The other day, one of my students said that she was still confused when it came to the pronunciation of the verb endings in their past form. We know that when we convert a regular verb from its present form to a past form, we add the suffix ed. The question though is, why we […]
Confusing English pronunciation: R vs. L
A couple of years ago, I worked closely with one of the pronunciation coaches in a local college. My job was to listen to students and correct the sounds they were confusing. Each week we practiced a different sound so I noticed how people had their own challenges depending on their native language. One day, […]
What to do when others comment on your accent
Confusing English pronunciation: voiceless stops
The other day I was watching an Instagram live of a well-known guy in the marketing field. He was sharing his business strategy and talking about how he pitched to clients. The only thing is, instead of “pitching” he was saying “bitching.” Now, pitching to clients and bitching to clients are two very different things […]
Top five posts of 2022
Enjoy the experience, don’t dwell on the goal
The unpredictable word stress in English
I sometimes hear nonnative speakers of English with excellent levels of grammar and vocabulary still struggling with word stress. This is because some languages have fixed word stress, which makes pronunciation of words predictable. But in English this is not the case. That is, some words have their primary stress on the first syllable, while […]
Confusing English pronunciation: L vs. W
During my last trip to Bulgaria, I had a conversation with a person who was helping me with some paperwork. At one point, answering one of my questions, he told me that I could find more details about the topic we were discussing “on wine.” Although this sounded odd to me, I immediately knew that […]
How I started my career as a pronunciation coach
Commonly confused English words
When I was in college, one day during my math class the teacher was explaining an equation. One of my classmates, an Arabic speaker, raised his hand and asked a question referring to the remainder in the equation as a “reminder.” This slight mispronunciation made our teacher smile and she told him that he was […]