English

Pronunciation American Accent Ear Training

Welcome to the Effortless English Show with the world’s number one English teacher, AJ Hoge, where
AJ’s more than 40 million students worldwide, finally learn English once and for all, without the boring
textbooks, classrooms and grammar drills. Here’s AJ with a quick piece to help you learn to speak fluent
English effortlessly.

Hi. I’m AJ Hoge, the author of this book, Effortless English: Learn to Speak English like a Native. I am also
the host of the Effortless English Show. Pronunciation. Pronunciation is so important. If your
pronunciation is bad, people don’t understand you. Even if you have great grammar, you know a lot of
grammar. Your grammar is perfect. It doesn’t matter. When your pronunciation is bad, people will not
understand you.

Even if you know a lot of vocabulary, a lot of words, if your pronunciation is bad, when you speak,
people will look confused. You know the face, right? When you try to speak English and people make
that face like they’re confused. Huh? Huh? They say, “Huh? What? Huh? Uh, I’m sorry. Uh, could you
repeat that?” It doesn’t matter if your grammar is good. It doesn’t matter if your vocabulary is good.

If your pronunciation is bad, people won’t understand you. This is why pronunciation is so, so, so
important. In fact, it’s probably the number one most important skill. When your pronunciation is bad,
you will get a bad score on the TOEFL. You will get a bad score on the IELTS. You see those tests, they
have native speakers. People from the United States or people from Britain, from England, that are
giving you the score and they listen to your recording or they interview you.

And when your pronunciation is bad, they give you a lower score. They, they can’t help it. It’s just
natural. You know, recently I told a story about visiting Vietnam. I visited Vietnam and I talked to a lot of
Vietnamese people. And one day, this girl asked me a question, Vietnamese girl. She asked me a
question. One sentence, just one sentence. She said one sentence. Asked me a quick question and
immediately I thought she’s a native speaker.

I, I think she, she lived in America. At least she lived in America for a while. Just one sentence. I didn’t
know about her grammar or vocabulary. Really not enough time. How did I know? How did I know her
English was great? Why did I think that? Simply because her pronunciation was so, so good. She had an
American accent. I mean nearly perfect. A nearly perfect American accent. So just 5 seconds, 10
seconds, I instantly knew, wow, her English is great.

And in fact, I did talk to her and in fact she had lived in America. She had gone to a university in the
United States for several years, so I was right, but I could tell just 5, 10 seconds, why, pronunciation.
When your pronunciation is great, people instantly respect you when you speak English. Just like me
with that girl. Now, I didn’t really know, I didn’t really know if she was fluent. I didn’t really know if she
had great grammar.

I didn’t really know if her vocabulary was great but just because of her pronunciation, instantly I had a
very high respect for her English ability. It’s the same. If you take these tests, IELTS or TOEFL. When your
pronunciation is excellent, you have a perfect American accent, they will give you a high score even if
you make grammar mistakes.

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 English Pronunciation American Accent Ear Training

Even if you have some trouble with vocabulary, they will give you a high score when your pronunciation
is really, really good. People will respect you if you’re in a job situation or travel, right? Do you know this
feeling? You’re traveling and you need help, and you ask someone for help. Maybe you’re in America.
Maybe you’re in Europe and you ask for help and the person looks annoyed, right, because they don’t
quite understand you.

You have a difficult accent and they go, “What? Huh?” And they make that kind of unfriendly face.
That’s because of the pronunciation. They’re having trouble understanding you. They can’t quite
understand you because of your pronunciation, because of your accent. So it’s so important. I think that
pronunciation, it’s, it’s really the, the top skill.

I mean you need some vocabulary for sure to communicate, but if you have some vocabulary, basic
vocabulary and you can speak very clearly, you have a great accent, you can communicate well even if
you make mistakes. So the next question is how, how do you do it? Well, in my next video, I’m going to
tell you some very specific techniques to improve your pronunciation.

In this video, I’m going to talk about a more general idea. It’s an idea that should be familiar to you. You
need to learn pronunciation with your ears. It seems obvious, right? It’s like music and to be a great
speaker, speak with a perfect American accent, you need to do ear training. I did some research about
pronunciation courses and I was quite surprised many, many pronunciation courses use a lot of text.

They use the phonetic alphabet. It’s called IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet and they try to teach
students good pronunciation with this alphabet. That’s a terrible, terrible way to improve your
pronunciation. It doesn’t really work. Why? Because pronunciation is music. It’s the music of the
language and to say the language correctly, to be good with the music of English, you first must hear it
correctly.

You must hear those sounds correctly. There are lots of little sounds, lots of little sounds that make a
perfect American accent. Right now, you probably don’t hear most of them. They’re probably many
sounds that you’re not quite hearing correctly. There’s also a rhythm to English. This is so super
important yet I look at most pronunciation courses, they don’t teach rhythm, but when you get the
rhythm of English correct, when you speak it correctly with the correct rhythm, people will understand
you much, much better just by improving that, super important.

So you’ve for to train your ears. You have to be like a jazz musician. See jazz musicians, they learn to play
by ear, right? They can hear some song and then they can play it back to you immediately all by ear.
They don’t need to read music. Well, that’s how you have to learn pronunciation. Another thing I found
in a lot of pronunciation courses, they just teach like one word at a time or maybe 2. That’s really
strange like they’ll teach you, sit, sat, sit, sat and you’ll just say those 2 words again and again.

Well, that’s crazy and that’s, that’s not a nor- … Normal conversations have full phrases, full sentences.
You need to pronounce full phrases, full sentences correctly with a great accent. In fact, you really need
to pronounce full paragraphs, several sentences. You need to be able to talk and talk and talk. Lots, and
lots, and lots of words. Lots of sentences and all the time your accent is perfect or great. Practicing just
one or two words at a time, that’s a terrible way. It’s not going to help your pronunciation. It doesn’t
work. It’s also super boring.

