Why don't they understand me when I speak English?

When we are starting in the practice and we speak to other people there may be times when they ask us to repeat what we have just said, maybe because they did not understand the word well or we do not use the correct sound, in this ocation I will share with you some tips to improve.

Make the right sounds

Because we must think in sounds, because while the English language has 26 letters in its alphabet, when it comes to speaking it, more than 40 sounds are used. Knowing the alphabet and knowing how to pronounce it is important, because when we write we must be careful as changing one letter for another can alter the meaning of the word, for example: blog = bad.

When we speak it

If we change one sound for another, we change the word we wanted to say causing problems in understanding others, for this reason we need to improve our pronunciation, instead of being fooled by the spelling of words, e.g.: Present(noun), present(adjective), present(verb).

Orthography as a guide

We already know that there are more sounds than letters and many of them do not have the same pronunciation, for that reason we have a phonetic writing system, which assigns a symbol or phoneme to each letter and can be found in some dictionaries and is used by linguists and singers.

The sound system

Each language has its own sound system, by learning them and combining them to create words, as well as helping us to avoid pronunciation errors, we will be able to recognize sounds of the language we speak and another language we learn, and in doing so we will have a significant improvement when communicating with others.