8 tips to learn to speak clearly

Do vocal exercises

For greater effectiveness, such exercises should be done in front of a mirror.
You can start such exercises by yawning, this helps to relax the vocal cords. Then move your jaw left and right. Don’t forget to massage your throat with your fingers while humming a sound. After the exercises, you need to take a deep breath and exhale slowly, combining this with pronouncing the letters of the alphabet, until you feel the tension in your abdominal muscles. Next, hold your breath for 10-15 seconds and try to stretch out any sound until the volume of your voice completely decreases.

Control your breathing

After watching the performers on stage, you probably noticed the important role a person’s breathing plays. Knowing small simple tricks, you can learn the correct breathing technique, this will make your speech clearer and more beautiful.

The first method is to place one hand on your stomach and the other on your chest while breathing. Your task is to keep the hand on your chest motionless and the hand on your stomach moving. Diaphragmatic breathing (when you “breathe with your belly”) promotes full inhalation, which will make your voice more consonant;
The second way is to speak at a time when breathing is at its peak. After taking a proper deep breath, begin to speak, delving into the meaning of your words as much as possible. At the same time, breathe measuredly and slowly, this will allow your breathing to speak slowly and support speech.

Read aloud more

At first glance, such an exercise may seem banal and ineffective, but it is not so.
Reading aloud lets you control your pronunciation, volume, and pitch. The technique is one of the most effective for intelligibility and clarity of speech. Choose a good book or text.
Watch your posture, don't slouch, straighten your shoulders and control your posture while reading. Each of these components is important. Control your voice tone, reading speed and volume. If you do this exercise regularly, you will be able to speak confidently, clearly and slowly.

Speed

We all know that chattering is not nice, and it is definitely a bad habit. Rapid speech is difficult for listeners to perceive, and as a result, people simply stop listening to you due to the fact that they cannot focus on the material. It turns out that a conversation with you automatically becomes unproductive for the interlocutor. To prevent this from happening, you need to learn to slow down your speech rate and not forget about pauses between phrases. But you shouldn’t go to extremes and speak too slowly either. In this case, it will again become difficult to listen to you, your speech will become monotonous, and the listeners will simply begin to fall asleep. You need to learn how to competently maneuver between fast and slower tempos. Turn it down when you need to emphasize a word or phrase, and then speed up when the story becomes highly emotional or when you need to convey enthusiasm.

Tongue Twisters

Tongue twisters are one of the simple and effective ways to improve speech clarity. Start by saying simple tongue twisters, such as:

Merchandisers lied - samovar sampling was disrupted!;
De-ideologized, de-ideologized, and pre-ideologized;
He reported, but didn’t finish his report; I completed my report, and I did.

Then move on to more complex tongue twisters. For example:

The fast talker quickly said quickly, That you can’t quickly talk all the tongue twisters, but you can’t over-speak all the tongue twisters, But, having quickly spoken, he quickly said, That you can’t talk all the tongue twisters, but you can’t over-speak.

Once upon a time there lived three Chinese: Yak, Yak-tsedrak, Yak-tsedrak-tsedrak-tsedroni. Once upon a time there were three Chinese women: Tsypa, Tsypa-drypa, Tsypa-drypa-drympamponi. They all got married: Yak to Tsypa, Yak-tsedrak to Tsypa-drypa, Yak-tsedrac-tsedrac-tsedroni to Tsypa-drypa-drympamponi. And they had children. For Yak and Tsypa - Shah, for Yak-tsedrak with Tsypa-drypa - Shah-sharah, for Yak-tsedrak-tsedrak-tsedroni with Tsypa-drypa-drympamponi - Shah-sharah-sharah-shironi.

Your goal is to learn how to pronounce all sounds correctly and as clearly as possible, and not just scribble tongue twisters at a frantic pace. First, speak the tongue twister slowly, assessing the sound pronunciation, then gradually increase the tempo each time. When you achieve perfection in this technique, you can complicate the task. Before pronouncing the next tongue twister, put a few walnuts in your mouth.

