I work on American English pronunciation and accent reduction with Arabic speaking professionals from different parts of the world including Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. These professionals need to make the following adjustments in order to speak American English more clearly: 1. Slow down and speak using thought groups (phrases) and focus words 2. Learn
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Learning American English syllable stress patterns can be problematic if you don’t know the patterns. Here are two patterns that are fairly common: In words ending with the suffixes ion, ity, ic, ical, ian, ial, tion & ious we typically stress the FIRST syllable BEFORE the suffix. inVAsion fanTAStic fiNANcial GLORious In words ending with
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The Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary online has a great interactive component titled Perfect Pronunciation. This section has lots of American English pronunciation exercises that you can use to learn and practice your spoken American English. There are exercises on contrasting vowel sounds, syllable stress, homophones and sentence stress. There’s even a short exercise on the syllabic
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One tricky word that many of my accent reduction clients have trouble pronouncing is the word ‘machine’. The first syllable is reduced and the ‘a’ has a schwa vowel sound. The second syllable is stressed and the ‘i’ has an /iy/ sound as in ‘green’. Here it is in a sentence. Stressed syllables are capitalized-
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This week I am writing about why you have an accent when you speak English. Yesterday I wrote about syllable stress and intonation. Today I will talk about the importance of lengthening certain vowel sounds. When you are speaking English you must lengthen the vowel sounds that occur in stressed syllables. You must also lengthen
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Many highly educated international professionals read and write English extremely well. However, when they speak English they have an accent that causes communication problems. There are a number of factors that contribute to accented speech. In my posts over the next few days I am going to describe five factors that may be causing you
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If you find that people don’t always understand you when you are speaking, try to slow down a bit. Here are two things you can do to help you slow down fast speech. 1. Learn to use content and focus words Native English speakers emphasize the content and focus words in each sentence or phrase.
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This week I’ve had many visits from Chinese speakers who are trying to improve their English pronunciation skills. There are many techniques one can use but with so many aspects of pronunciation to learn, what is the best place to start? Learning to use syllable stress is one of the most effective techniques that Chinese
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Most of my clients from India have advanced degrees in science, IT and engineering. They read and write English perfectly. Since they were educated in English their reading, writing and vocabulary indicate a high level of success. Unfortunately their spoken English is often not comprehensible to American English speakers. Here are 3 common American English
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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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