During the past couple of months I’ve had the opportunity to do American accent training with a couple of German speakers. This has been a real pleasure for me because these clients have been so dedicated and hardworking both inside and outside of our sessions. Typical problems that Germans have when speaking American English include
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I buy a lot of American English pronunciation and accent reduction books because I like to have a variety of interesting materials to use with my students and clients. Last week a couple of people asked me if I used the book titled Speak Business English Like an American. I did not have a copy
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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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Two of the American English vowel sounds that non-native speakers frequently mispronounce are the /iy/ sound in the word sheep and the /I/ sound in the word ship. When non-native speakers (especially Spanish & Portuguese speakers) say the word cheap, it often sounds like chip. When they say the word seat, it sounds like sit.
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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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When you are speaking American English it is very important for you to use syllable stress correctly. One reason is because English has many heteronyms. Heteronyms are two words that are spelled identically. The way the words are pronounced determines their meaning. One good example of this is the word: ADDRESS. When you say the
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Linguistic research indicates that the most common sound in spoken English is the schwa vowel sound. This is because native English speakers pronounce the vowels in most reduced syllables with the schwa sound. The phonetic symbol for schwa is /ə/. Here is an example. When I say my name, Susan, the first syllable is stressed so
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Continuing on my theme of American English vowels I’m going to write briefly on the pronunciation of the vowel combination ou. This vowel combination can be pronounced 3 ways in American English. Here are some examples. ou can be pronounced like /oʊ/ shoulder soul though doughnut although ou can be pronounced like schwa /ə/ cousin
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On her blog this week Lisa Mosjin, author of Mastering the American Accent writes about the pronunciation of the words months and clothes. These words contain the difficult consonant cluster th+s. She says that you should always pronounce the th + s as in words like strengths and Smiths. In order to do this you must
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