How do you pronounce specifically

It's not "sHUR-burt. While commonly mispronounced "nitch," this word comes from the French word nicher , which means to nest. Accordingly, the correct pronunciation is "neesh. It turns out we've all been calling the Boston Celtics by the wrong name. Incorrect: "SELL-tick.

The word itself means "trickery" or "deception," and its pronunciation is obligingly tricky. That delightful Italian dish of grilled bread with garlic, olive oil, and tomatoes actually takes a hard "r.

The technically correct way to say this sounds so wrong that it may not be worth doing. The word, which refers to one's strong point, is actually pronounced "fort," not the commonly used "for-TAY. When you say "liability," you probably include all the right syllables.

Let's just settle this debate once and for all: The actual inventor of the GIF says it's pronounced "jif. Watch him make the determination himself skip ahead to if you're short on time. It is, of course, your prerogative to mispronounce any word you choose. Just don't get mischievous and hold me liable. Plus, English vowels make it really tricky to know how to say a word.

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. Did the speaker sleep or slip? Did he hurt his chin or his shin? If you can hear the difference, it will be easier to speak the difference. There are many guides to get you started in learning to listen. We have some great articles here about learning to listen from movies , songs and music and podcasts.

You can also find listening exercises online, like this one from Rong-chang. The pronunciation practice at Many Things is really slick, especially its huge selection of lessons on minimal pairs. Minimal pairs are pairs of words like sleep and slip, that are only different by one sound. You can click on each word to hear a complete sentence with each, then quiz yourself in the second box and click the correct answer.

When you want to listen to authentic English instead of pronunciation exercises, you can watch videos on FluentU. FluentU takes real-world videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons. Unlike traditional language learning sites, FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the English language and culture over time. FluentU has a variety of engaging content from popular talk shows, nature documentaries and funny commercials, as you can see here:.

FluentU makes it really easy to watch English videos. There are captions that are interactive. That means you can tap on any word to see an image, definition and useful examples. Learn all the vocabulary in any video with quizzes. You can start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, by downloading the app from the iTunes or Google Play stores. You probably already use a dictionary to translate English words, but online or digital dictionaries can offer many additional benefits, including pronunciation guides.

Website iOS Android. You may have already used Google Translate during your English studies. Google Translate is an easy-to-use translator that also provides pronunciation guides for single words and whole sentences. You might want to listen to the word being used by someone in a real-life scenario.

FluentU and its many video lessons can let you do just that! The program comes with its own kind of pronunciation dictionary, but with a few extra features. Every video lesson in FluentU comes with special interactive captions.

You can click on any word and instantly listen to its pronunciation and learn its definition; at the same time, you can also see and hear the word being used in different videos. In-context means that you know and think about all the other factors involved, so for the words you learn in FluentU, you get a lot more information about them.

Forvo is a user-generated pronunciation guide in which native speakers submit audio clips of themselves saying certain words or phrases. You can look up a word, learn its definition and listen to how different people from different places say it.

There are also pronunciations for whole sentences and phrases as well! Forvo is well-liked because real people are the ones speaking the words. You can also see how certain speakers are ranked in their pronunciations; the pronunciations with the most likes may be the ones you should focus on. Because the audio submissions can come from all over the world, you can listen to how the same word is said in different regional accents; the importance of this will be discussed in more detail later on.

The dictionary offers detailed definitions and information about the words you look up, as well as clear, good-quality audio pronunciations. You can also download the free app version of this dictionary, which comes with some special features. WordReference is a helpful multilingual dictionary.

It supports translations for a lot of languages, so if your native language is included, you can find words in English by writing it out in your language, or search for English words and get translations in your language. WordReference also lets you listen to audio pronunciations in different English accents, more than many other dictionaries.

Most online dictionaries may just offer one British pronunciation and one American pronunciation, but WordReference also specifies other specific accents such as Irish, Scottish, American Southern and even Jamaican. The definitions are written in an easy-to-understand manner and you get plenty of example sentences that show you how the word is used.

The dictionary has two pronunciation options: you can listen to the word spoken in British English or in American English. The pronunciations are done by different male and female humans not robots! This dictionary offers most of what the other listed dictionaries have, but with some extra audio features. Once you look up a word, Collins dictionary also provides audio pronunciation of the word in its different forms such as in past tense or participle form.

There are even audio pronunciations for the example sentences that show the word in use, which can be very useful when you want to practice speaking in whole phrases. With each definition section, you can hear either the British or American pronunciation of the word. In some cases, there may even be a video clip of a real person saying the word!

One thing to note is that the example sentence pronunciations are done by a text-to-speech robot instead of a human. When you speak, you move your mouth. How you move your mouth affects how you pronounce a word.

The first step to correcting your mouth shape is to notice it and pay attention. There are a few ways you can check that your mouth and lips are making the correct shape:. Just so we're all on the same page. Pronounce derives from Latin pronuntiare , a union of the prefix pro- "forth" with the verb nuntiare "to report or declare". To pronounce a word, syllable , digraph , or letter is to sound it aloud according to the established rules governing the language—or according to the unconventional rules of dialect.

Here are a few basic examples of the verb: "The students practiced pronouncing the new spelling words"; " Colonel is pronounced the same as kernel "; "The k in know is not pronounced. The verb, however, is also generally used to mean "to say or speak a word or speech sound correctly," as in "The teacher had trouble pronouncing the student's name.

Additionally, it is used to make reference to a particular person's way of pronouncing words: "The spelling bee's pronouncer has flawless pronunciation. If told to articulate your words, you might be mumbling or slurring, or perhaps speaking too slowly or softly so that listeners cannot clearly hear and identify each word because you are not being articulate. Articulation is the related noun form of the verb articulate. It refers to the act of expressing something in words—for example, "The collection of essays is an articulation of the author's most personal thoughts.

Enunciation also shares this sense, as illustrated in these examples:. Actors try out a range of salty brogues that pitches much of the dialogue in a sea of confusing accents.

However, [Johnny] Depp takes the opposite approach with precise enunciation of every line in what is best described as an accent-less accent. He blazed through his set, delivering each line, each syllable of each word with perfect articulation and fervor.

Enunciate is a synonym of both articulate and pronounce. It can refer to the act of saying a word or parts of a word fully and distinctly, as articulate does, or correctly, which pronounce signifies. So it's a word finding difficulty. The fact that she's speaking, that she's enunciating as well as she is.

She's coordinating the movements of her mouth. All much better than, you know, we heard how she was doing before.