A Guide To Learn English Language

We know that Eng­lish is spo­ken mostly in the west­ern coun­tries like USA, Canada, UK etc. Eng­lish is the mother tongue of the peo­ple who live here. Eng­lish became one of the most impor­tant lan­guages because of the glob­al­iza­tion. If you are deal­ing with busi­ness then speak­ing in Eng­lish is very impor­tant to deal with the for­eign issues. Peo­ple in coun­tries like India also speak in Eng­lish but the accent is dif­fer­ent from the west­ern­ers. So peo­ple try to improve their accent and try to speak in Amer­i­can accent but this is not pos­si­ble if you just watch the Eng­lish movies or read Eng­lish news papers.

Pho­net­ics is the basics for the west­ern accent. If you are really moti­vated to speak in Amer­i­can accent or west­ern accent then it can be done very eas­ily by learn­ing the pho­net­ics. I too tried to speak in Amer­i­can accent many times by mim­ic­k­ing the dia­logues of Eng­lish movies but I never able to speak in real world in that way. There are sev­eral soft­ware which will train you to speak in Amer­i­can accent very eas­ily. Recently I tried the soft­ware “Sephonic”. I want to say that, this is a won­der­ful soft­ware which helps in learn­ing Amer­i­can accent. Through this soft­ware I learned all the basics of pho­net­ics and with in less period of time I was able to speak in that slang.

This soft­ware starts with very basics of pho­net­ics like pho­netic alpha­bets then match­ing sound and pho­netic sign then speak­ing the cor­rect pho­netic word (word in pho­netic alpha­bets), spelling the cor­rect pho­netic sound, cor­rect spelling and sev­eral other kinds of prac­tice ses­sions which really helps us to speak in Amer­i­can slang. This is very easy to use, sim­ple, small soft­ware but very much use­ful. Let’s see each fea­ture separately.

The pho­netic alphabet:

This intro­duces the pho­netic alpha­bet. If you click the pho­netic signs you will hear which sound they rep­re­sent. You can also see a word that includes the rep­re­sented sound and a tran­scrip­tion of the word will be shown on the screen.

Match sound and pho­netic sign:

In this you will hear a sound that you are to match with the pho­netic sign that rep­re­sents it. The sound is repeated three times so that you will have enough time to hear which one it is.

Which spelling is correct?

Here you will see a tran­scrip­tion of a word along with three alter­na­tive ways to write the word with ordi­nary let­ters. The assign­ment is to choose which one of the alter­na­tives is cor­rect by click­ing on it. If the clicked alter­na­tive is the cor­rect way to spell the word the box will turn green or yel­low based on the num­ber of times you have tried. A cor­rect answer on the first try gen­er­ates a green box, the sec­ond or third tries gen­er­ate a yel­low box.

Which sound can you hear?

In this you will see a word and four pho­netic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of dif­fer­ent sounds. Your task is to decide which of the four sounds that is pro­nounced in the given word. It is also pos­si­ble to hear how the word and the alter­na­tive sounds are pro­nounced. To pro­vide con­text a sen­tence that includes the given word is dis­played on the screen.

How is the word spelled?

This gives you an oppor­tu­nity to prac­tice how to read tran­scribed text. You will see a tran­scribed word and when you know which word it is you type it in the box using the key board.

How is the word transcribed?

Here you get to tran­scribe text your­self. You will see a word spelled with ordi­nary let­ters that you are to tran­scribe using the signs in the charts to the left f the screen.

This is free soft­ware which you can down­load from the fol­low­ing URL: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/Home-Education/Sephonics.shtml. This soft­ware is really help­ful to learn Amer­i­can accent and to speak with­out any shy­ness in your office. It gives you the much needed boost in your com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills.