The Center for Confident American English Communication

I always tell my accent reduction coaching clients that they must listen to American English if they want to improve their accents. Focused listening is a key part of accent improvement! One way to listen is to use the Voice of America’s Special English Broadcast. One of my clients from Madagascar uses the VOA all

Read more →

Chinese speakers of English often have difficulty pronouncing the /ng/ sound in words such as:  sing, wrong, evening, & going.  Many Chinese speakers substitute the /n/ sound for the /ng/ sound. The /ng/ sound is a voiced, nasal sound. To articulate this sound you must raise the back of your tongue to the soft palate

Read more →

Many of my accent reduction coaching clients mispronounce the word focus. Mispronunciation of this word can cause some embarrassing problems! This error is frequently made by Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian speakers. Here’s a tip. The O in the word focus must be pronounced with an /oʊ/ sound. This is also transcribed as /ow/. It’s

Read more →

Over the years I have found that many of my clients’ pronunciation problems occur because of spelling. What? It’s true. The reason is this- in American English there is not a one-on-one relationship between letters in the alphabet and spoken sounds. Think about it…do you find yourself wondering why… the letter S often soundz like

Read more →

Over the weekend, I was working on vowel sounds with one of my accent reduction coaching clients. We were working on the difference between the /iy/ sound in the word leave and the /I/ sound in the word live. My student, a manager at an international company, said “but Susan, I can’t even hear the

Read more →

Many non-native English speakers including Chinese, Vietnamese & Spanish speakers have a tendency to drop word final consonants such as the S in words such as: boys, washes and stops. Dropping word final sounds both contributes to your accent and creates grammatical errors that will confuse American listeners. Keep in mind that word final S

Read more →

This week someone sent me a question about the sounds of the letter A. In spoken American English  the letter A has a variety of sounds. The letter A can sound like /ae/ as in black The letter A can sound like /ey/ as in gray The letter A can sound like /ɑ/ as in

Read more →

Lots of people send me email messages asking me to explain some of the intonation patterns that we use in American English. In fact this is one of the most important things that I teach my clients in my accent reduction coaching course. Let me describe the most common type of intonation. The most common

Read more →

Here is a great story about the power of pronunciation and accent reduction classes- Foreign born scholars at the University of California at Berkeley may have PhD’s but they found that spoken American English is a very tricky subject. Before the class, few of the scholars knew what their specific English pronunciation problems were. They

Read more →

My name is Susan Ryan. I am the author of this blog and an American English pronunciation and accent reduction coach. I work with professionals from around the world to help them reduce their accents and speak American English with clarity and confidence. My one-on-one accent reduction coaching sessions are designed for people who want

Read more →