Are you accidentally saying “estop” instead of stop? Or maybe “espanish” instead of Spanish? If so, don’t worry — you’re not alone. This pronunciation issue is especially common among Spanish speakers and learners whose first languages don’t allow words to begin with /s/ + consonant clusters, like st, sp, or sk. But the good news […]
Have you ever listened to native English speakers and thought their speech had a special rhythm — something musical? That’s because of sentence stress. Sentence stress is what gives English its rhythm. In every sentence, some words are stressed — said louder, longer, or higher — while others are spoken more softly or quickly. Learning […]
Watch the French President, Emmanual Macron make a speech in English and learn about some of the most common errors made by French people when they speak English. Consonant ‘h’ French speakers often have difficulty pronouncing the English consonant /h/ at the beginning of words because the /h/ sound is generally silent in French. As […]
Did you know that the letters ‘T’ and ‘D’ don’t always sound like /t/ or /d/ in native English speech? The way we pronounce them depends on the sounds that come before or after them. If you learn and apply the five pronunciation rules below, your spoken English will sound much more fluent and natural—especially […]
Many of my students have problems with pronouncing the English vowels, and sometimes, it’s not much that they can’t pronounce them, but rather, it’s that they can’t tell the difference between 2 vowels that may sound close or similar. They may really struggle with distinguishing between minimal pairs such as ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’, ‘walk’ and […]
Since we’re just a few days away from Christmas Eve, I thought I should tell you how to say it without sounding funny (in the negative way). It’s very unlikely that people won’t understand you when you greet them with “Merry Christmas” or “Happy New Year” because they are expecting it right? Let me show […]
Japanese are stubborn, so are their pronunciation problems Japanese students of English struggle with their pronunciation problems. No matter how advanced the speakers are, no matter how long the learners have been learning or speaking English for, some (phonetic) mistakes are real stubborn aren’t they? They keep happening over and over and Japanese students can’t […]
Bad pronunciation comes basically from 3 reasons that your pronunciation may not be good enough or clear enough. We’ll refer to these 3 reasons as the 3 don’ts. We’ll use the following sentence to demonstrate the 3 dont’s. I will get back to you as soon as possible (you often say or hear that sentence […]
Not that my website has anything to do with politics but when Mr. Putin decides to get himself into the kind of mess he’s gotten himself into, one’s got to pause and try to figure out why this man’s just lost all his marbles, invaded a country with thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks […]
Aren’t all sounds important for fluent English? Yes absolutely. Yet, there are 9 sounds or phonemes which, in my opinion, are crucial for clear and fluent English. The reason that I consider these phonemes to be critical is their frequency. In other words, they are more common than other sounds, hence important. If you mispronounce […]