Pronunciation of 'ed' sounds

Tear and desert ‘Tear’ and ‘desert’ are words that are pronounced differently to indicate their meaning. The noun tear, which is a drop of fluid from the eye, rhymes with the word dear. ‘She shed a tear when her cat died.’ But when we use ‘tear’ as a verb, meaning to rip, it's pr ...  Show more

Gonna and Gotta In informal English conversation, we often use shorter, versions of common word combinations. One of the most common is ‘gonna’ - short for ‘going to’. When we say the words ‘going to’ very quickly, they run together and sound like ‘gonna’. So ‘Are you going to wa ...  Show more

The key to learning to speak like a native is learning to open your ears to the sounds and rhythm of American English. As you tune your ear to the sounds of English you'll be better at pronouncing them correctly. 

To go deeper into training your ear to hear, join P ...

Let's practice pronunciation together!

We'll work on pairs of words with confusing pronunciation - in which the same combination ...

'c' or 's'? Learn how to spell words that begin with a /s/ sound. 

Today I want to help you fix a pronunciation problem that I hear in a LOT of students' English, and that is saying things like this:

The mistake is with t ...