In the latest update, I write about the importance of checking the pronunciations of English words and offer a few tips about that.
The Antimoon Blog
Thoughts for serious language learners
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Language help
You can select any word on this page to check its definition and pronunciation in a dictionary. In addition, if you see colored text, you can click it (or point at it) for a pop-up explanation.
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About
My name is Tomasz P. Szynalski. I live in Poland. In the 1990s, my friend and I taught ourselves to speak English fluently (with a native-like American accent) in about 3 years, using some unorthodox learning techniques. In 2001, we founded Antimoon to share our insights with other English learners.
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Recent Posts
- Reader mail: Reading aloud to improve your English3.1
- Grammar rules update4.7
- Why it’s so difficult to speak English without mistakes3.4
- Things you should know about phonetic transcription1.29
- English pronunciation is a minefield11.1
- Why it’s important to learn about the sounds of English10.24
- Modernizing Antimoon10.16
- YouGlish: A YouTube-based pronunciation dictionary2.19
- Antimoon en español12.12
- Confusing American phonetic transcriptions for “air”, “near” and “sure”8.20
- Should you care about phonetic transcriptions?6.26
- Solving the problem of typing foreign characters and phonetic symbols on a PC5.14
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Archives
© Tomasz P. Szynalski
Having accidentally come across the pronunciation test I was somewhat annoyed to be told thatI had got one wrong – “Is food and good pronounced the same?”
Your answer : No – food has a longer “o”.
The majority of native English speakers, like me, would disagree. The use of an extended diphthong in the word “food” is characteristic of affected speech so common in southern England. It is sometimes taken to an extreme where the word is pronounced : fe-ew-ed.
I am a native English speaker from the northern part of the Union and the distortions emanating from the south-east are very annoying at times. The dropped “r” and the intrusive “r” are constant. A wildly growing phenomenon is – “outside of” – even adopted by some BBC journalists.