The Center for Confident American English Communication

Most non-native speakers of American English have problems articulating the two ‘th’ sounds that we use so frequently in spoken American English. Most of my clients including Spanish, Chinese and Indian language speakers pronounce the voiceless th as a /t/ sound and the voiced th as a /d/ sound. Since the ‘th’ sounds are used

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Spanish speakers frequently drop the consonant sounds at the ends of words. This can cause your speech to sound both accented and grammatically incorrect. If you are a  Spanish speaker, here is one technique you can use to reduce your accent. Words in Spanish do not typically end in a consonant clusters but English words

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Last week, I was working on vowel sound articulation with one of my accent reduction coaching students. We were working on the tense /iy/ sound in the words feet & leave and the lax /I/ sound in the words fit & live. My student, a project manager at an international communications company, said “but Susan,

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Linguistic research indicates that the most common sound in spoken English is the schwa vowel sound. The phonetic symbol for schwa is /ə/. The schwa sounds like “uh”. Now….. Why is the schwa sound so common? The schwa is the most common sound because native speakers use this sound to pronounce vowels in reduced syllables.

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Here is an accent reduction tip for Brazilian-Portuguese speakers who want to improve their spoken American English. Be careful when you pronounce the letter P! Brazilian-Portuguese speakers often pronounce the American English /p/ sound like a /b/ sound. This can be confusing to American listeners because when you do that because: pill sounds like bill pull

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In spoken American English the letter combination TH makes two different sounds. One of these sounds is voiced and the other is voiceless. The IPA symbol for the voiced th sound looks like this /ð/. The IPA symbol for the voiceless th sound looks like this /θ/. While both of these sounds cause problems for

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