Name: Letting Go of Inhibitions┃Learn American English Pronunciation On the Go
Uploaded: 2025-07-20T19:22:34.000Z
Duration: 29 min 7 s
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Present continuous

In today's episode, I'm sitting down with my husband, David, and we're discussing a conversation we had when we were in Italy.

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Now, when we went to Italy, we didn't study much Italian, and so communication was a challenge, but we were able to pick up some phrases and we did do a little bit of studying.

And in this conversation, we're talking about how much more there is to do when learning a language than just learning from a book.

We're talking a lot about how you can personally engage with the language and the culture and the people and the personalities around you.

And these kinds of things, I think, are really underrated when someone is learning a new language.

People tend to focus so much on book knowledge, and that's really just part of the story.

If you need help understanding what's being said here, you can always get a free copy of the transcript for any of the podcasts.

Please go to rachelsenglish.com slash podcast and search for this episode.

Thanks David for being here and sharing your thoughts about this experience.

David and I were just saying this morning how it's been a week ago today we were flying home.

Does it seem like a week ago or does it seem further away to you?

I would say it seems a little bit further.

It's been such an awful week, really, of transitioning back and everybody's sleep schedule.

Yeah, no, it has been tough getting Stoney back on a normal sleep schedule.

But I think today, tonight, last night, he finally did it.

Yeah, fingers crossed.  Okay, so about speaking another language, actually one night you and I and Audrey and Leon, well, first I should say David's sister, Audrey, and her husband, Leon, came to stay with us in Italy for about nine days that we traveled together.

And one night we were sitting around talking about what it was like for us on that trip in that moment to be non-native speakers.

And in some cases to like, I'm not sure, I guess everybody knew at least a few phrases, but I mean, we were not just non-native speakers, like we speak almost no Italian.

So one night we were sitting around talking about this and I pulled out my phone and started recording it as a voice memo because I thought it was so interesting what was being said.

So at the beginning of this clip, I'm talking about students who I'm trying to get to embody the whole language and be more of a pure imitator rather than being themselves trying to figure out how to sound.

Do you understand the difference there, David?

Yeah, I mean, it came out in that conversation.

But yeah, this idea that if you, in a sense, can leave your whole self behind and just imitate another person, I feel like that's what we talked about that night for a little bit.

And so when it's, I think in a way when they're no longer feeling so much that it's them and they're like taking a parallel step that's a straight switch to another idea of someone else, then some of those inhibitions go away and the imitation becomes more accurate.

Because for a lot of people, imitating a native speaker feels very exaggerated.

I mean, Italian can feel very like there's no way that I would do it like that.

So here we're talking about how exaggerated it can feel to do anything that's sort of outside of your normal language feeling and normal language sounds.

And for us, Italian felt especially that way because Italian is such an expressive language.

And I think that culturally, the people are so expressive.

Would you say that that is a generally true statement compared to like the broader world?

Oh, I don't know if I would say broader world, I would say as compared to American English for sure.

I think that there are lots of other languages that are like that too.

But that in particular, when you set that beside American English, American English looks reserved and stiff compared to Italian.

And yet for someone who's coming from a different language, probably even Italian to English, anytime you're dealing with sounds and characteristics that are not your own, it feels awkward to the point where it feels exaggerated and maybe even sometimes clownish, like to go all the way there.

But it's so important that students try to let themselves go all the way there.

And that was one thing we were kind of feeling when we were there.

And this idea that maybe it's easier to let yourself go there if you sort of abandon yourself and kind of completely take on the persona, the character of someone that you're observing that's a native speaker.

If you're more playful and you just kind of enter into it more playfully, you don't take yourself so seriously.

And so maybe that's easier than in a way.

So, David, I'm so glad to hear you've been experimenting with that on this trip.

And I remember that from living in Dominican Republic.

You know, you do the first six weeks in the city and then six weeks on service.

And so on service, it was this sort of country accent, but it was when I was actually good enough at Spanish to, you know, even have a foundation to take on.

So David, here you're talking about when you were living abroad, how you started out living in the capital of Santo Domingo.

And then after six weeks of language study, you went out into the country and you were in a pretty rural area.

And you had been saying that the Spanish spoken in these two places or the Spanish that you learned in your formal Spanish class, and then the Spanish that was actually being spoken in the rural area, that those two Spanishes were quite different.

The character of the language, this thing that we're talking about.

And so I really I think I did that the second six weeks and I came back to the city and I had one night then at the host family in the city and I something happened and I made a comment.

You had picked up some phrases and a way of speaking that was different than how your host family in the city spoke.

And I think it was a common sort of curse word kind of a thing.

Like it was a it was maybe a little bit sort of edgy and, you know, yeah, a little bit of a little questionable whether or not you should be using it freely.

But it was also I think my accent and just the way that I said it made her say, oh, my God, this guy has turned into a country bumpkin.

Which we talk about later is actually a compliment because it's like, wow, you absorbed where you were so well.

Because I had, you know, the nuance, I had taken on the accent and the subtlety of the Spanish of folks that I had been spending 24-7.

Which is totally not what you've been studying.

You'd been studying textbook Spanish, perfect Spanish.

But then when you're there and you're embodying it, you take on the character and the feeling and the vocabulary and the lilt.

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Letting Go of Inhibitions┃Learn American English Pronunciation On the Go

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