Does pronunciation really matter when speaking another language?

Does pronunciation really matter when you're speaking a different language? Many of you might be scared of saying the wrong thing, or pronouncing something slightly differently, or offensively by accident, when you're practising with a native speaker. You might feel reluctant to practise because you don't want to mess up your pronunciation.

The risk is that instead of practising with a native speaker and continuing the conversation, you're reluctant to even start, because you're scared of offending them or making a mistake. You want to wait until your pronunciation is perfect. You might not be completely conscious of it, but something in your mind is saying, "I'm a bit fearful of speaking with the native speaker, what if they judge me?" The fear can be subconscious a lot of the time.

While it's great to aim for better pronunciation, don't let it stop you practising just because you're scared of saying something slightly differently. Overall, the positives of making an effort and practising outweigh the chance of saying something a bit wrong and offending someone.

I'm James, I'm a native English speaker, and I help people reach a conversational level in a different language. Here are three reasons pronunciation isn't as important as you think.

1. With context, you're very understandable

Say you're talking about travelling and you want the word for plane. In different languages the sound of two words can be very similar, so you could say the wrong word by accident. If I said "I'm looking forward to travelling by plane next year on holiday" and instead I said "I look forward to travelling by shoe next year, and it's a very long flight", the words around the wrong word make it clear. You understand: ah, you don't mean shoe, you mean plane.

At that point, if you're both getting on and having a conversation, they'll care more about what you want to say and the flow of the conversation than about a wrong word. They'll think, "That's not quite right, but he means this, okay, continue." They're not likely to correct you. If they're nice, they might say at the end, "By the way, it's this word." They won't want to embarrass you. You'd probably be like that for other people too. If someone says something in your native language slightly mispronounced, you probably won't stop them mid-sentence and say "no, it's that".

It even applies in your native language. I'm from Manchester, more or less, and if I speak to someone from Liverpool they've got a different accent and sometimes a completely different word for the same thing. I have to work out what the word could mean, and the more they talk around it, the more I understand and learn the word from the context. That's what we do in other languages too. If we have a new word at the key of a topic and other surrounding words, we can guess what it means.

2. Even in our native language we don't pronounce everything correctly

I'm making an effort right now to improve my pronunciation so more people can understand me. But with friends and family I slur words, especially if I've had a drink. I'm surprised people who aren't native English speakers can still understand me, because I speak quite fast. That applies to every language. In our native tongue, when we know our friends can understand us, we put slightly less effort into making it clear.

There's also the fact that every region has a different dialect:

• If I'm English and studying Spanish, I could learn words according to a region. Spanish in Málaga is very different to Andalucía, more southern Spain, and that's very different to Colombia or Venezuela.
• I might think I've learned Spanish perfectly for Valencia, but in Andalucía I could hardly understand what they were saying. I can understand maybe 80% in Valencia, but in Andalucía it goes out the window, because they sometimes miss off the word endings. It's not a bad thing, it's just different.
• The same applies if you're not a native English speaker and you visit London, Manchester or Yorkshire.

If you're trying to reach 100% perfection in pronunciation for one region, you'd have to do the same for every region. Where do you stop? The answer is you accept you're not going to get perfect pronunciation for every region, and what you know so far is fine. As long as you can stay in the conversation and pronounce it as correctly as you can, the other person can guess what you mean from the context.

3. Offending someone by mispronouncing a word

This is quite a major point, because a lot of people have come to me and said they're scared of saying the wrong thing or offending someone by mispronouncing a word. You might mispronounce a word slightly so it turns out to be a vulgar word. But they can normally tell whether you want to be offensive by your body language and tone of voice. If you're looking at them dead in the eye and you sound like you want to cause them harm, they'll take it a different way. But most likely you want to communicate with people, make new connections and make new friends.

If you know a swear word in a language, you'll use it as banter with someone you get on with. The effort you're putting into learning someone else's language, they'll appreciate that massively, because it's not every day that someone speaks your language. If you mispronounce a word and say something vulgar, they might be a bit shocked, but they'll laugh and joke with you. That's the worst-case scenario.

If you're showing visible effort, getting your words out, smiling and your body language is positive, that outweighs any negative they might perceive from a mispronounced word. And if they're offended by the slightest thing despite you making an effort, they're probably not someone you want to be friends with anyway.

To summarise

Many people might be reluctant or scared of speaking with a native speaker, and one reason, subconsciously, might be that you don't want to make mistakes, look like an idiot, or offend someone. The benefit of keeping the conversation going outweighs any risk of saying the wrong thing, as long as you've got enough context around what you're saying. And given there are so many accents and ways of saying things around the world, you can't expect to be 100% perfect on every word of every dialect. It's not going to happen. Accept that your pronunciation will never be 100% perfect, but you'll still be understood, and you can still communicate with a wide range of people.