitch in English. Speakers of tonal languages, like Chinese, often mistakenly believe that English does not have different tones; in fact it has a wide range of tone, pitch and tonal changes. Unlike tonal languages, however, tone is not used to change the definition of the word, but informs the listener of the speaker's attitude toward their topic, emphasizes grammatical contrastive structures, cues the listener to the speaker's conversational direction, and gives social and cultural signals.
Category Seven: using the sound resonance and mouth muscularity methods specific to your first language, rather than English
Category Eight: using the rhythm and melody patterns of your first language, rather than English.