English Pronunciation: The American Way

This audiobook is designed to help non-native speakers of English to master the pronunciation of the English language. The type of accent we will learn in this book is American English. This audiobook is written by Nanhee Byrnes, PhD, and is narrated by John Byrnes, PhD.

Learning pronunciation begins with learning all the particles of English sound. The smallest unit of speech sound is called a phoneme. Different phonemes make different words. Different languages have different sets of phonemes. American English has 15 vowel phonemes and 24 consonant phonemes. Phonemes, however, are abstract, categorical speech sounds.

When phonemes are used in words, they may sound different from the sound in abstraction. For instance, /t/ can sound like a flap T or a glottal stop, and /l/ can sound "light" or "dark". These different sounds of the same phoneme are called allophones. If we don’t use correct allophones, our speech will sound foreign or unrecognizable.

Naturally, in this audiobook, we learn phonemes and their allophones. In addition, we will learn sound modification that inevitably happens when several words are spoken like one word. In the natural speech environment, words are spoken in chunks. We pause briefly between each chunk of words. The method of pronouncing multiple words like one word is called connected speech.

Mastering pronunciation is acquiring muscle memory. Naturally, in this audiobook, we not only cover the theories of pronunciation but we also provide abundant practice material.

For this, we first isolate each phoneme sound and learn the mechanics of its production. We then practice the same sound in different ways: the phoneme in words and in sentences. We also compare each phoneme with neighboring sounds that can cause confusion. For this, we use the minimal pair method, where a pair of words has exactly the same sound except for one phoneme.