American Pronunciation; Say the Sounds, Not the Letters

Have you ever thought you had enough of English learning while reading through books? Now, that's a mouthful to pronounce since in English the "ough" sound has many different pronunciations. One reason for the multitude of pronunciations is that many English words are borrowed from other languages. But sometimes, the words just aren't spoken as they are spelled. English has many words which contain silent letters such as should, would, and could which contain the unpronounced "l." As Gabby mentioned in this English podcast tip, Wednesday just does not sounds like it is spelled. English also contains the words "err", "air", and "heir" which are all spelled completely differently and yet are pronounced the same. There are no real rules for how English words sound and how they are spelled. You just have to memorize the sounds sometimes. If you would like to learn more about this and other tips for improving your English fluency and gaining confidence in your speaking ability, then make sure you visit gonaturalenglish.com where Gabby will coach and guide you on your English language learning adventure. Episode transcript below: Hey! How's it going? Welcome to the Go Natural English podcast – the best place to improve your fluency in the English language. In this quick English tip we're going to learn about how to improve your pronunciation in English to sound more like a native English speaker. If you don't know already, I'm your host, Gabby Wallace, your American English teacher. And you can visit gonaturalenglish.com to pick up your copy of the short and free Go Natural English eBook that will help you to improve your fluency by improving 15 common mistakes. So, getting rid of those mistakes will help you with your English fluency and that mini eBook is free. So, speaking of eBooks, we're also working on completing the full length Go Natural English eBook that will really help you with strategies, practical examples, and advice on how to improve your English fluency naturally. So, that eBook will be available in August 2015, so I'm very excited for that to come out, for that release. So, stay tuned and if you join the email list at gonaturalenglish.com – if you get your eBook you will automatically join the email list and you can find out more about the release day of the Go Natural English eBook. OK. So, without further ado, let's talk a little bit about pronunciation. One problem that I've noticed a lot of English learners having is how to pronounce words that seem to have a lot of extra letters in them that we don't say. For example, think about the word "Wednesday", the day of the week. We write it, and you'd think that it would be said, "wed-nes-day" but that's not how we say it at all. We don't say, "wed-nes-day", we say "wensday". But you wouldn't know it from the way that we spell the word. Another word for example – take the word "autumn." You would think that we would say it "ah-oo-tum-nuh" by the way that it's spelled but that's not at all how we say the word "autumn." So, my advice for words like this and there are a lot of them in the English language is to remember that speaking English is not the same as reading English, or writing English. When you want to listen, and you want to speak English, or you want to listen to English, you want to understand what native speakers are saying, and when you want to speak and you want to sound like a native speaker, you have to remember the way that words are said. You have to remember the sound of the word and not the spelling. So, if you attempt to sound out every word from the English spelling, you will be sorry. The thing is English writing has a very loose relationship with its sounds. So, you have to learn the sounds if you want to understand English and ...