The Center for Confident American English Communication

If you are a Chinese speaker who is working to improve your American English pronunciation, you may have found that you’re having trouble with your /l/ & /n/ sounds. Don’t worry!! This is a very common problem & you can fix it. ✔ The /n/ & /l/ sounds are articulated in almost the same manner.

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Many people contact me to ask if it’s possible to eliminate their foreign accent. That’s a very good question! Can you totally eliminate your native accent and speak like an American born person? The answer is…. probably not. AND, it’s really not necessary! What you CAN do, if you get some training and work hard is modify your

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Many (most) of the people who come to me for accent reduction coaching mispronounce these words: worry courage world girl Do you know why?….. Notice that in each of these words the vowel occurs before an /r/. ☝ The /r/ conditions the sound of the vowel, causing it to sound like /ɝ/ as in the

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In my accent reduction coaching program I work with many Chinese professionals. Most of my Chinese speaking clients live in North America, but a few live in China. These professionals (who often work for multinational companies) are highly motivated to speak English more clearly in the workplace. One American sound that Chinese speakers often have

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One of the key skills that I teach my accent reduction coaching clients from Japan & China is how to articulate voiced &  voiceless consonants. Here is a brief description~ American English has 24 consonant sounds. 15 of these sounds are voiced & 9 are voiceless. Voiced sounds create a vibration in your vocal chords

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This week I am writing a series of posts that describe WHY you have an accent when you speak American English. Yesterday I wrote about syllable stress. You should read that post NOW if you missed it yesterday. Today I’ll talk about the importance of lengthening ⇒  certain vowel sounds. There are 2 rules I

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To start out the New Year, I’m going to write a series of 4 posts to answer the question: Why do I have an accent when I speak American English? There are a number of factors that contribute to accented speech. Over the next few days I’ll describe 5 factors that may be causing YOU

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Chinese students seeking to study in the United States often have the money and the reading & writing skills that they need. What they lack are good spoken English skills. University bound students need advanced linguistic skills that will enable them to participate in discussions and seminar-type settings.

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Many non-native English speakers sound “choppy” when they speak American English. That’s because (to the American ear) they speak word by word. This often happens when Italian, Chinese, Korean & Japanese speakers speak American English. When you speak English with a choppy, word by word rhythm it creates accented speech that is difficult for native

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In my accent reduction coaching program I work with many Indian English speakers whose “home languages” include Hindi, Telegu, Malayalam, Gujarati & Tamil. In the program I address the specific American English pronunciation problems of Indian language speakers. Course participants learn the following accent reduction techniques: How to stress vowels in syllables  so that Americans

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