Hi. On TV you may not hear the sounds, the tongue-play within the chamber of the mouth and the tiny air stops, etcetera that occur when people speak. You need to be face-to-face with your pronunciation coach. I can well see how you

My students always have questions about this pronunciation feature. I know of four patterns that might help you predict where to pronounce 't' as a soft /d/. 1. when a ‘t’ is between vowels when the preceding vowel is stressed in words

, we are able to communicate in English if we know 1000 words. IT IS THE EASIEST LANGUAGE

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, this is a weird question. I once discovered that syllable are important for pronunciation. For example, Merriam Webster says that coolish is coo-lish, not cool-ish. The reason must be that in coo-lish, the L is put at the beginning of the

I cannot find any word with ay or ai that is pronounced this way, except those with -says or -said at the end. I thought you were only looking for irregular verb forms. again and against also have ai as a lax e , if that's what you want

finite indeed has the tense i in both syllables. The tense vowel is the typical pronunciation for the last syllable of all two-syllable words ending in -ate, -ete, -ite, -ote, -ute, even when the first syllable has the primary stress, as in the

Well yes back is always /bæk/ in NAE. "Beg" is more variable. Some people have tense-lax neutralization before /g/. According to Wikipedia: "Some examples of neutralization of /ɛ/ to /eɪ/ before /ɡ/ are beg, egg, Greg, keg, leg and peg's

The other thing that I was saying was that before /r\/, there is no contrast between tense and lax vowels in most definitions of General American and approximate accents. OK. But what I was saying was that what applies for /r\/ applies

Hmm. Sorry for the confusion. Now I'm a little confused too. I was saying two different things: 1) The "ay" in play, is pronounced differently in different dialects. Such as a monophthong or something like or other variations. Some dialects