Improve your English pronunciation | Simple techniques and highly effective app

If you're finding it difficult to improve your  pronunciation and your listening comprehension in English,

then you are certainly not alone.

Hello and welcome everyone. This is Minoo at Anglo-Link.

English pronunciation is difficult to  master for two main reasons:

firstly, vowel letters don't always produce the same vowel sound.

Take for example the letter 'e', and listen to how it's pronounced differently in these four words:

Them, Term, Theme, They.

Secondly, English is a stress-timed language.

What does this mean?

It means two things:

in a sentence, we only stress key words, not grammatical words.

Let's look at a sentence together:

Excellence is an achievable goal.

So, which words are the keywords?

The key words are: 'excellence', 'achievable',  and 'goal', so they are stressed.

The grammatical words are: 'is' and 'an', so they are unstressed.

And each multi-syllable word also has its own stress pattern.

For example, which syllable in 'achievable' is stressed?

It is the second syllable: a-CHIEV-a-ble.

The problem is that word stresses  are not marked, except in a dictionary.

And, the phonetic symbols that indicate the sound of each letter can be more confusing than helpful.

Although we can listen to words in an online  dictionary,

it is difficult for our brain to remember foreign sounds,

especially if we have not heard them during our childhood.

Let's take this sentence:

Aim for excellence, not perfection.

We have two multi-syllable words in this sentence:

'excellence' and 'perfection'.

In 'excellence', the first syllable is stressed: EX-cel-lence.

In 'perfection', the second syllable is stressed: per-FEC-tion.

How well do you think you will remember  these in a few days?

It's not that easy.

So let's bring in some visual cues and hand  movements to help our memory.

EX-cel-lence

per-FEC-tion

Now, let's put the two words back in the sentence:

Aim for EXcellence, not perFECtion.

I hope this information has been helpful to you.

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