Pronunciation
guides.
Short and practical. Every example word is a button — tap it and hear it in the accent you have chosen.
American vs British pronunciation
The five differences that account for most of the gap between American and British English, each with words you can play in both accents.
IPA for English learners
What the phonetic symbols in a dictionary actually mean, with the vowels English learners confuse most.
Minimal pairs practice
Pairs of words that differ by exactly one sound, and how to use them to fix the contrasts you cannot hear yet.
Silent letters in English
Which letters go unspoken, the patterns behind them, and the words that catch learners out.
English word stress
Stress placement is what makes a word sound right. The rules, and the pairs where stress alone changes the meaning.
How to pronounce TH
English has two th sounds and most languages have neither. Where the tongue goes, which words take which one, and how to stop substituting s, z, t or d.
Pronouncing -ed endings
The three ways -ed is said at the end of a regular past tense verb, the one rule that decides which, and a full word list to practise with.
Pronouncing -s endings
Plurals and third-person verbs take three different -s sounds. The rule is about voicing rather than spelling, and it takes about a minute to learn.
Commonly mispronounced words
Words that trip up learners and native speakers alike, each with the sound people actually get wrong and audio you can play in your own accent.
How to pronounce names
Names are the hardest words to read aloud. How to find a name’s real pronunciation, why spelling misleads, and the names people most often get wrong.
Connected speech
Native speakers link, drop and weaken sounds between words. Learn the four patterns and fast speech stops sounding like a different language.
Indian English pronunciation
What distinguishes Indian English from British and American English: retroflex consonants, pure vowels, syllable timing, and which features are worth keeping.
IELTS speaking pronunciation
Pronunciation is a quarter of your IELTS speaking band. What the descriptors reward, why your accent is not penalised, and what is actually worth practising.
English vowel sounds
English has around twenty vowel sounds but only five vowel letters. The full set with audio, what each one sounds like, and the pairs learners confuse most.
Homophones in English
Hear which words are genuinely identical in sound, which only nearly are, and which look identical on the page but are said two completely different ways.