pronunciation tips

Hello. Now, one question I'm often asked is ' what's the best way to improve my pronunciation?' Well, my first piece of advice is to try to learn... ...each different sound of English. And in order to learn each different sound of English... ..it's very helpful to learn each different symbol... ..that represents these sounds of English. ' Why do we need different symbols?' ' Why do we need different symbols?', I hear you ask Well, in writing English we use 26 letters of the alphabet But there are more than 26 sounds in English. In fact, there are over 40 sounds in English. And it's not very easy to show these... ..using only the letters of the English alphabet. So, there's a system which uses a group of symbols. Now, some of these symbols are the same as letters and some of them are different. You can use the symbols to write out the pronunciation of words and in many dictionaries for English learners you will see the pronunciation of words written out using these special symbols. To show that it is the sounds which have been written and not the letters the transcriptions are written between slashes. For example, the pronunciation of the word "pet" is written like this In this example, the sound symbols look exactly the same as the letters. You can only tell that we're talking about pronunciation... ...and not spelling ...because of the slashes. However, some words look very different when you see their pronunciation. Look at this one: Have you got any idea what that is? It's the word 'knowledge' And as you can see, it's very different from the spelling. So this is why it's very useful to learn the symbols. You can't always match the letters of a word to the sounds of that word. So, if you want to improve your English pronunciation... ...you should learn the different sounds. And if you want to learn the different sounds... ...you should learn the symbols. And here's some good news: If you know the symbols and the sounds, you'll be able to use many dictionaries to find the pronunciation of any word in English And you won't even need a teacher So, to help you learn the symbols and sounds why not watch my videos here? Good luck, and happy speaking.