English Pronunciation: The American Way

Book Synopsis: This book and its accompanying audio book are 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. The audio book can be found here: https://www.nanheebyrnes.com/p/style.html Pronunciation is the foundation of learning any spoken language. Through the knowledge of pronunciation, we can say words in sentences correctly. And when we say words correctly, we are understood easily. Learning pronunciation begins with learning all the particles of English sound. The smallest unit of speech sound is called a phoneme. Specifically, a phoneme is a unit of sound that distinguishes one word from another. So, different phonemes make different words. For example, consider these words: rug, rag, and lag. ‘Rug’ means a floor mat, ‘rag’ means cleaning cloth, and ‘lag’ means to be left behind. The fact that the sounds /ʌ/ and /æ/, and /l/ and /r/ make different words demonstrates that these sounds are the phonemes of English. Different languages have different sets of phonemes. For instance, in Korean, /r/ and /l/ are not two separate phonemes, and /æ/ is not a phoneme at all. To Koreans, /æ/ is a sound a goat makes. Phonemes are abstract, categorical speech sounds. When phonemes are used in words, they may sound different from the sound in abstraction. Consider, for example, words like captain, butter and mountain, all of which have /t/ phoneme sound in common. But the /t/ has different sounds in these words. The T in ‘captain’ has the clear /t/ sound: /t/, but the T in ‘bottle’ is pronounced by tapping the back of the top teeth. This way of pronouncing /t/ is called the flap T: [ɾ]. And the T in ‘mountain’ is pronounced by blocking the glottis. This way of pronouncing /t/ is called the glottal stop: [ʔ]. These different sounds of the same phoneme are called allophones. Most English phonemes have a few allophones. And if we don’t use correct allophones, our speech will sound foreign or unrecognizable. Naturally, in this book 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. That is, instead of saying each word separately, we group words based on intended meaning units, and speak them as if they are one word. We pause briefly between each chunk of words. The method of pronouncing multiple words like one word is called connected speech. The sound modification is substantial in connected speech, but the change is systematic. Depending on the speech environment, some phonemes are eliminated, some phonemes are lengthened, some phonemes are moved to the next word, and some phonemes are transformed into entirely different phoneme sounds. In this book, we will learn all these aspects of English pronunciation. Specifically, in Part I, we learn the 15 American vowel phoneme sounds; in Part II, we learn 24 consonant phoneme sounds and their allophones; and in Part III, we learn sound modification in connected speech. Learning pronunciation is like learning a new body movement, like learning a ballet move or learning to throw a baseball. Mastering pronunciation is acquiring muscle memory. Naturally, in this book, we not only cover the theories of pronunciation but we also provide abundant practice material for the tongue, lips and jaws. 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. Through these phonemic consistency and phonemic contrast methods, we can master all the sounds of English.