The Center for Confident American English Communication

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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This week one of my accent reduction clients asked me to explain the difference between the vowel sounds in the words want & won’t. Here is my answer: The ‘a’ in want has an /ɑ/ sound. This is the same vowel sound in the word father. The ‘o’ in the won’t has an /ow/ sound.

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When you are speaking American English, there are many consonants  that don’t always sound like you expect them to. Here is an example. When a word that ends with an /s/ or /z/ sound is followed by a word that starts with a /y/ sound the linked blended sound is a /sh/. Examples include: that’s

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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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Do you ever feel like the English spelling system does not match the sounds of spoken American English? It seems that way doesn’t it? English spelling is the way that words are written using the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. Since English is not a phonetic language there is not always a one-on-one relationship

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The vowel O has many sounds in American English. It can be confusing to know the correct pronunciation of this vowel. I can think of five different pronunciations for the vowel O, but there could be even more. Here are my five examples: 1. In these words the O is pronounced as a schwa sound

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Lots of my students have asked me what the best online dictionary is for learning to pronounce American English words. I like to use http://dictionary.reference.com/ because they show both the spelled pronunciation and the IPA spelling. The audio is not terrific though. The Merriam-Webster ESL Learner’s Dictionary has a great section called Pronunciation Exercises that

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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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I found a great vowel chart from the University of Texas. This chart shows where each of the 11 simple American English vowel sounds are articulated in your mouth. The website has audio so you can listen to each sound. You can use the chart as a guide as you pronounce the words below. When you

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Every language has vowel sounds. Some languages have as few as three vowel sounds and some languages have more than 20 vowel sounds. The English alphabet has five vowels, a, e, i, o, and u, but these vowels make 14 (or more) spoken sounds in American English. The variety of sounds is very complex and

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