The International Phonetic Alphabet

Vowel sounds are made by putting your tongue in a certain position in your mouth so that the air from your lungs can flow out freely.  For open vowels such as /ɑ/ as in "bought" you open your mouth by lowering your jaw.  For close vowels, you keep your mouth more closed.  To make the front vowels such as /i/ as in "beat" you put the tip of your tongue near the front of your mouth.  To make a rounded vowel, such as /u/ as in "boot," you round your lips into a circle.

These are the main vowels in my dialect of English, Canadian.

	unrounded front	unrounded central	unrounded back	rounded back
close	i beat			u boot
near-close	ɪ bit			ʊ book
close-mid	e bait			o boat
open-mid	ɛ bet	ǝ about	ʌ but	ɔ bored
near-open	æ bat
open		(a)	(ɑ)	ɒ bot, bought

Wikipedia has an IPA vowel chart complete with sound files you can click on for each vowel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA_vowel_chart_with_audio

The International Phonetic Association also has the most recent version of the alphabet on their website.

People who speak English dialects pronounced vowels differently depending on where they are from while in general, they pronounce most consonants the same.  In Canada, from Ontario to British Columbia most English speakers use Standard Canadian English.  Standard Canadian is marked by the cot/caught merger, Canadian raising (starting the vowel high in words such as bite and about) and the Canadian shift (lowering short front vowels).

In Canada and some parts of the U.S., the words "bot" and "bought" are pronounced the same.  U.S. dialects often say the two words differently, eg. bot /bɒt/ vs. bought /bɔt/.  In Received Pronunciation in southern England, "bot" is pronounced /bɒt/ with more rounding than in North American English, and "bought" is pronounced /bɔːt/ with a slightly longer sound than in North American English.

Another feature of Canadian English is Canadian raising.  The word "bite" is pronounced /bǝit/ with the tongue starting in the middle of the mouth.  In Standard American, the tongue starts lower /bait/.  In Canada, the word "about" can be pronounced /ǝbʌut/ again with the tongue starting a bit higher than other dialects.  In Standard American, it is pronounced /əbaʊt/ with the tongue starting and finishing a bit lower.  In some parts of the American midwest, people also say these words in the Canadian way.

Recently, young speakers have been lowering the short front vowels in something which is called the Canadian shift, pronouncing words such as "bit," "bet" and "bat" with the tongue somewhat lower than their parents.  The same thing appears to be happening in California.

There is also a northern cities vowel shift.  In the U.S. in northern inland cities such as Chicago and Detroit, for the last hundred years there has been a vowel shift, raising the vowel in "bat" /bæt/ closer to /bɛt/, and fronting the vowel in "bot" /bɑt/ to /bat/.

Canadian English has 12 vowel sounds.  Japanese and Spanish have only 5 vowel sounds.  Danish is said to have 26 different vowel sounds.

Here are the consonant sounds found in Standard Canadian English, American English and Received Pronunciation:

	bilabial	labiodental	dental	alveolar	postalveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
voiceless plosive	p pen			t tan			k kid
voiced plosive	b bit			d dark			g gift
nasal	m man			n nap			ŋ sing
voiceless fricative		f fan	θthin	s sat	ʃ should			h help
voiced fricative		v van	ð that	z zap	ʒ vision
approximant	w was				ɹ run	j young	w was
tap/flap				ɾ water
lateral approximant				l lad

Wikipedia has a consonant chart with audio.

English also has two affricates made by stringing together two sounds, an alveolar plosive followed by a postalveolar fricative: /tʃ/ catch /dʒ/ judge

In bilabial sounds, you put your lips together or round them into a circle.  In labiodental sounds, you touch your upper teeth against your lower lip.  In dental sounds, you move the tip of your tongue close to the back of your upper teeth.  Your alveolar ridge is the hard red ridge just behind your upper teeth.  In postalveolar sounds you move your tongue close to the very back of your alveolar ridge where it goes up.  The hard palate is the roof of your mouth behind that.  Velar is the soft palate at the very back of the roof of your mouth.  Glottis is the opening between your vocal cords where your voice comes from.

To make a plosive, you close off the air with your tongue, breathe out, and then release the closure.  To make a nasal sound, you lower your velum so the air from your lungs goes out through your nose.  To make a fricative, you move your lips or tongue close, but not touching, so that the air becomes turbulent making a hissing sound.  In approximants, you keep your tongue fairly far from the roof of your mouth to make a smoother sound with no hissing.

