This week I received many questions about the schwa vowel sound. Let me explain a few things about this KEY English vowel sound. In spoken American English the schwa (see the image above right) is the relaxed vowel sound that is frequently used for vowel sounds in unstressed syllables. The schwa sound is made with
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Most people don’t realize that vowels that occur before the letter R have a unique pronunciation. In order to pronounce these correctly, it’s important that you insert a schwa vowel sound before the /r/ sound. This will give your vowel sound enough length and it will make your R sound very clear. This site on
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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
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Good listening skills are one of the first steps to changing your accent! One key step in improving your accent is learning to notice American English speech sounds and patterns. For example: I typically find that my accent reduction clients are not aware of the schwa vowel sound. This is the reduced vowel sound found
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The Merriam-Webster English Learner’s Dictionary has a excellent section called Perfect Pronunciation. You can use the exercises in Perfect Pronunciation to practice difficult vowel sounds and consonant sounds. You can also use it to practice syllable stress and sentence stress. Merriam-Webster’s Perfect Pronunciation Related posts The Best Online Dictionary for American English Pronunciation (0) Why
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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
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This is Part 3 of a series of posts that describe why you have an accent when you speak American English. In the past two posts I wrote about syllable stress and the duration of vowel sounds. Today I will write about voiced and voiceless consonant sounds. Using voiceless consonant sounds instead of voiced consonant
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This week I am writing about why you have an accent when you speak English. Yesterday I wrote about syllable stress and intonation. Today I will talk about the importance of lengthening certain vowel sounds. When you are speaking English you must lengthen the vowel sounds that occur in stressed syllables. You must also lengthen
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Many highly educated international professionals read and write English extremely well. However, when they speak English they have an accent that causes communication problems. There are a number of factors that contribute to accented speech. In my posts over the next few days I am going to describe five factors that may be causing you
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It’s been awhile since I mentioned the Kelly brothers’ fantastic website for learning English called manythings.org. The site contains many audio lessons on English vocabulary, pronunciation, idioms and grammar. There are also some short video lessons here. Here is a link to the online pronunciation activities. These are great and free. Enjoy! Related posts Pronunciation
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