A very warm welcome to you to this Level 1 Course on British English pronunciation. Through these Courses we will not only learn a lot of English words, but more importantly, we will learn how to pronounce them correctly. We often mispronounce a lot of common words … often due to a lack of knowledge. Moreover, we will learn to speak English the way English was meant to be spoken. It is a language that spans almost the entire globe and regional influences have penetrated the pronunciation. There is English spoken the English way and then there is American English, Indian English, Australian English, and a whole lot of others.
Often, people confuse accent with vocabulary with pronunciation. Let us not confuse them.
An accent is a distinctive way of pronouncing a language, especially one associated with a particular country, area, or social class. It comes from regional, ethnic, and geographical differences. Thanks to colonisation, the English took their language all across the world and even after they left, the language remained. Over time and due to cultural, regional and ethnic diversities, distinctive accents emerged within the same language.
Vocabulary is the body of words used in a particular language. It is the number of words that you know and use. It often indicates command over a language.
Pronunciation is how a word sounds. Of course, the pronunciation might change depending on the influence dialect and region has.
There are largely two distinct dialects of spoken English … British and American, with Indian English gaining in popularity with the sheer number of Indians who speak English quite fluently. Here we will learn to pronounce English the English way, and not the American way or the Indian way or the Chinese way or the Australian way or any other way.
This Course is about learning how to pronounce some common English words that are often mispronounced due to regional, cultural and geographical influences. This is not about mastering the English language. We will go through a bunch of words in this Course and learn to pronounce them correctly … the English way.
An average adult knows about 20,000 words. About a tenth of them are very common words like “a”, “an”, “the”, “but”, “on”, “off”, “no”, “yes”, “above”, “below”, “about”, “act”, “add”, “adult”, “man”, “woman”, “good”, “bad”, etc. These are mostly simple words with the possibility of mispronunciation relatively limited. Along with the words we will go through in this Course, chances are that you will become a bit more fluent in the language than you possibly were before. By the end of Level 3 of this Course, you will have learned more than 1,000 words and increased your command of the English language substantially.
All the best for embarking on this journey.