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Learner's Club

How to Say What's Important

Sometimes you need to say how important things are to you. These are all common ways of telling someone what your priorities are.

In a job interview
"The most important thing for me is that the job is challenging."
"What's really important to me is being able to learn something new."

"The most crucial thing for me is to be valued by my colleagues."
"The most vital thing is knowing that I am doing a good job."

"What really motivates me is learning about new ways of doing something."
"I'm extremely interested in learning more about the market."

"In terms of priorities, I am most interested in getting results. In addition, I would like to develop my marketing skills."
"As far as my priorities go, getting results is the most important."

"At the top of my list of priorities is feeling appreciated."
"The least important thing is salary."
Better English speaking skills

Improving your English speaking skills will help you communicate more easily and effectively. But how do you become a more confident English speaker?

Practise where you can, when you can. Any practice is good - whether you speak to someone who is a native English speaker or not.

It's important to build your confidence. If possible, use simple English sentence structure that you know is correct, so that you can concentrate on getting your message across.

Try to experiment with the English you know. Use words and phrases you know in new situations. Native English speakers are more likely to correct you if you use the wrong word than if you use the wrong grammar. Experimenting with vocabulary is a really good way of getting feedback.

Try to respond to what people say to you. You can often get clues to what people think by looking at their body language. Respond to them in a natural way.

Try NOT to translate into and from your own language. This takes too much time and will make you more hesitant.

If you forget a word, do what native English speakers do all the time, and say things that 'fill' the conversation. This is better than keeping completely silent. Try using um, or er, if you forget the word.

Don't speak too fast! It's important to use a natural rhythm when speaking English, but if you speak too fast it will be difficult for people to understand you.

Try to relax when you speak - you'll find your mouth does most of the pronunciation work for you. When you speak English at normal speed, you'll discover that many of the pronunciation skills, such as linking between words, will happen automatically.

Remember, when speaking English…
Try to become less hesitant and more confident.
Don't be shy to speak - the more you do it, the more confident you'll become.

Remember to be polite - use "please" and "thank you" if you ask someone to do something for you.

Improving your pronunciation
Here are some tips to help you improve your pronunciation.

First of all, don't worry about not having a native-English accent. It's important to be able to speak clearly, so that people can understand you. However, it's almost impossible to sound exactly like a native English speaker if you are learning English as an adult in a non- English speaking country.

However, there are many things that you can do to improve your pronunciation and your speaking skills.

1. Listen to spoken English as often as possible.
Listen to how speakers pronounce various words and phrases and "model" your pronunciation on what you hear.

2. Learn the phonetic alphabet.
Use the phonetic alphabet page (at the beginning of most good dictionaries) as a guide to pronouncing new words.

3. Don't forget to learn the word stress of a new word.
Every English word has its own stress, or intonation. For example, the word "believe" has two syllables (be and lieve), but only the second syllable is stressed. We say be'lieve and not 'be lieve. Your dictionary will show the syllable stress by an apostrophe (') before the syllable to be stressed.

Word stress is important. In fact, it is more likely that someone misunderstands you because of wrong word stress than because of the wrong pronunciation of a sound.

4. Work out which sounds cause you most problems in English.
Depending on what your first language is, you may have problems with certain sounds. For example, French speakers have difficulties with "th"; speakers of Mandarin have difficulties with "r" or "l", and Arabic speakers have difficulties with "p" and "b".

5. Practise the sounds you find difficult.
A useful exercise is a "minimal pair" exercise. For example, if you have difficulty distinguishing between "p" and "b", try practising pairs of words which are the same except for the sound "p" and "b":

For example, "pair" and "bear"; "pond" and "bond"; "pie" and "buy" etc.

6. Be aware of intonation and sentence stress.
Not all words in a sentence have equal stress, and generally only the "information" words (nouns and verbs) are stressed.

'Where's the 'pen I 'gave you?
'Where's the 'red 'pen I 'gave you?
Where's the 'red and 'blue 'pen I 'gave you 'yesterday?

The unstressed words (such as "the", "I", "you" and "and") don't carry as much "weight" as the stressed words. They become much smaller in length, and are almost abbreviated. For example, "and" becomes "un".

Changing stress
Sentence stress isn't "fixed" like word stress. In fact, you can stress words that are normally unstressed in order to highlight different meanings.

For example:
I 'love you. (Love, rather than just like.)
'I love you. (With the stress on I to highlight that it's me rather than another person who loves you.)
I love 'you. (And nobody else.)

Intonation
There are a couple of easy to remember rules about intonation. Usually our voices go up at the end of the sentence to show a question, and down at the end to show a statement.

Intonation is also important in "tag questions":
You know him, don't you? (With rising intonation on "don't you?" to show it's a question)
You know him, don't you. (With falling intonation on "don't you" to show it's a statement you expect the other person to agree with.)

7. Learn to recognise spelling patterns.
For example, "tion" on the end of a word is pronounced "shun", while "sion" can be pronounced "zhun". There are often many ways to pronounce a particular spelling pattern, but it certainly helps to know what the variations are. For example, the pattern "ough" can be pronounced "uff" as in "enough" and "tough", or "or" as in "ought" and "bought" or "oh" as in "although" and "dough".

8. Don't rush.
If you speak too fast, the danger is that you could skip over some words, fail to pronounce them completely, or mix them up. If you speak too slowly, you might end up sounding unnatural. But it's better to speak slowly and clearly than too quickly.