Suggestions for Students: Understand the Mechanics of Your Mouth

The mouth is a very complicated and brilliantly designed machine used for many purposes: breathing, chewing, swallowing, coughing, kissing, and communicating, just to name a few.

When the mouth is used to articulate speech several muscles are used at one time and those muscles are trained over 6-8 years to make precise phonetic sounds in a person's first language.  When we learn other languages often times (depending on the language), we must retrain our articulators (see image below) to pronounce new sounds.

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When I learned Spanish, this was a very mild issue for me being an English speaker.  Spanish only has a couple phonemes that are not in English, and places of articulation change very mildly.  However, now that I am learning French, my mouth is facing a new articulation challenge.  I will touch on this more in the next couple of days as I compare French phonemic vowels to those of other languages.