Pronounce English Accurately

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Welcome to the course. I'm delighted that you've enrolled!

I'm going to help you improve your English pronunciation by focussing on the one thing that matters most when we learn pronunciation – the physical actions which give rise to the various speech sounds we produce.

For consonant sounds – sounds like /p, t, r/ and /m/ – I'll describe which parts of our vocal organs are in action when we make a particular sound, what that action is and how it affects the air flow through our vocal tract, and thus the sound that results.

For vowel sounds – sounds like /iː, ɪ, e/ and /æ/ – I'll show how the shape of the lips, the degree to which the mouth opens, and the position and height of the tongue all vary to influence the resulting vowel sounds. I'll also demonstrate how long or short a certain sound should be, which varies according to its environment.

If your language doesn't have a contrast which exists in English, then it's likely that you'll find it hard to even perceive the difference, let alone make it, so we'll work on perceiving sound differences too, as you certainly cannot make the different sounds if you cannot even perceive them.

For example, the contrast between the /ɪ/ and /iː/ sounds as in ‘bit' and ‘beat' is a relatively rare one – most languages have only one sound like that, somewhere in between the two: /i/.

If your language has that contrast – German does for example – then it's not going to be a problem. If it doesn't, then you'll probably need instruction both on perception and production of that contrast.

This course provides that – the lessons cover the production of all the various sounds, and in between the lessons you will find perception exercises of various sorts which you should use to check that you can hear the difference between each of the sounds.

Depending on how and where you have learnt English, you may never have had a solid framework for learning pronunciation. For instance, you may not even have any clear idea of how many different sounds there are in the language.

This is really regrettable and it's the result of a long-standing and apparently determined trend in English language teaching against the systematic teaching of pronunciation.

All the other aspects of the language, such as vocabulary and grammar are taught properly, but pronunciation has for a long time been sidelined. Many learners now have never had any proper instruction in it, and have just muddled along in confusion all their lives.

If the English language were like German or Spanish, spelt regularly so that we know from the spelling how every word is pronounced, this wouldn't be such a problem.

But the apparently chaotic relationship between English spelling and pronunciation means that both sides of the equation are a real problem – what the intended sounds of the language are, and which of those sounds the spelling is intended to represent in a particular word.

I aim to tackle this problem head on and to give you a solid framework on which to base your pronunciation of English.

You will learn the International Phonetic Alphabet – or IPA for short.

This is a way of writing all the sounds of all the world's languages using the principle that one symbol equals one sound, with no variation.

After the course you should be able to look up any word in a dictionary and pronounce it accurately.

For example, in the IPA, the word ‘women' is transcribed /ˈwɪm.ɪn/.

This shows us clearly that both the letter ‘o' and the letter ‘e' in the word ‘women' represent the exact same vowel sound as in ‘pick' /pɪk/ or ‘tin' /tɪn/.

Another example is the word ‘cough'.

This is transcribed like this in the IPA: /kɒf/, so we can see clearly that it has a /f/ sound at the end, even though the spelling doesn't really show that very well.

The IPA is the only way there is of representing English pronunciation systematically, and it's the system used in all serious dictionaries.

But it seems that so few people have learnt the IPA that one sometimes wonders why it's there at all!

Let's put that right and learn it properly, and bring order to the chaos!

If you're in a hurry to get started you can move right on now to the next section and start with the consonant sounds.

But if you've got ten minutes to spare then I recommend you watch the next lesson, which is a very short overview of the history of the English language, and an explanation of how we've got to the current rather chaotic situation with English spelling.

Following that, is a review video giving my recommendations on specialist pronunciation dictionaries.