❓ As a non-native speaker – is your pronunciation really up to scratch?

Today I wanted to tell you a little story about a case where a tiny mistake made a big impression.

Johannes, who works with singing bowls was giving a presentation. Telling everyone in the audience about the wonders his singing bowls could achieve in relaxing you and bringing your body peace.

The only problem was that there was a tiny mistake in his pronunciation of the “singing bowls”. They had become “singing balls”.
And as many of you will be aware “balls” is not only a colloquialism (not to be used in all situations) for “rubbish”, i.e. statement: “Your cousin won’t like that” answer: “Balls, he’ll love it”, but also a nickname for a man’s private parts.

So when Johannes started to talk about his “singing balls”, the audience collapsed laughing. Unfortunately, the only one not laughing was Johannes – he had no idea what the audience was laughing about.

You see it was simple a question of pronouncing the word in two syllables, i.e. bo wls or in phonemics “bəʊl”. Ball has just one sound and although we don’t really realise it sometimes, bowl has two.

The message behind this little story is that if you are presenting (as a non-native speaker) to an international audience or – even worse – an English audience, it is important to get it right. Your reputation depends on it.
So if you want your audience to be able to concentrate on the contents and not on your accent, take time to work on your delivery and accent.

If you need help and seriously wish to work on your pronunciation or delivery, please contact us.