
Identify and compare the two long U sounds in American English, and recognize how different spellings (u, o, oo) yield sounds like you, oh, look, and book.
Learn to distinguish and pronounce the short a and short e sounds through a guided set of one- and multi-syllable examples, with practice on listening, repetition, and mouth placement.
Explore long o versus short o sounds in American English with examples like won't and war, plus contractions and exceptions, including bureau, plateau, and dpo variations.
Learn the schwa plus r sound in American English, practicing its pronunciation across spellings with examples like water, what, were, world, weather, burglary, and elevator.
Master the r-controlled or sound across key words and spellings, from warm and board to four, war, wore, floor, door, and related forms like your, were, dormitory, territory, and corridor.
Compare r-controlled vowel sounds by analyzing near-identical words and practicing with repeated listening to guess the sound, using pairs like per, card, chord, care, heard, her, hard, hair.
Do you struggle to pronounce certain words or sounds in English? Or worse, do native English speakers struggle to understand what you're saying and repeatedly ask you to repeat yourself? Do you need to reduce your accent to be understood better in business?
Learning the different pronunciation sounds in the American English language is both easy and difficult at the same time. It's difficult because you often don't realize where you're making the mistakes and it's easy because once you find the errors, you can work on correcting them.
And that's my job. To help you find your weakness when it comes to American English pronunciation and then work with you to improve the sounds you make so people can better understand you.
I have a background in broadcast communications and journalism in America where I was born and raised. The last few years I've taught English abroad with a special focus on pronunciation/enunciation/accent reduction for the many ESL (English as a Second Language) students and clients of mine living all over the world. Their biggest complaints to me have been that they've been hindered by their English pronunciation to experience growth in their professional or academic careers.
Which made me realize that this is probably happening to hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. You know English yet people still can't understand you all of the time. If that's you then this course is for you!
What are you waiting for? Let's get started with this extensive vowels course!
P.S. How important is it to speak English clearly? Warren Buffet was referenced in a Business Insider article specifically about this topic. "Warren feels so strongly about developing our communication skills that when asked by recent college graduate Michael Hood which skill he recommends young people focus on, Warren replied — "Invest in yourself. The one easy way to become worth 50% more than you are now — at least — is to hone your communication skills, both written and verbal. If you can't communicate, it's like winking at a girl in the dark: Nothing happens. You can have all the brainpower in the world, but you have to be able to transmit it."