Potentially problematic areas

The sounds of your native language affect your pronunciation of English, and you may be lucky enough to have many sounds similar to the English ones. However, not all of us are that fortunate, and we need more practice!

First, you should try to identify the sounds and combinations that are the most difficult for you.

There are several ways to identify the problems you might have:

• Ask a friend, preferably a native speaker, to listen to you and observe the 'errors' you make.

• Use the tapes and pronunciation courses in PUHUMO (Oppio ground floor) to record your speech - repeat the words and sentences after the model and then compare your pronunciation with that of a native speaker. You can use any spoken material as a model (TV programmes, films, the news).

• The Headway course books in PUHUMO have notes on some sounds that are especially problematic for speakers of certain languages.

• At Speech Accent Archive you can listen to samples of English that have been read by speakers from different language backgrounds, and examine the most common problems. You can compare various native speakers to the speakers of your own language, and highlight the problematic parts of the sample.

• On the Easton English Pronunciation page (About Pronunciation section) you will find links to pages listing common errors of speakers of other languages. The lists are not very extensive, but they may be helpful.