Paired words can make learning English pronunciation easier

I'm not a provider of "neutral global accent" training as called for by the international call centre industry. The intention of this post is to offer assistance to South Africans who are speakers of languages other than English and who are looking for help in pronouncing certain South-African English sounds which are known to be challenging. 

 

PRONUNCIATION OF ENGLISH VOWEL SOUNDS (MONOPHTHONGS): pair the sound you know with the sound you don't know

People who have worked with me will immediately recognise this exercise as a favourite of mine.  Those pesky English long monophthongs will be tamed by the simple pairing of the sound you know: the SHORT one, with the sound you don't know: the LONG one. Speaking words in pairs in this way helps the speaker to differentiate sounds, it's easier to hear and feel the similarities and differences.

Speak the word containing the short vowel sound followed by the word containing the long vowel sound.  You can slightly exaggerate the length of the long vowel sound in the second word if this helps you. Of course you would not exaggerate it in an unnatural way in everyday speech, but only for this exercise.

SHORT	LONG
ship	sheep
hill	heel
lip	leap
cat	curt
hat	hurt
hut	heart
cut	cart
bid	bead
bit	beat
live (to live)	leave
sit	seat
wedding	wording
cot	caught
of	off

Practise these paired words as often as you like.  Add new pairs that occur to you.
Practising at least twice a day will usually improve your pronunciation of these vowel sounds in as few as ten days.

As always, if you'd like to find out more about how I can help you or if you'd like to contact me, you can do so from my website.