Why do people keep asking you to repeat yourself in English?

It’s not your vocabulary. It’s not your grammar. Something else is creating friction - and no one’s telling you what it is.

The south coast of England - home to white cliffs, clear skies and the accent behind Pronunciation with Ellie.

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Listen to this article · 3:24IPA (発音記号)

You know the moment. You've said something perfectly clearly - or so you thought - and the person you're speaking to pauses: "Sorry, could you say that again?"

Your vocabulary was fine. Your grammar was correct. But something about how you said it made your listener work harder than they expected.

If this keeps happening in professional settings - meetings, presentations, interviews - there's a reason.

The problem no one prepared you for

Your English is strong. You've studied for years, probably scored well on tests, maybe lived abroad. But in high-stakes moments, something doesn't land.

Here's what makes it worse: no one tells you what's wrong. You're too advanced for generic corrections. English-speaking friends are impressed by your abilities and certainly won't nitpick your pronunciation.

Also: pronunciation gets very little time in Japanese schools, and English teachers can qualify without ever studying phonetics.¹

So you're left with a gap no one gave you the tools to close.

Sometimes the friction is obvious - someone asks you to repeat yourself. But often it's silent. No one says anything, and you're left wondering.

As Yui, one of my students, put it: "I didn't really know which specific sounds I was mispronouncing."

That uncertainty can be challenging - especially when your professional credibility depends on being heard clearly.

This isn't about sounding British or American. It's not about "correct" pronunciation in some abstract sense.

It's about whether your listener can follow you without effort.

When your pronunciation is clear, their attention stays on your ideas. When it's unclear - even slightly - some of their mental energy goes into decoding what you've said.² In a meeting or interview, that's attention pulled away from the point you're making.

The goal isn't perfection. It's clarity - zero cognitive load for your listener.

This is solvable

The patterns causing friction are specific, diagnosable and fixable.

Here's an example. Put your hand on the front of your throat and say "ice" - notice the hissing "sss" at the end. Now say "eyes" - feel the buzzing "zzz". Your mouth position is the same (try a broad smile for both) but, when you say the "s" in "eyes", your throat vibrates. That vibration is called voicing - and mixing up voiced and unvoiced sounds is one of the most common reasons listeners have to do extra work to understand you.

This is the kind of small, physical detail that changes everything once you know which sound belongs in which word.

After working with me, Yui had an interview with a native English speaker. At the end, the interviewer asked her: "Why is your English so clear? Did you spend a long time in the UK?"

She hadn't. She'd simply learned to hear what was happening in her own speech - and changed it.

Over to you

Does this feel familiar - the frustration of being asked to repeat yourself, or the uncertainty of not knowing whether you've been fully understood? Let me know in the comments below.

Next steps

If you'd like to know what in your own speech is making your listener work harder, my Written Diagnostic Report is the place to start. You send me two short recordings, and I write up the three patterns creating the most friction - and what to work on first.

And if you'd like the next article, you can sign up below.

1. Asuka Yoneyama, interviewed by Norihiko Sasaki, PIVOT (YouTube), 2024 (title translated: "The science of English pronunciation"), youtube.com/watch?v=2nU7_1lDwqk. ↩
2. Derwing, T. M. & Munro, M. J. (2009). Putting accent in its place: Rethinking obstacles to communication. Language Teaching, 42(4), 476-490. doi:10.1017/S026144480800551X. ↩

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