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 English Pronunciation American Accent Ear Training

Ear training. Why, why is this familiar, because for us English, what’s our first most important skill?
Listening. Listening is super important for fluency, for learning to speak quickly and effortlessly. For
learning vocabulary, for learning correct spoken grammar. Well, listening is also super, super important
for pronunciation. But there’s a little difference. For pronunciation, you have to change your focus a
little, right?

When you’re listening, when you’re just trying to learn English, the words, the meaning, you want to
speak fluently, well, then you focus your listening more on meaning, right? But for pronunciation when
you’re trying to prove your accent, when you want that perfect American accent, well, then you need to
listen a little differently. Learn the meaning yes, but then you must focus on that music.

Now, in my new pronunciation course, I teach you which elements, which parts to focus on. I mentioned
rhythm, that’s one, right? Rhythm. Rhythm, it’s, it’s really the pattern of pauses. If I just talk without
words, if I say nonsense, you can still hear the rhythm of English. “Na nan a nan a na na nonu.” That’s
the rhythm right there. “Na nan a nan a na na nonu.” “Na nan a nan a nananonu.” Tada da da.

See, that’s rhythm. That’s rhythm. That’s super important for your accent. That is so important. This is
probably the number one biggest pronunciation problem I hear from most English learners. They’re
using the wrong rhythm when they speak English. They’re using the rhythm of their own language.

See, Japanese for example has a quite different rhythm. Even I don’t understand Japanese but I can hear
the rhythm if Japanese. I can hear the “dadadadudu”. I can hear the rhythm and it’s different than
English. The problem is if a Japanese person speaks English and they use the Japanese rhythm, it sounds
so strange and it’s actually difficult for most people to understand.

Well, it’s the same thing. If you’re a Spanish speaker, if you use Spanish rhythm with English, it will
sound strange and will be hard to understand. So just learning to hear the rhythm correctly and then of
course speak with the correct rhythm, this will help so much with your accent, with your pronunciation.
Now, of course there are other parts of English as well.

You have rhythm. You have pitch. That’s when you go up and down like singers, right? It’s a scale. “aaa
aaa aaa aaa uuuuu aaa aaa”. The up and down. The rising and the falling. Well, again, English has a way
doing that that’s different than Chinese. It’s different than Spanish. It’s different than French. It’s
different than German, et cetera, right?

You need to learn to hear it and then do it but you got to hear it first. You have to hear it perfectly first
then you’ll be able to do it much more easily. What else do we have? Of course we have a, a pattern of
stress or loudness, right? So we stress certain words. This also is part of rhythm by the way. Well, again,
English has a way of stressing words, of getting louder or softer. It’s different than other languages. You
have to learn to hear it and then you’ll later be able to do it. So, so important.

And then finally, finally after all of that, you finally will get to those individual sounds. Now, each person
has different sounds that are difficult. For some people that R and L sound. Oh, those 2 are tough, hard
to do them correctly. Especially the American R is quite strong, right? We Americans, we like to
pronounce our R’s quite strongly and especially the end of words like computer, water.

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 English Pronunciation American Accent Ear Training

We have a nice R sound. For some people that’s very tough. Even if you have an R sound, for example
Spanish speakers, they have an R sound but the Spanish R is not quite the same as the American R. if you
pronounce it like Spanish, it will sound a little weird, water. It just … It won’t sound correct and
therefore it will be harder to understand so you need to learn each of those.

In my course, I’m going to teach you all those little sounds, those common difficulty sounds, vowels and
consonants both, but the thing is the little sounds, those are the last things you learn in my course.
You’re going to start with the rhythm. I’m going to train you, teach you and train you to use the correct
rhythm. I’m going to teach you and train you to use the right pitch, the right up and down, the right
stress.

And then finally, there’s what I call just the feeling of a language. And it’s hard to say what that is exactly
but there’s a certain emotion, a certain feeling. It’s kind of psychological. It’s emotional. That is also
super important. I listen to Italian. I, I hear a kind of a … There’s kind of feel to Italian. It’s hard to say
exactly what it is but Italian has a certain feeling and Italian speakers, they move their body a certain
way when they speak.

It’s different than Americans who speak English. Japanese people same thing. I can just watch Japanese
people speaking just their body movements different than Americans when we speak English. You’ve got
to learn that too, that feeling which includes the non-verbal part. It seems strange but, but that non-
verbal part and that emotion will help your pronunciation a lot. It will give you that great perfect
American accent.

All right. So in my next video, I’ll send to you in a few days, I’m going to give you a few more very specific
techniques to help you improve your pronunciation. These techniques are things you can do any day
with any audio to practice, train and improve your pronunciation so that you get that perfect American
accent, so you’ll be respected every time you speak English.

All right. Finally, get my audio book. My audio book, it’s, it’s my same book that I showed you but it’s the
audio version. It’s me personally reading the book. Start listening to that. You can listen to my
pronunciation. You can start hearing the rhythm, the pitch, all of those things. My audio book is free
now. Free. Free for you (laughs).

Okay. So just go to effortlessenglish.com. That’s my book website, effortlessenglish.com. Middle of the
page, enter your email. That’s all you need to do. Enter your email, effortlessenglish.com. I will send you
my free, the whole thing, my free audio book. My entire book that you can listen to. All right. The next
video is coming in a few days. I’ll reach you those specific tips. For now effortlessenglish.com. Get my
free audio book. See you soon. Bye for now.

4
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