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It can take months or even years before your brain gets used to new sounds. In the beginning, you probably won’t be able to produce a perfect /r/ or make a clear distinction between /eə/ (where) and /ɜː/ (were), to take just two examples.It is certainly important to pronounce English sounds clearly. If you don’t, people will have difficulty understanding you. But it is far more important to

Pronunciation is definitely the biggest thing that people notice when you are speaking English. Let me tell you a personal anecdote about this.Michal and I once went to a conversation class taught by Americans. Before the class started, the teacher said to us: “So, do you speak good English?”. I replied “We think so”, and the guy said “It sure sounds like you do”.Notice that I just sai

Good pronunciation should be one of the first things that you learn in English. You can live without advanced vocabulary — you can use simple words to say what you want to say. You can live without advanced grammar — you can use simple grammar structures instead. But there is no such thing as “simple pronunciation”. If you don’t have good pronunciation, you have bad pronunciation.And the

Almost all English learners say “I don’t need to study pronunciation. I just want to communicate in English.” Many of them think that they can communicate in English because they can communicate with their teacher and other students.Do not make this mistake! You have to remember that:Your teacher has been listening to bad English for years. He or she can understand it much more easily than t

English uses different sounds than your native language. If you want to speak English well, you have to teach yourself to recognize them and pronounce them. ONEStudy the sounds of English and their IPA symbols. Learn to recognize all thesounds. Recognition is important because it lets you learn pronunciation from spoken English. In order to learn the correct pronunciation of a word, you need to k