Tagged: consonant clusters
Donald Tram
‘Trump’ is a little bit tricky for Indonesians for two reasons:
- It contains the phoneme /ʌ/, which is extremely rare in Bahasa Indonesia.
- It ends with a ‘consonant cluster’ (/mp/) – also rare in Bahasa Indonesia.
Indonesians will use sounds that are close enough for the sake of communication, and when they say ‘Donald Tram’, we know they mean ‘Donald Trump’. But if you’re taking IELTS you can easily score points for pronunciation by producing the correct sounds:
/trʌmp/
The phoneme /ʌ/ is very common in spoken English: up, under, mother, thorough, etc.
Finding spoken examples of ‘Trump’ should be easy – just switch on CNN! (And remember to switch on your ears, too!)
BTW in British English, ‘trump’ is a slang word for ‘fart’! 🙂
Pronunciation by George
Indonesians hate to add ‘s’ to plurals, possessives and third person verbs. In Bahasa Indonesia these grammatical features are produced in other ways.
It’s also extremely unusual in Bahasa Indonesia to see two or more consonants together, which is often what happens when you add ‘s’ to the end of a word:
- Mike’s (possessive, 2 consonants together)
- expands (third person, 3 consonants together)
- texts (plural, 4 consonants together!)
Pronouncing this final ‘s’ is difficult for Indonesians and for some reason embarrassing, rather like when English people attempt to pronounce the French ‘r’.
But if you want to communicate well, and if you want a good score for pronunciation in IELTS speaking, then you had better start producing the ‘s’ at word endings!
In this video, former student George does his best to put ‘s’ in all the right places. I’ve added a scoring feature to help you follow his ‘performance’!
A good way to practice ‘s’ is to record yourself, and then listen back following a tapescript. Focus on the ‘s’ in particular. Exaggerate it. Make it longer and louder. In the IELTS test make sure the examiner can hear it!
guruEAP 