The Voice of America website has some excellent stories that you can use to listen to American English. I especially like the series titled Words and Their Stories. This series has stories with idioms, phrasal verbs and stories that describe American culture. Keep this in mind though: the narrators who read the audio tend to
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A couple of people have emailed me this week to ask about American English Audio courses that they can buy and listen to in their car. While audio courses are not nearly as effective as accent reduction coaching (that’s because you don’t get the feedback that you need) they do provide opportunities for learning and
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The Color Vowel Chart is an excellent visual tool that you can use to learn or TEACH the 15 vowels sounds in North American English. The hard copies of the chart are really nice; colorful and laminated with color words and IPA symbols. There are teaching activities you can use on the back of the
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Back in 1999, linguistics professor Steven Weinberger at George Mason University created a cool tool called the Speech Accent Archive The archive contains 1,500 recordings of people from around the world reading the same paragraph in English. There are recordings of both native English speakers and non native English speakers along with their age, gender
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In American English we typically stress compound nouns on the first syllable. HOMEwork WEEKend AIRport PASSport PRINTout (noun) This is an easy rule to follow. Most of my accent reduction students are able to pronounce compound nouns correctly they learn the rule and get a bit of practice. One thing that they don’t always do
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One tricky aspect of American English is the correct use and pronunciation of phrasal verbs. In order to pronounce phrasal verbs correctly you need to employ both linking and syllable stress strategies. Examples of commonly used phrasal verbs include: break up take off turn it on work out Here is a great audio story on
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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
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Voice of America has a great online idiom dictionary that you can use to learn to pronounce and understand American Idioms. This dictionary even has dialogs that you can listen to. That means that you hear each idiom used by American English speakers in context. American Idiom Dictionary with Audio Listening to dialogs is a
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Many people have emailed me this week looking for some free American English conversations and dialogs. Here is a site that features thousands of words and phrases as well as many dialogs. The speakers speak rather slowly though. Don’t expect American English speakers to speak at this pace! Here is a link to the site-http://englishspeak.com/
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Here is a wonderful website that you can use to practice your American English spelling. The site allows you to type in words that you need to practice and creates activities and quizzes. The audio is very clear. It you are serious about improving your vocabulary you may want to check out Rocet Vocabulary. This
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