Introduction You may have to listen to this Cd a couple of times to catch everything. To help you, every word on the Cd is also written in the book. By seeing and hearing simultaneously, you' ll learn to reconcile the differences between the appearance of English( spelling) and the sound of English(pronunciation and the other aspects of accent) The CD leaves a rather short pause for you to repeat into The point of this is to get you responding quickly and without spending too much time thinking about your response Accent versus Pronunciation Many people equate accent with pronunciation. I don' t feel this to be true at all. America is a big country, and while the pronunciation varies from the east Coast to the West Coast, from the southern to the northern states, two components that are uniquely American stay basically the same-the speech music, or intonation, and the word connections or liaisons Throughout this program, we will focus on them. In the latter part of the book we will work on pronunciation concepts, such as Cat? Caught? Cut? and Betty Bought a Bit of Better Butter; we also will work our way through some of the difficult sounds, such as TH, the American R, the L, v, and z. Which Accent is correct?5 American Accent Training was created to help people"sound American"for lectures, inter- views, teaching, business situations, and general daily communication. Although America has many regional pronunciation differences, the accent you will learn is that of standard American English as spoken and understood by the majority of educated native speakers the United States. Dont worry that you will sound slangy or too casual because you most definitely won't. This is the way a professor lectures to a class, the way a national news- caster broadcasts, the way that is most comfortable and familiar to the majority of native " Why Is My Accent So Bad? be seriously hampered by a neg tant point early. First, your accent is not bad; it is nonstandard to the American ear. There is a joke that goes: What do you call a person who can speak three languages? Trilingual. What do you call a person who can speak two languages? Bilingual. What do you call a rson who can only speak one language? American. Every language is equally valid or good, so every accent is good. The average Ameri can, however, truly does have a hard time understanding a nonstandard accent. George Bernard Shaw said that the English and Americans are two people divided by the same Some students learn to overpronounce English because they naturally want to say th word as it is written. Too often an English teacher may allow this, perhaps thinking that colloquial American English is unsophisticated, unrefined, or even incorrect. Not so at all! Just as you dont say the T in listen, the Tt in better is pronounced D, bedder. Any other pronunciation will sound foreign, strange, wrong, or different to a native speaker