Training speech clarity using improvised means

Many actors and artists use this simple life hack. For clearer, more beautiful and precise speech, they use... a simple champagne cork! You need to put the cork under your tongue and start speaking. Your mouth will have to work hard to fully pronounce each syllable clearly. Having a cork in your mouth will give your tongue the opportunity to stop stumbling on words that are difficult for you. If you experience increased salivation during the exercise, use a napkin.

Training using this method should not take much time, as this can lead to pain in the jaw.

Norms of speech development

Child 1 to 1.5 years old. At this age, children use individual words in conversation. By the age of one and a half years, the child composes simple sentences. For example, “give me some porridge” or “give me some water.” The child remembers the names of objects that surround him at home, as well as several basic verbs and adjectives.
Child from 1.5 years to 2 years. Toddlers' vocabulary is expanding rapidly. Shortened forms of words are gradually disappearing. Children's speech becomes coherent thanks to pronouns and adjectives. By the age of two, the child begins to use sentences of 3-4 words. The more we develop children’s speech at home, the more expressive and emotional it becomes.
Child from 2 years to 2.5 years. While studying the speech of your children, you can move on to simple poetry. At this age, kids remember quatrains well. Vocabulary increases due to the rapid acquisition of new phrases and expressions. Questions appear in coherent speech. The number of words in sentences increases due to conjunctions and prepositions. The child begins to communicate not only with parents, but with peers.
Child from 2.5 years to 3 years. Children begin to understand the meaning of speech well. They can delve into stories about future and past time. The more often we develop children’s speech at home at this age, the faster their vocabulary increases. Parents become a source of information. Children can be assigned tasks that involve several activities. If we develop speech correctly, then numerals and cases appear in it.
Child from 3 to 4 years old. Sound pronunciation improves. The child can talk about himself and correctly uses comparative adjectives, verb tenses and gender. Children are given generalizations (furniture, people, etc.). Vocabulary includes not only objects available at home, but also abstract concepts, phenomena and evaluations. At this age, we develop speech with the help of books and poems. Children like to reread the same thing several times, since familiar information is absorbed better. The child is able to memorize prose and poetry verbatim. However, retelling is difficult.
Child from 4 to 5 years old. Children's vocabulary is rapidly growing due to adverbs. The child becomes interested in independently analyzing words, transferring their formation to others. Although it doesn’t always turn out correctly (“cuter is cuter”, “bright is brighter”). By the age of five, a child can use the plural fluently. However, when encountering unfamiliar words, children may have problems (“cucumber – cucumbers – cucumbers”). The child’s coherent speech is not yet sufficiently developed. When retelling events, inconsistency is acceptable. At this age, it is necessary to develop the child’s speech, working on the sound pronunciation of sonorant and hissing sounds.
Child from 5 to 6 years old. At this age, correct coherent speech is actively developing. Children are able to compose stories based on visual material, retell stories in compliance with tenses and logical chains. Inner speech is formed, so children have the ability to plan their actions. Gross grammatical errors disappear. You will no longer hear from your child: “I’ll go to the store yesterday.” Sound pronunciation and sound analysis are normalized. The child’s speech becomes more expressive, accompanied by changes in intonation and volume.
Child from 6 to 7 years old. Children fully master coherent speech. Sounds are pronounced correctly, temporal and logical sequences are observed. Errors occur only in complex sentences.
Child from 7 to 8 years old. Stable and figurative expressions are added to coherent speech. The kid is able to read a poem with an expression, as well as explain its meaning. A child at the age of 8 begins to actively master reading and writing. By this age, he has developed all the skills necessary for studying at school. As a rule, at this stage, adults do not have the question of how to develop a child’s speech.

