A student of BWOL came to me on QQ to ask about making improvement on pronunciation.

I promised to tell him more about this in this forum rather than individually over IM.

From my interaction with English users here in China, I can see that many of you make common mistakes by:-

1) Sounding out the consonant when it should just be a barely audible sound.
e.g. En glish becomes En ga lish

2) Mixing the Mandarin pinyin with English alphabets.
e.g. "N" is pronounced as "nun" when it should sound like "en"

I really have a headache everytime people from China are trying to spell out the email address to me. I just have to stop them and give them mine or tell them my QQ number instead.

The connector of an email address "@" is invariably pronounced as "ad" with a loud "d" almost like "da". It should be pronounced exactly like "at".

In short, my advice to those concerned about pronunciation to use their ears instead. Listen very carefully to native speaker English sounds to pick up the finer difference between sounds made by poor Chinese speakers of English.

Have your MP4 or tape recorder ready always to record your spoken English and listen back very carefully to pick up your weaknesses. Practicing it persistently, you will become an excellent English speaker before long.

Choose some articles which are easy to read to start off your practice journey. Then you pick up some tongue twisters to train yourself as you move on.

I hope we can all speak English which foreign friends can understand without any difficulty. Remember one thing. If you are very okay talking to Chinese English users, make sure you are not an advanced level Chinglish user in disguise.