Using phonetics to help improve your pronunciation

In last week’s blog, I mentioned pronunciation and the phonetic alphabet, (also known as the phonemic chart). I talked about how pronunciation is an important factor in being understood, and how learning and practising individual sounds (phonemes) can help you to achieve this.

Unlike some other languages (such as Spanish for example), English spelling is not phonetic. This means that very often, you can’t look at the spelling of an English word to know how it sounds. Learning English can therefore be very frustrating, given that the same letters and groups of letters can be pronounced in completely different ways. For example, take a word like ‘able’. Looking at it for the first time, you would not know how to pronounce it. And then when you see ‘able’ in a word like ‘acceptable’, the letter ‘a’ is pronounced differently. And what about the letter ‘o’ in ‘comfortable’? The first ‘o’ is pronounced as an ‘uh’ sound, and the second one is not pronounced at all!

On the other hand, the phonetic alphabet can make learning how to pronounce words a lot easier. This is because each symbol in the phonetic alphabet represents a different sound, and this symbol/sound relationship does not change. So when you hear a word and write it down using the phonetic alphabet, you immediately know how to pronounce it when you read it. Then when you look back on it, you still know how to pronounce it and can practise it on your own. You can also look up any word in a good dictionary and know how to pronounce it by reading the phonetic symbols next to it. Another bonus is that learning the phonetic symbols makes you more aware of, and therefore more able to practise, the different sounds. It can be time consuming learning a partly new alphabet, but in my experience, it is worth it in the long run.

Before we go any further, one thing I must emphasise is this: there are many native regional and country accents in English, and all are as valid as each other. If anyone ever tells you that one accent is better than another, this is simply not true. However, the accent I’m focussing on is 'Standard' Southern British English (SSBE), which is more or less my own accent and usually what you find in dictionaries.

Please note that for non-native speakers, sounding 'perfect' is not the goal either. It is very difficult to have no foreign accent at all. Let’s also not forget that your accent is part of who you are, and there’s no shame in that. So if you can be understood, are doing your best and also continuing to learn and improve, then, at least in my opinion, that is all that matters.

Below is a chart of all the phonemes (sounds) used in the English language. As you can see, many of the consonant symbols look the same as they do in the English alphabet. I will therefore focus on the vowel sounds of English first, and then move on to looking at only the consonant sounds that differ from the letters of the standard English alphabet.

Incidentally, there are phonetic symbols for every sound of every known language! So if you are learning other languages, you can check out the phonemic charts for the pronunciation of those languages too.