The Center for Confident American English Communication

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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Like the past tense “ed”, the plural and possessive “s”  has three different sounds in spoken English. These are: /ez/ as in the wordz churches & marshes /s/ as in the wordz cats & stops /z/ as in the wordz loves & hugs In order to improve your American English pronunciation you must learn the

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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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Here are a couple of tips for French speakers who want to improve their American English pronunciation. 1. Pronounce S at the end of English words. Word final s is always pronounced in English. Word final S often has a /z/ sound as in the words: boys, girls & dogs. The S may also have a

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Here are two American English consonant sounds that are problematic for Korean speakers. The first is the /f/ sound. This sound does not occur in Korean. Korean speakers often pronounce the /f/ sound as a /p/ sound . That means that the word stuff sounds like stop, the word coffee sounds like copy and the

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The sounds of the letters S & Z are often confusing for students of American English pronunciation. Here are a few tips for pronouncing these sounds correctly. Tongue position The /s/ and /z/ sounds are made with the same tongue position. The tip of the tongue is behind your upper gum ridge. The tongue is

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