Q: I have trouble pronouncing words that contain groups of consonants. Why is this and what can I do to change this?

A: American English has lots of consonant clusters, groups of 2 or 3 consonants that occur together with no vowels in between. Consonant clusters can occur at the beginning of words or at the end of words.

While triple consonant clusters are fairly common in American English, they are not present in other languages such as Spanish and Japanese.

Clusters with three consonants can be difficult even for native English speakers to pronounce. In order to make these easier to say, native speakers will sometimes delete one of the sounds. This happens most often when the consonant in the middle of a cluster is a /t/, /k/ or /th/ sound.

Here are a few examples:

• In the word tests many Americans delete the /t/and say tess.
• In the word tourists /t/ many Americans delete the /t/ and say touriss.
• In the word months many Americans delete the /h/ and say monts.
• In the word asked Americans delete the /k/ and say ast.
• In the word facts Americans delete the /t/ and say fax.

Listen to how native speakers say these and other words with consonant clusters. If you hear them delete a consonant, you can do that too.

Post Source:
Teaching Pronunciation: A Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages

Here are my favorite products for students:

1. Mastering the American Accent by Lisa Mosjin

2. Best Accent Training mp3 Audio Course by Charles Becker

American English Pronunciation books for students

Here are my favorite books for teachers:

1. Pronunciation Pairs by Sharon Goldstein & Ann Baker

2. Teaching American English Pronunciation by Susan Ehrlich & Peter Avery

American English pronunciation books for teachers

There are lots of other more expensive products available but these are the resources that I use.

Here is a link to an easy to read history of the English language.

Those of you who are really interested in the History of English should check out Seth Lerer’s book titled, Inventing English.

Babies who hear only English are left unable to distinguish between subtly different sounds used in other languages. Babies exposed to multiple languages during their first few months retain the ability to recognise sounds from all the languages they hear.

Babies and language learning

Some of these key features include:

• working on individual sounds or phonemes
• word stress (also called syllable stress)
• sentence stress & intonation
• teaching students to use phonemic scripts
• using minimal pair exercises

Click here to access the PDF on Teaching Pronunciation

One of the most useful features of this book is the chapter in which the authors categorize and explain the most common pronunciation mistakes made by speakers of major languages.

To listen to the songs choose: ComAudio and then choose Songs from the drop down menu. The songs are sung by artists such as the Beatles, Dianna Ross and Johnny Cash.

There is also a poetry section but I didn’t like that as much as the songs.