If a child does not have developed speech for his age group, then specialist help may be required. It is better to contact a speech therapist or preschool teacher. It is also necessary to develop the baby’s speech at home.

Smiling and public speaking

If information is presented to a person in a friendly tone, the speech becomes pleasant, inspires confidence and is better perceived.
Be sincere in your emotions, this will help change your speech for the better. The key to success as a speaker mainly depends on the ability to win over the audience. When speaking in public, most people feel very nervous. If you manage to pull yourself together and understand that you are in a hurry and worried, calm yourself down and try to speak more slowly. Breathe correctly, this will help you analyze your speech and be calm.

Remember that it is important for people to hear and listen to what you have to say.

Watch your intonation and pronounce each word with pauses. This will allow people to hear and understand you. Write several sentences on a piece of paper and underline the last letter of each word. When reading the text, focus on these letters, after taking a short pause.

The Greek thinker Demosthenes, to combat stuttering, spoke with a mouth full of pebbles. You can also practice with something more edible. Be careful not to choke.

When speaking in public, it helps a lot to think carefully about all the words before pronouncing them and get unnecessary thoughts out of your head.

Height

Oddly enough, the pitch of your voice makes an impression on your listeners. If you speak in a choppy, high-pitched voice, the audience is 100% likely to think that you are nervous. Moderate timbre is considered the most convincing. Too low is considered dominant and tends to persuade and motivate. If you change the pitch of your voice on purpose, it will be perceived as unnatural, but control will not hurt. Practice to keep your tone soft and balanced.

A few more little lifehacks for speech

Drink more water. The human vocal cords are like a machine that needs lubrication. Before starting speech lessons, rinse your mouth with warm boiled water, adding a small pinch of salt to it. This will help the ligaments become more flexible and relieve tension in the throat.
Swallow any saliva that has accumulated in your mouth in a timely manner. Due to excess accumulated saliva, the pronunciation of the letters “k” and “s” is distorted, and words or parts of them are swallowed. Swallowing your saliva cleanses your mouth and also gives you time to pause and breathe again. Do not do this in the middle of a word or sentence; it is better to swallow your saliva after you have finished expressing your thought.
Don't speak with clenched teeth. When you clench your jaw tightly, you are very tense, which can cause stress. At this time, you will not be able to open your mouth wide to pronounce words clearly and distinctly. If you notice that your teeth are already clenched, slowly take a deep breath, puffing out your cheeks, as if air is deflating from a balloon.
Don't avoid difficult words; on the contrary, say them as often as possible. If you have difficult-to-pronounce words in your vocabulary, you are constantly in a hurry, trying to pronounce them faster, such attempts usually end in unclear and slurred pronunciation. Practice saying these words often until you develop muscle memory of how to sound them correctly.

Emancipation

The main enemy of diction is not speech defects, as is commonly believed. Even a person with perfect speech can instantly lose all its advantages, begin to “mumble”, draw out words, stutter, stammer, “chew” endings and do everything so that the interlocutor does not understand him. This happens, of course, not out of good will, but for purely psychological reasons. It’s not a fact that this will happen to you, just don’t delude yourself into thinking that the whole range of problems can be solved with one tongue twister.

Simply being able to speak quickly and clearly may not be enough. The hardest thing is to learn not to lose the skill under any circumstances.

The culprit behind slurred speech is called “excess tension.” To understand what this is, do an experiment right now: try to strain your neck muscles to the limit. Happened? Now list all the muscle groups that have tensed along with the neck ones. Face, shoulders, arms, chest? But the task was to strain only the neck.

The same thing can happen when you are nervous: tension constrains your speech apparatus, it becomes difficult to speak, your voice sounds muffled, and your throat becomes dry. The only thing that will help with this is the practice of relaxation, which can be used situationally and as a daily exercise. There are many variations of this practice, you can come up with your own. One thing remains unchanged: you need to relax your whole body as much as possible and consciously control the relaxation process in the smallest detail.