I just finished posting a four-part series on the culture of family bands in one region of Tennessee. The Minton family plays traditional music of the South–bluegrass, folk, gospel and Irish styles. On the way back to Indianapolis, I stopped at a store somewhere in the heart of Kentucky to take a break. I heard a woman speaking Russian on the store telephone.

“Hey,” I thought to myself, “I can’t understand a word that woman is saying. She’s either speaking Russian or Norwegian.” I’m not sure I can actually tell the difference between those two languages, but I have been wanting to include a sample of Russian in our lessons. So the woman caught my attention.

She finished the call, and I asked her where she was from.

“Right here in Kentucky,” she said. She said it in English that sounded just like the Russian she was speaking on the phone. She doesn’t speak anything but a regional Kentucky English.

Max and Max Spanish lessons include all kinds of angles to reveal the variety and beauty of language here and afar, to help people fall in love with language, any language.

Forget the speech recognition technology when you’re learning to pronounce. That technology allows you to see a wave-like picture of your voice as you speak. Don’t aim for the same voice picture of another person or even of yourself. You can say almost anything properly in ways that produce different voice pictures.

Here’s what works well:

Learn songs, rhymes and short statements. Play them aloud and let them play over and over in your mind. They will work their way down deep. You’ll find yourself singing or saying them repeatedly, getting better at the pronunciation all the time.

Repeat what you hear. Simply repeat words and statements that you hear. Some people can do this endlessly. Others become bored fairly quickly. Do what you can tolerate. Learning to pronounce right takes plenty of time.

Listen a lot. Let language hit you in the head continuously. It will find a happy spot in your brain. Allow plenty of time for that to happen.

At different points in time you will realize that you have not been making certain sounds correctly. You will need some tips, and sometimes you will need to see fluent speakers talking so that you can study their mouths, their tongues, their jaws–the speaking machine.

Don’t compare your progress with others. We’re all different in that way, and we all can master pronunciation. Don’t say, “I’m just not good with language.” Listen here, silly, humans are tailor-made for it. I like teaching pronunciation, because people of all ages enjoy trying to get it right when they are guided well.

A former boss of mine once showed off his Spanish to me: “Una cerveza, señorita” (One beer, ma’am). He was pretty proud of that. His pronunciation was lazy and bad, so I repeated the phrase so he could hear how Spanish sounds. His response was, “Oh, you’re being technical.”

Just yesterday a friend told me about a friend from the Philippines who stopped at an American gas station and asked for a mop. “No, we don’t sell mops here. Sorry,” the attendant said. The Filipina told him all gas stations sell mops. He again told her that his station does not. After a while, the attendant figured out that she was looking for a map, not a mop.

Little differences in pronunciation can convey big differences in meaning. It’s not a technicality; it’s about saying what you have to say so that others will understand. You don’t have to be perfect, but at least come sort of close to saying it right.