How to improve your pronunciation in another language
The one skill you cannot correct on your own, why people mishear you even when you know the word, and how to practise aloud with real feedback.
With grammar you can check whether you got it right. With vocabulary too. With pronunciation you cannot: you hear yourself from the inside, not the outside, and your brain quietly corrects what it already believes it knows. That is how you can repeat a sound wrongly a thousand times and sound perfect in your own head.
It is the most neglected skill and the most noticeable one. A text with a case ending wrong still reads fine; a vowel in the wrong place makes the person in front of you ask again.
Why people mishear you even when you know the word
It is rarely about having an accent. It is about sounds your own language does not distinguish. If your mother tongue treats two sounds as one, your ear hears one — and what you cannot tell apart when listening, you cannot produce when speaking. The problem is not your mouth. It is your ear.
- Spanish speakers learning German tend to merge u and ü, and to shorten the long vowels that change meaning in German.
- In English, the tense/lax vowel contrast — *sheep* versus *ship* — collapses if your language has five vowels.
- In Russian, mobile stress reshapes unstressed vowels: the right syllable with the stress elsewhere sounds like a different word.
- In French, nasal vowels and the uvular r have no equivalent and get replaced by the nearest sound, which is not always understood.
The practical consequence: repetition alone is not enough. You need someone — or something — to tell you which specific sound came out different from what you intended.
How to practise aloud so that it counts
- Listen first. Hear the model before attempting it. Reproducing a sound you have not properly heard is practising the mistake.
- Practise sentences, not isolated words. Rhythm and linking carry half of intelligibility, and neither shows up in a single word.
- Record yourself and listen back. It is uncomfortable and it is the highest-yield step: outside your head, sounds are what they are.
- Work on one sound at a time. Fixing five things at once fixes none of them.
- Come back to the same text days later. Pronunciation consolidates through spacing exactly like vocabulary does.
What Lehrito does when you read aloud
You pick a word from your vocabulary and an example sentence at your level, or write your own text. You listen to the model, read it aloud, and get back:
- Accuracy
- How close what was understood is to what you meant to say.
- Fluency
- Rhythm and continuity, not just individually correct sounds.
- Completeness
- What fell off along the way: swallowed endings, words that never arrived.
- Sounds to work on
- Each divergence, with what was expected, what was heard and the phonetic transcription where it applies, plus an explanation and what to do about it.
If you want something lighter, there is a pronunciation game that only checks whether you were understood, with no scores or analysis.
FAQ
- Is my voice stored on a server?
- No. Speech recognition happens in your browser and only text reaches our servers: the sentence you were reading and what the browser understood. The recording never leaves your device.
- Does it work in any browser?
- Recording needs Chrome or Edge. Safari and Firefox do not provide the speech recognition this uses; there you can listen to the correct pronunciation but not receive an analysis.
- Which languages can I practise?
- German, English, Spanish, French and Russian, and you can get the explanations in whichever of those five you prefer.
- How much practice before I notice a change?
- Short and frequent beats long and occasional. Five minutes a day on one or two specific sounds shows within weeks; an hour on Sunday does not.