Samuraifingers: I'm sorry if I made it seem like I was expecting a professional assessment of my pronunciation. I am really only looking for brief comments such as "this or that vowel has the wrong quality" or "too much

Frequently listen to English spoken by native speakers and repeat them. Watch English movies, listen to music, audio clips, BBC news and presentations. Control your rate of speech to get the correct intonation and rhythm of English. Use your

I am glad we agree about the sound /w/. That leaves us with the letter <w>. Letters of the alphabet must not be confused with sounds. By convention and for convenience, letters that represent vowel sounds are called vowels and letters that

As per phonetics theory, I've been told one should use the indefinite article "a" before words beginning with a consonant and "an" before words beginning with a vowel or a diphthong. And the sound "y" ( or / j /

Hi, the American Pronunciation you found is ok, and Merriam-Webster is the best (in my opinion) to check American pronunciations. The thing is you have to learn how to read phonetic transcriptions in the dictionaries you use, because often every

Hi, well, I think the original poster was contrasting two different pronunciations, one with an r-colored schwa (as in "curly"), and the other with just a simple schwa (as in "cut"). So, without using any phonetic

Hi Avangi, it's pretty complicated, I'll try to explain it better. I'll use an equivalent phonetic transcription to avoid IPA, because I heard not everyone can see the symbols. MW breaks the words into syllables in phonetic transcriptions

Hi, It has been my experience that students become lost when consulting dictionaries with regard to phonetic symbols as many times each one uses different phonetic symbols. This has caused much grief and I just tell my online students to stay

Hi David, here you can find some stuff about American English. Vowels, consonants, lots of stuff... http://evaeaston.com/pr/home.html On that website there's also a link to this page, where the states are pronounced.

CalifJim wrote: I read somewhere that Mario Pei, the linguist, tried to learn a different language every year. He supposedly claimed that Vietnamese was the most difficult. CJ I disagree with the linguist Mario Pei not