Learning English pronunciation

Why should you study English pronunciation? Because pronunciation is the biggest thing that people notice about your English. You should study it even if you think you can already communicate in English.

Test your English pronunciation: Can you pronounce basic English words correctly?

Fact 1: English uses different sounds than other languages. For example, the first sound in the word thin and the first sound in the word away are never heard in many languages.

Fact 2: Reading an English word does not tell you how it is pronounced. For example, the words no and do both end in the letter o, but they are pronounced very differently. English is so irregular that you should check the pronunciation of every new word that you read.

Therefore, if you want to learn English pronunciation, you have two tasks: learning the sounds and learning the proper pronunciation of every word that you're going to use.

How to learn English pronunciation?

Learn about the sounds of English and their IPA symbols from our chart with audio recordings.

Learn about phonetic transcription and word stress.

Choose your pronunciation model: American or British.

Learn to pronounce all the English sounds by listening, paying attention to pronunciation, and repeating, repeating, repeating...

Learn the pronunciation of every English word that you use. You can find phonetic transcriptions of words in good English dictionaries. Our English pronunciation software teaches you the pronunciations of the most frequently used English words and makes you remember them.

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What is good English pronunciation? There are three levels of English pronunciation. Your pronunciation is good if it is understandable and pleasant.

Useful phonetic concepts:

We created the ASCII Phonetic Alphabet because the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet are difficult to type on computers. The ASCII Phonetic Alphabet uses only symbols which you can find on your computer's keyboard.

Demonstration of phonetic transcription: Listen to recordings and read the transcriptions.

In the "Myths and facts" section: "You are a foreigner, therefore you will always have a foreign accent"

Comparative review of English pronunciation dictionaries: the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary