Get Better At English Speaking And Pronunciation With The Listen And Learn English Pronunciation Course
Many of your emails tell us that fixing your English pronunciation is one of the biggest issues you have as you move to spoken English fluency. Today I’m going to explain why learning English pronunciation is so difficult for some people. I’ll explain what you can do to fix well understood English specific pronunciation problems.
The beauty of the Adept English "Listen & Learn" English lesson is while you are improving your English language vocabulary and listening comprehension. Building that long term English language memory you will need for English fluency. You also "automatically" learn about English accents and correct English pronunciation. But what if there was a way we could speed up the pronunciation learning part and target stubborn mispronunciation issues?
What if I told you I have methodically identified every single problem area a non-native English speaker will have with English pronunciation? That I’ve applied the Adept English Listen & Learn approach, that you love listening to in our podcasts, to help solve all your English mispronunciation issues. An approach that gives practical instruction and advice on how to position your mouth so an English listener will understand every sound you pronounce.
If you're interested in using the same easy-to-use system we use in our podcasts to solving your pronunciation problems, you should definitely listen right to the end of today’s podcast and jump over to vip.adeptenglish.com to register your interest.
Most Unusual Words:
Mispronunciation
Stubborn
Practical
Rhythmic
Chemistry
Dachshund
Rough
Cough
Dough
Plough
Whole
Hole
Most common 2 word phrases:
| Phrase | Count |
|---|---|
| You Want | 7 |
| You Can | 4 |
| Know That | 4 |
| The Number | 4 |
| English Pronunciation | 4 |
| In English | 3 |
| To Get | 3 |
| Kinds Of | 2 |
| Tell You | 2 |
| To Speak | 2 |
| This Course | 2 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
The mp3 audio and pdf transcript for this lesson is now part of the Adept English back catalogue . You can still download and listen to this lesson as part of one of our podcast bundles.Transcript: Learn To Pronounce And Speak English The Listen And Learn Way
In today’s podcast I’m going to invite you to influence the future direction of Adept English and I’m going to share my ideas about an Adept English course on Pronunciation. This course is ready to go, but before we release it, we need to know that you want a course like this! We need to know that enough people will be interested in an Adept English Pronunciation Course.
Hello, I’m Hilary, and you’re listening to Adept English. We will help you to speak English fluently. All you have to do is listen. So start listening now and find out how it works.
The number one question you ask us is ‘How do I improve my pronunciation?’ So listen on, if you want to hear more about the course and how to get this course for half-price - 50% off! I’m going to talk about some of the craziness of English pronunciation and explain how the course will help you! I’ll explain why English pronunciation creates such difficulties and I’ll even do a little quiz, so you can test your own pronunciation knowledge. Keep listening to find out how to get that 50% discount code!
There’s no obligation, you are just registering interest - it doesn’t mean you have to buy the course. But there is a deadline of 30th April for registering your interest. And if there are lots of people showing interest, we may need to limit the number of discount codes available. So if you’re interested, register as soon as you can! I’ll tell you how.
‘How can I improve my pronunciation?’ is the number one question that we are asked
So pronunciation is the number one topic that our listeners ask about ‘How can I improve my pronunciation?’ And this isn’t surprising. Your English learning is going well, you’ve got a good vocabulary and you can speak simple sentences - and you can understand a lot more. But you want to be able to speak English even better, you want to appear confident and knowledgeable in English - but the pronunciation is a challenge.
There are all kinds of illogical and inconsistent pronunciations in English, just waiting to trip you up. What kinds of things am I talking about here? Well, consider the word ‘reading’, READING - present participle of the verb ‘to read’ - I’m sure you know that verb. But then there’s a British city called ‘Reading’, READING. Same spelling, but with a capital R. Now British English speakers would automatically know that the capital R means it’s the city and therefore it’s pronounced ‘Reading’, but the activity is pronounced ‘reading’.
It’s this type of inconsistency which happens all the time in English and which can cause people to lose a bit of confidence in their speaking. I understand if you want to speak really good English, you might worry about your pronunciation and where you’re getting it wrong. And people don’t always tell you - they’re often too polite, but they will notice it. If you want to get closer to native English speaker pronunciation, then this Adept English Pronunciation Course is for you.
You want to sound ‘professional’ when you speak English
More and more people are using English for their work and for their studies. They don’t want their English pronunciation to hold them back or affect their confidence. They want to sound professional. For most people, it’s not important that you sound exactly like a native English speaker. Having an accent which shows that English isn’t your first language - that’s a wonderful thing.
