American Accent Training American Intonation Do's and Don'ts Do Not Speak Word by word Bob... is . on.. the lone Connect Words to Form Sound groups the foun Use staircase intonation Ba Start a new staircase ou that information, generally a noun 4 Do not speak word by word. If you speak word by word, as many people who learned"printed"English do, you'll end up sounding mechanical and foreign. You may have noticed the same thing happens in your own language: When someone reads a speech, even a native speaker, it sounds stiff and stilted, quite different from a normal conversational tone. 4 Connect words to form sound groups. This is where you're going to start doing something completely diferent than what you have done in your previous English studies. This part is the most difficult for many people because it goes against everything theyve been taught. Instead of thinking of each word as a unit, think of sound units. These sound units may or may not correspond to a word written on a page Native speakers don' t say bob is on the phone, but say [babizan the foun. Sound units make a sentence flow smoothly, like peanut butter- never really ending and never really starting, just flowing along. Even chunky peanut butter is acceptable. So long as you don' t try to put plain peanuts directly onto your bread, you'll be OK