My name is Mandy, and this is our 168th episode. With help from a linguist, we finally get down to the bottom of Kathy Bates' questionable 'American Horror Story' accent. American English Pronunciation Course. The stressed syllable in this word is the second one. Everything. This sometimes makes spoken English hard for students to understand. You can purchase one in the store or consider 1:1 accent training.) If you would like to access even more pronunciation practice, consider a subscription to our full online practice site. If we say /proh-DOOS/, even if we are giving longer duration to the second syllable, the first syllable still seems a bit emphasized with the true pronunciation of Long O. This word is filled with 3 A’s but we don’t pronounce them all the same way because of syllable stress. My name is Mandy, and this is our 168th episode. Natural spoken English contains reductions – sounds that change and disappear when spoken at normal speed. Today we're returning to the concept of schwa. Subscribe to the full site for audio and video recordings to practice these and other sounds and patterns to improve your American English pronunciation. Here's Kathy Bates's Bananas 'AHS' Accent, As Explained By A Linguist Music This messes up the rhythm of the word, and in pronunciation of the American accent, Rhythm. Many English learners pronounce each word clearly, to get the pronunciation perfect – but native English speakers don’t do this. Banana. GA accents usually have some degree of merging weak vowels. Naaaa. Most General American accents, but not British ones, have undergone vowels mergers before /r/: the nearer–mirror and hurry–furry mergers, and some variation of the Mary–marry–merry merger, a total three-way merger being the most common throughout North America. Hi again, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast. David ate our last banana so here’s a photo of a banana. (Don't have an assessment? Many sounds link to practice materials or further information. JSTOR Daily provides context for current events using scholarship found in JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, books, and other material. You can use this chart to identify which pronunciation targets you can work on to improve your American Accent. Banana. Which has the AH as in bat vowel sound. We publish articles grounded in peer-reviewed research and provide free access to that research for all of our readers. Is.