The Center for Confident American English Communication

Here are two American English consonant sounds that are problematic for Korean speakers. The first is the /f/ sound. This sound does not occur in Korean. Korean speakers often pronounce the /f/ sound as a /p/ sound . That means that the word stuff sounds like stop, the word coffee sounds like copy and the

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The voiced th sound is one of the most problematic sounds for non-native English speakers to pronounce. To make the sound place your tongue slightly between your teeth. Vibrate your vocal chords as you push the air through your throat. While there are not that many words that have the voiced th sound, the words

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This week I found an excellent American English Pronunciation Audio Course on the web. In this audio course instructor Charles Becker teaches you American English vowel & consonant sounds, syllable stress & intonation as well as linking and connected speech. This is a very complete course and I advise you to check it out! You

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American spoken English frequently causes problems for English speakers in the Philippines. Specific pronunciation problems include the schwa vowel sound, and voiced and voiceless sounds such as the /s/ & /z/ sounds, the /p/ & /b/ sounds and the /f/ & /v/ sounds. Here is an article from the Manila Bulletin that explains more about

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Listen for all the different ways the th and the t are pronounced in this Thanksgiving video by Martha Stuart. Here is a checklist you can use to guide you as you watch and listen. Print or copy these words and mark each one when you hear it. Then watch and listen again several times

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Many of you already know about the great free pronunciation software from the University of Iowa. However, for those readers who are new to my blog, I’m going to post it again. This online software shows you how to pronounce all of the American English vowel and consonant sounds using audio and video. If you

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Many of my readers are from India and other countries in South Asia. These people read and write English extremely well. However the spoken English that they learned in school is not always comprehensible to American English listeners. Here are a couple of American English pronunciation problems frequently made by speakers of South Asian languages.

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When you are listening to American English speakers you may have noticed that when the letter “t” is in the middle of a word it often has a /d/ sound. Pronunciation teachers call this sound the flap or the tapped T because when we make this sound we slightly flap or tap our tongues behind

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In American English the /l/ is referred to as a “liquid” sound. That’s because when you articulate this sound the tip of your tongue touches the ridge behind your upper teeth and the air flows through the sides of your tongue. When /l/ comes after certain vowel sounds American English speakers will insert a schwa

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I receive lots of requests from students for IPA charts and information about the pronunciation of American English vowel and consonant sounds. Here is some basic information. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system that was developed to represent the sounds of spoken languages. The system uses characters from the Latin and Greek alphabets.

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