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Pronunciation

Websites aimed at pronunciation

There are some really great websites dealing with pronunciation and, everything related to this like phonemic charts, transcription or the International Phonetic Alphabet. Some excellent examples are listed below.

Mr. Thorne Does Phonics ...and even more! Absolute MUST. This gifted young teacher is covering the complete area of pronunciation, all packed in short, clear, well made and very entertaining youtube videos. Bookmark this site and/or subscribe to his YouTube Channel.
University of Iowa Phonetic Flash Animation Project they're offering here a very good site showing incredibly instructive animations of the English phonetic sounds.
Spoken Skills Speaking Activities Very good place to hear all the vowels, consonants and diftongues ánd train them. There is a very nice option to listen and to record yourself.
English Central


One of the best! English Central is an amazing place at the web to work effectively on your pronunciation. It's a very user friendly site with almost no learning curve: you open the page, register quickly and everything that follows is self explanatory. If you have no teacher to help you to guide you, this site is invaluable. Unfortunately the site also created Premium account which means that there will be a lot functionality on the site which is not accessible for free users. Till now however it still is possible to access their basic pronunciation tool.
Listen and Write

Online tool to listen to various stories, at different levels and the option to type what your hear . Highly recommended to train you listening &writing skills. Material is very attractive and anyone will be able to find texts to his needs. level and interest. Interface is quite intuitive and offering lots of editing options for those who wish. Main source of material is the VOA, Voice of America. This site is linked to Listen and Write and offering additional language learning resources of high quality.
Cambridge University Press English

Some funny and/but absolutely instructive presentations. Especially the animations about word–stress and sentence–stress are very instructive!

BBCLearningEnglish

Pronunciation tips, theory, exercises, quizzes and much more. Wonderful site!

English Online from the British Council

Very instructive online, interactive, flash pronunciation tutor

Howjsay.com from Fonetics.org

An English Pronouncing Dictionary with Instant Sound

shiporsheep.com

English language pronunciation practice with minimal pairs Simply mouse over to hear the words spoken. Great website!

Foniks

Learn to read, write, spell & speak English with phonics & Instant Sound. Excellent website

usaAmerican English pronunciation

Game-like Minimal Pair Practice using Flash and MP3 Files

Phonemic chart. British Council

Small little flash-application to exercise consonants, vowels, diphtongs and triphtongs and, get to know the phonemic symbols at the same time

Manythings.org

A very good place for exercising anything language related including their pronunciation exercises. A site to explore though!
Antimoon.com

Phonetic transcription help: earn and practise the IPA (International phonetic alphabet) sounds.

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3tips to improve your pronunciation

Listen and speak
Listen to native speakers: radio, film, video or soap, humor or documentary. It cannot be emphasized often enough how basic this is!
Important:it is very advisable to choose something you can really relate to, at least the first few months of the study.
Listen regularly every day. Don't do anything else but this: watching and/or listening, at least 20 minutes every day.

Speak! Use free (online) audio-recording tools (video-recording can be used as well.) Record yourself while talking, reading some text. Listen carefully afterwards to yourself. Free online audio/video-recording tools include: Vocaroo and MailVU. Absolutely fool-proof tools!

 

There are various ways to immediately find out the right pronunciation of any English word. You can bookmark Dictionary. com or download the Say It gadget for Windows' sidebar (Vista and above.)
There is however a growing amount of add-ons (Firefox) and extensions (Google Chrome) who are doing this job. Just Google a bit.

 

Flashcard applications are not only a great tool to memorize new words, you can use them as well to train and improve your pronunciation.
You can do this either by searching and finding the flashcards online or by creating them yourself, using the record-option of your flashcard program.
It's a lot more work, BUT...it's a very good and productive way to study.

Or... use Quizlet: Quizlet automatically adds sound to your words and phrases. In English and a handful other languages!

 
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Applications to learn, practice the English phonetic alphabet
Sephonics
windows
(also availabel at the downloadpage of this site)		Quoting them:
Sephonics 1.0 is a Windows program that will teach you the English phonetic alphabet, which is a subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA, in short). Sephonics includes seven different exercises for practising English pronounciation and the phonetic alphabet, including a phonetic memory game to relax between the lessons! There are also exercises where you learn to match a sound to a phonetic sign, transcribe from phonetic text to ordinary text, and much more! Sephonics is freeware.
  
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