Hi, this is interesting, it reminds me of something I read in a book for improving pronunciation (the famous "American Accent Training"). The title of the paragraph is "Spoon or Sboon?" She (the author) say: "Say spoon. Now say sboon. Hear how

To tell you the truth, I've never heard any foreigner (unless they learned English when they were very young, or had lived in an English speaking country for at least a decade, and had extensive, and personalized accent coaching) ever be able to

Hi The Golden Man, You wrote: His pronunciation of 'today' for instance, places too much stress on the first syllable. He says "too-day," when that first vowel should be a schwa. Of course, some people pronounce 'today' /tu'deI/.

I think the problem with his Standard American Accent is two fold- one, his native accent sneaks through a few times in the consonants as a few have pointed out. Secondly, and I think this is the deal breaker, he has some problems with stress

8. Why do you say “She is a one-eyed teacher” and not “ She’s an one eyed teacher”? (Focus on a phonetic explanation) The article an is used before vowel sounds, not vowel letters. The word one is pronounced wun . The w is not a vowel sound even

In my opinion, foreign students are taught the pronunciation of words according to the their first entry in the Pronunciation Dictionary (John Wells' Pronunciation Dictionary or Daniel Johns' English Pronouncing Dictionary - these two hold a good

I'm sorry that I don't know how to use the IPA or other pronunciation symbols, but there are also accents within the US where the R is not strong - the Boston accent is frequently made fun of with the phrase "pahk the cah in the Hahvahd yahd"

Tallulah Tam wrote: I feel that Alan Jay Lerner was not so concerned about his own grammar when he wrote the song, he insults the intelligence of the audience by using the word "hung" incorrectly, especially when putting the words into the mouth

Yes, but John Hall implied that he heard this in ... (using SAMPA notation) but I've never noticed this. (SAMPA: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/english.htm) SAMPA is itself quite confusing since it offers two different symbols (V and U)

It really depends on your native language. If your native language has many of the same sounds as English, it may be possible to attain a speech pattern that is very close to American accent. If, however, your native language lacks most of the