The Center for Confident American English Communication

When it comes to American English pronunciation, one common problem is the letter A. Why is the letter A so problematic? Well…. When you are speaking American English, the letter A has three sounds; /ae/ as in black, /ey/ as in  grey and /ə/ as in mustard. In my work teaching the American accent to international

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Here is an accent reduction tip for Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese speakers. American English has about 15 vowel sounds. These 15  sounds include several pairs of vowels which are pronounced with your lips and tongue in approximately the same position, but where one vowel sound is considered “tense” and the other is “lax”. For tense

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The Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary online has a great interactive component titled Perfect Pronunciation. This section has lots of American English pronunciation exercises that you can use to learn and practice your spoken American English. There are exercises on contrasting vowel sounds, syllable stress, homophones and sentence stress. There’s even a short exercise on the syllabic

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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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Do you get confused about how to pronounce the O in American English? You are certainly not alone. In Lisa Mosjin’s book, Mastering the American Accent, she has an entire section dedicated to the “problematic o”. I believe that the O has five or more different sounds in spoken English. Here are a few examples:

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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

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American English has about 15 different vowel sounds. Some of these vowel sounds are particularly difficult for Koreans to pronounce. These include the /iy/ sound and the /ae/ sound. Koreans often pronounce /I/ vowel sound as in the words sit, still, & live more like the /iy/ vowel sounds in the words seat, steal &

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I work with many Spanish speakers in my accent reduction coaching course. A common word that they have trouble pronouncing is the word problem. The reason is this. The O in the the word problem does not sound like the O as in no or go. This O sounds like the A in the word

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The Roman alphabet has five letters that represent vowels;  a, e, i, o, & u, but in spoken American English there are approximately 15 vowel sounds. Linguists and many pronunciation teachers use phonetic symbols to represent these 15 sounds. Dictionaries and pronunciation books do not all use the same phonetic symbols. However, each will have a symbol key

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The schwa + r sound /ɚ/ is frequently a confusing feature of American English pronunciation. In many situations when a vowel is followed by an /r/, only the /r/ sound is heard. The vowel sound isn’t really heard at all! This is called the schwa + r /ɚ/. The letter combinations or, er, ur &

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