Pronounce English Accurately

Video Text

Conclusion

That's it; we've come to the end of the course! We've covered a lot of ground and gone through many examples of all the sounds of English in just about every possible environment.

You should now be able to use the IPA to look up unknown words in a pronunciation dictionary.

If you use dictionaries other than those I have recommended - the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary - then then just check that they do use the same transcription conventions as we have been using. Don't use the Oxford dictionaries edited by Clive Upton.

Do use the IPA and look words up, rather than listening to recordings all the time.

Reading from the IPA means you will be building the words up in syllables, using the reference sounds from the simple example words I gave. This makes it much more likely that you will be producing the right target sounds, particularly for the vowels.

With words of more than one syllable, remember the trick of finding the stressed syllable,

saying JUST the stressed syllable, ALOUD, and making sure the vowel is correct: ˈteɪ

then saying the stressed syllable and the rest of the word to the end: ˈteɪ.nɪə

and finally start at the beginning and say the whole word:

̩æk.wɪˈteɪ.nɪə

Aquitania

ˈpleɪ

ˈpleɪ.dʒə.rɪ.zəm - plagiarism

biː

ˈbiː.ən

̩kæ.rɪ. ˈbiː.ən - the British pronunciation of Caribbean.

The problem with just listening to recordings is that you may persist in pronouncing words with inaccurate sounds. The IPA focuses your mind on the correct pronunciation of each syllable of the word. Do trust the transcription and follow it, even if it seems odd - it will be correct!

Of course, you may also want to hear words spoken aloud - both the LPD and CEPD come complete with a CD, or if you go online then I recommend www.howjsay.com - notice the spelling carefully - I have put in a link in the lesson resources. This is the most comprehensive and reliable website I have found for British English and a good feature is that it has a huge number of technical and medical words, all reliably pronounced.

I hope you have enjoyed the course and found it useful! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to post them here and I will respond…. So all that remains is for me to wish you every success and enjoyment in your continued use of the English language!