If you’re not living in a country that speaks English, learning to properly pronounce English can be difficult. Like all languages, English contains some sounds that may not exist at all in your language. Not only will you have to learn to pronounce these sounds, but you’ll have to learn to hear them as well.

Below are my 5 favorite online English pronunciation resources that will help you with anatomical demonstrations, audio and much more. We also recommend taking classes with our native English speaking teachers. Click here to register for a free trial class.

5. The Poetry Foundation is one of my favorite things to show my students for general English learning, and for pronunciation practice. I like to use poems in my classes to help my students learn English pronunciation because great poems have a focus on the sound of the English language. But the Poetry Foundation’s website also offers free mp3s of many of the poems being read by the authors. Here’s one of my favorites, by Robert Frost.

4. ManyThings.org offers great practice using minimal pairs. This is a pair of words that are almost exactly the same, but differ by one sound. Studying them is a great way for students to learn to distinguish and pronounce sounds that my be difficult for them to separate in a new language. The site offers recordings of the minimal pairs, as well as tests students can take of their ability to distinguish the sounds.

3. Rachel’s English channel on YouTube offers a great series of videos with detailed instructions on American English pronunciation, with explanations of how to move your mouth for particular sounds.

2. Here is a great video on YouTube for learning the American English accent 😉

1. The University of Iowa has a very ambitious project on its website here that allows you to choose specific sounds from the English language, and watch videos of them demonstrated by animations that show what happens inside the mouth when the sounds are formed, video showing an English speaker’s mouth as she says the words, and audio. It’s a great resource for very focused work on your English pronunciation.

Thanks! Please let us know if you have any more great resources to add to the list.