The Center for Confident American English Communication

When you are speaking American English it is really important to recognize the difference between voiced sounds and voiceless sounds! A voiced sound causes your vocal chords to vibrate. A voiceless sound does not cause your vocal chords to vibrate. American English has 8 voiced/voiceless consonant pairs such as /z/ & /s/ and /v/ & /f/. Here are a couple of examples:

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One of the most frequent questions that I get is how to tell the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants. Here are rules. American spoken English has 24 consonant sounds. Fifteen of these sounds are voiced and nine are voiceless. Voiced sounds create a vibration in your vocal chords when you say them. Voiceless sounds

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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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If you are a Chinese speaker you may have found that Americans don’t always understand your pronunciation. Here is one accent reduction tip you can use to help. Pronounce your voiced final consonant sounds more clearly. In American English some of the most common voiced consonant sounds are: /b/,/d/, /g/, /ð/,/z/, /r/, /m/, & /n/. You need

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Linguistic research indicates that the most common sound in spoken English is the schwa vowel sound. This is because native English speakers pronounce the vowels in most reduced syllables with the schwa sound. The phonetic symbol for schwa is /ə/. Here is an example. When I say my name, Susan, the first syllable is stressed so

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There are some American English vowel sounds that are particularly difficult for Koreans to pronounce.These include the /ɪ/ sound and the /ae/ sound. Koreans often pronounce the /ɪ/ vowel sound in the words sit, slip, & grin more like an /iy/ vowel sound. That makes sit, slip, & grin sound like seat, sleep & green to American

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The voiced th sound is one of the most problematic sounds for non-native English speakers to pronounce. To make the sound place your tongue slightly between your teeth. Vibrate your vocal chords as you push the air through your throat. While there are not that many words that have the voiced th sound, the words

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Listen for all the different ways the th and the t are pronounced in this Thanksgiving video by Martha Stuart. Here is a checklist you can use to guide you as you watch and listen. Print or copy these words and mark each one when you hear it. Then watch and listen again several times

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Every week I receive several questions about the importance of voiced and voiceless sounds in American English pronunciation. There are many reasons why it is important to pronounce these sounds correctly. One of these reasons is that vowel sounds that come before voiced consonants have a long, stretched out sound. To illustrate this let’s look

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