Your accent is part of you and your unique history - it would be sad to lose that. And people who hear you speak English with a non-native accent usually have an automatic admiration for you and your tenacity, when you’ve learned a language that’s not native for you. And especially English, which is a challenging language to learn. Your accent shows the effort that you’ve put in.
Most native English speakers don’t speak a second language - they haven’t had to. So be proud of your accent - it deserves admiration. But I also understand that you don’t want to be in a situation where everyone in the room but you is aware of your mispronunciation of a word. It takes a really high level of English language skill to not do any mispronunciation at all - but this course will take you much further forward and will smooth out many of your pronunciation issues.
Video
You may be unaware of your mispronunciation and there are ‘traps’ waiting to catch you out!
The problem for many language learners is that they are unaware of where their mispronunciations are. ‘Mispronunciation’ just means ‘incorrect pronunciation’. And you get used to pronouncing a word a particular way, so you don’t realise it’s incorrect. So this course addresses those parts of English that are completely illogical and inconsistent, when it comes to pronunciation.
It’s almost like English sets ‘little traps’ where it’s just designed to make it difficult and getting it wrong is really easy. One ridiculous example of this - one that I think that is completely stupid is the surname ‘Cholmondeley’. What’s wrong with this English surname? Well, nothing except that it’s spelt CHOLMONDELEY and pronounced ‘Chumley’.
How crazy is that? It can seem as though these things are designed to trip you up, cause you to make a mistake. This one is more upper class British piece of nonsense - and fortunately not many people are called ‘Cholmondeley’. But this rather silly name isn’t the only place in English where logic has flown out of the window, when you come to pronounce something!
Try this quiz to test your English pronunciation
Let me give you a little taste of the kinds of problems our pronunciation course addresses. A lot of the more general challenge in pronunciation is that the written word doesn’t seem to match the pronunciation. Here’s a little quiz to demonstrate - I’ll give you the answers at the end.
There are words which are spelt in the same way, but which are pronounced differently. Take for example the words ‘rough’, ROUGH, ‘cough’, COUGH, ‘plough’, PLOUGH and ‘dough’, DOUGH - that’s completely inconsistent, isn’t it? ‘Rough’, ‘cough’, ‘plough’, ‘dough’. So question 1 of the quiz - how do you pronounce these spellings? TOUGH, DROUGHT and BOROUGH?
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A photograph of bread dough being kneaded. This podcast is a practical guide which will show you how to fix your English pronunciation problems.
Then there are words which sound the same but different spelling indicates completely different meaning, like the worlds ‘hole’, HOLE and ‘whole’, WHOLE. So question 2 - do you understand the different meanings of ‘hole’ HOLE and ‘whole’, WHOLE? And there are even words which have a different meaning if the emphasis is different. So question 3, do you know the difference between ‘present’ and ‘present? I’ll give you answers to these questions at the end!
A little taste of English Consonants Pronunciation Course
So the first pronunciation course we’re proposing will address specific challenges with English consonants. If we get enough interest, there will also be a second course, which is ready to go and this deals with the problems of English Vowel pronunciation. A ‘prickly subject’! I really want you to register interest, so that these courses can go ahead! In the Consonants Pronunciation course that I’m proposing, there are chapters on specific challenges.
For example, there is a section on ‘Silent Consonants’ and another on the confusion of S and Z pronunciation - why is it ‘cats’, with an S, but ‘dogz’ with a Z?! And yet another chapter helps you practise your consonant clusters. A ‘consonant cluster’ is when there are lots consonants all together and we look at and practice it specifically. The word ‘rhythmic’, RHYTHMIC is a good example of a ‘consonant cluster’ - seven consonants and only one vowel. I even look at those times where pronunciation is different, depending upon the origin of the word.
So for example ‘chaos’, CHAOS and ‘chemistry’, CHEMISTRY - both have a hard ‘k’ sound though spelt with CH, whereas church, CHURCH has a ‘ch-ch-ch’ sound. The word ‘chic’, CHIC has a ‘shh’ sound and the word ‘Dachshund’, DACHSHUND - well that’s got a different sound altogether! Sometimes it helps to know the word’s origin. So here Greek, French and German origins influence pronunciation. I cover all of that too! As I said, it’s a comprehensive look at English pronunciation!
Some chapters may be particularly useful if you’re coming from certain languages. For example, my chapters on L and R pronunciation may be really good practice for you if you’re coming from Chinese, Japanese or related languages. And if you’re a Spanish speaker, you might like my chapter on ‘Squishy Consonants’ - where I cover the sounds made by the letters CH, SH, J, Y and Soft G.
The course is called The Adept English Consonant Pronunciation Course - that’s the first course. But I do tackle a couple of subjects concerning vowels. The topic of English vowel pronunciation is a big one - so I’ve started to cover just a couple of vowel pronunciation challenges in this first course to start you off. So there’s a section on Magic E and how that works and a ‘Bonus Material’ section on ‘OUGH’ words.
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Some further points about the Pronunciation Course
Some further points about the course
- It’s pronunciation teaching using the Adept English ‘Listen & Learn’ technique. Some English pronunciation courses are complicated and cover linguistics in a technical way. We don’t do that! Children learn our own language without technical understanding of linguistics and so can you with English! This course teaches in a way that’s natural, the way your brain wants to learn. The chapters are in pairs - a theory chapter, which explains the particular pronunciation challenge is always followed by a practice chapter, where there’s a story or a quiz or some exercises that help you practise what you’ve just learned through listening.
- The course is comprehensive - it addresses a high percentage of the problems that English learners will have with pronunciation. And I’ve kept it shorter by dividing into two parts - consonants and vowels so that it’s more manageable and easier to do.
- The Consonant Pronunciation Course is in line with what you would expect, if you’ve bought our new Most Common 500 Words Course. It’s an easy to download course, you can drag and drop it onto your Android or your Apple phone. It’s an audiobook, accompanied by the text, in the form of an ebook. Once you’ve bought the course, It’s quick and slick and simple to use.
Save time learning pronunciation - I’ve done the hard work for you!
So for this course, I’ve done the hard work you - I’ve worked out and researched which areas of English give the most difficulty - and covered them in these two courses. It saves you time by focusing on the challenging parts and all you have to do is listen! Oh - and there’s not just my voice on these courses.
The chapters where you get to practise, with stories, practice sentences and exercises - well there are four other voices on the course, not just mine. This will help you practise with different speakers. And I also give you different US spellings and sometimes pronunciations. You may even have a laugh when you hear my attempts at an American accent! And as with all our courses, if you don’t get on with it, there is a 30 day, money-back refund guarantee.
How to register interest, ensure the course is released and how to get that 50% discount code!
So first of all, how do you get that 50%, discount code for this course? Well, you simply go to vip.adeptenglish.com, type in your email address and hit enter. Takes about 5 seconds! You will then receive an email confirming your registration of interest in the course. But there is a deadline that you must register by - and that is the 30th April.
Download The Podcast Audio & Transcript
Signing up to show interest doesn’t mean that you have to buy the course - there is no obligation. But we need enough people to register interest for the course to go live. If we have enough interest, we’ll produce the course, put it on the website adeptenglish.com for you to buy and you’ll get early access! We’ll email you again with the discount code.
You’ll have the course before anyone else and at half the price, 50% discount. If there’s a really big response and we get a lot of people registering interest, we may have to limit the discount code - so make sure you register as soon as possible. This is your opportunity to influence the direction of Adept English, and hopefully this pronunciation course will be available for anyone who needs it, very soon.
Answers to the Pronunciation Quiz in this podcast!
Just before I go - answers to those quiz questions?
Question 1. TOUGH is pronounced ‘tough’, DROUGHT is pronounced ‘drought’ and BOROUGH is pronounced ‘borough’ These difficult OUGH pronunciations are something I cover as ‘Bonus Material’ in the Consonants Pronunciation Course.
Question 2. ‘Hole’ HOLE means a gap, an opening - a space. So you might have a ‘hole in your sock, where your toe pokes through. Whereas ‘whole’, WHOLE means ‘all of it’. ‘You ate that whole birthday cake yourself - oh my goodness!’.
And final question.
Question 3. ‘Present’ with an emphasis on the second E means a verb ‘to present’ - which means ‘to talk about’, ‘to give details about something’ - like when you give a ‘presentation’. But the word ‘present’, with the emphasis on the first E, as a noun means ‘a gift’, like a birthday present. Or as an adjective, ‘present’ means ‘here’ or ‘current’. You might say ‘The present manager of the bakery’ - to distinguish that manager from a previous or a future manager of the bakery.
OK, that’s enough! Don’t forget to register your interest at vip.adeptenglish.com. We would love to bring you that Adept English Consonant Pronunciation Course - it’s ready to go. But it’s up to you - the clock is ticking and you need to register as soon as you can - no later than the 30th April!
Goodbye
Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
Thank you so much for listening. Please help me tell others about this podcast by reviewing or rating it. And, please share it on social media. You can find more listening lessons and a free English course at adeptenglish.com
