The Get Rid of Your Accent book is an audio training manual to master British English Pronunciation. Get Rid of Your Accent is an English Pronunciation and Speech Training Manual.
What is an accent?
An accent identifies which part of the country or world you come from. There are different types of accents: Scottish, Russian, Spanish, educated, strong, slight, and many others.
According to the latest edition of the Rough Guide to England, “England is a country where accent and vocabulary can stamp a person’s identity like a brand.” Indeed, the biggest single factor that affects people’s first impression of you is your speech and accent.
Why do we speak with different accents?
From our childhood, we learn to speak by imitating our relatives, teachers, and friends. The way we speak and our pronunciation are influenced by the environment we live in.
Sounds are created by our speech organs, namely lips, tongue, and jaw.
The positions of our speech organs are different for different sounds. For example, we drop the tongue in order to pronounce the English (el sound as in “cat”. In order to pronounce [wl as in “way” we put our lips in a tight whistle.
Many people begin to learn English when they are adults. They may not automatically position their speech organs as native English speakers will. Moreover, they often don’t know how to correctly position their speech organs in order to produce clear English sounds because not all English sounds exist in other languages.
For example, there is no [w] in Russian, and many Russians pronounce [v] instead of [w]. Another example is that in Russian they don’t have long vowels, and therefore there is a natural tendency for Russians to shorten long English vowels and diphthongs. Instead of “two sheets of paper” they most likely will pronounce “two shits of paper”. Instead of saying “the room is dark”, they are likely to pronounce “the room is duck”.
Speaking, writing and listening are taught in most colleges, but phonetics and pronunciation classes are not always part of the
Book Features
5 things this book will help you with:
- Neutralising your accent within 3 months.
- Making your English clear and easy to understand.
- Making you a confident communicator and public speaker.
- Increasing your personal confidence and overall image.
- Improving your job prospects.