The English 'r' sound is often made by bunching your tongue up, and moving it up closer to your postalveolar ridge, but not close enough to create hiss.  This sound is actually fairly rare in the world's languages.  Mandarin Chinese has a retroflex fricative /ʐ/ where you bend the tip of your tongue backwards, and make a hiss.  Hindi has a retroflex flap /ɽ/ bending the tip of your tongue backwards, and tapping it against the back of the alveolar ridge.  Spanish and Japanese have lateral alveolar flaps /ɾ / keeping the sides of the tongue down, while tapping the tip against the alveolar ridge.  Arabic and Italian have a trill where the tongue is brought close to the alveolar, but vibrates up and down due to the air passing through.

In Canadian English and Standard American, the 'r' sound is pronounced at the end of words, eg. bar, car, dare.  In Received Pronunciation and Boston English, the final 'r' is sometimes not pronounced, i.e. /bɑ:/, /kɑ:/, /dɛǝ/.

Youtube Channels for Learning English

Probably the most popular English teacher on Youtube would be Lucy Bella Simkins of England.  Her channel is called English with Lucy.  She is from Bedfordshire near Cambridge, studied in London and Spain, before returning to Cambridgeshire where she lives on a farm.  She covers a wide range of topics: national dialects, phrases for speaking politely, and especially likes teaching pronunciation.  Her own accent is Received Pronunciation, the south England standard.

Learn English with TV Series is another popular channel.  They show you a short scene from a movie with English subtitles, and then one of their teachers picks out phrases, and tries to explain what they mean in different words.  They also replay a few pieces of dialogue, showing with spelling how the pronunciation is different from the spelling.  The main teacher speaks American English.

Kendra's Language School has videos giving a phrase in languages such as Spanish, Japanese, Indonesian or Chinese, and then giving the English translation.  We don't see the teacher, and there is no explanation of the meaning apart from the translation.

mmmEnglish is a channel hosted by English Confidence Coach Emma of Australia.  The teaching style is somewhat similar to English with Lucy, and the two have even collaborated.  The teacher at Learn English with TV Series pronounces etc. as /eksetera/, but Emma tells us the word should be pronounced /etsetera/ with a 't.'  Interestingly Emma pronounces the letter H as /heich/ rather than /eich/. Emma has recently stopped posting videos to pursue a separate opportunity.

The BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation, the United Kingdom's national TV and radio broadcasting service.  BBC Learning English is their channel for teaching English.  The videos do have a feel similar to a radio broadcast, professional presenters, but sometimes at quite an advanced level without so much explanation.

Speak English with Vanessa.  She is an American, a young mother.  She seems to really enjoy teaching, and likes to share amusing anecdotes as she takes us through common situations highlighting phrases, slang or idioms that might be useful.

Rachel's English.  Rachel is an American former opera singer who studied German and Spanish, but is now teaching English.  She talks about pronunciation, how to practice, how to do interviews and introductions and other topics.

Learn English with Rebecca * engvid.  Rebecca Ezekiel is probably an American.  In her videos, she talks about common mistakes and how to correct them.  She appears to be interested in teaching business clients and cross-cultural communication skills.

Easy English has short cartoons that show you conversations in context.  The voices seem to be reading from a script, and some of them are not native speakers, or might even be created using artificial intelligence.

Luke's English Podcast.  Luke Thompson is a teacher from England with a Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.  He was at one time an aspiring comedian, and sometimes does segments on jokes, along with more serious topics such as how to use chatgpt to study.

How to Learn a Language

Hina and Ali were two students who had recently arrived in Canada.  They had studied English a bit in their home countries (Japan and Saudi Arabia), but one of the reasons they came to Canada was so that they could improve their English, and use it in their work in the future.  How did they go about learning English?  What strategies did they find the most useful?

Hina was interested in Hollywood movies and music and books.  There was a TV in her home stay, so after school, she would bring a dictionary and notebook, and watch a show, trying to figure out what the characters were saying.  Some of the words came pretty fast, but she did her best to write them down, and maybe ask someone later about words she was unsure of.  If she watched the same movie again, she often found it easier to understand the second time.

Ali loved to play soccer, so he found a group that played on a local field, and would go once a week to play soccer with some other locals.

One of Hina's classmates pointed out that there were language exchanges both online and in the city she was staying.  She went to the website Meetup, found one of these exchanges, and went to check it out.  She also noticed that there was some English language cafes back in her home country.

Hina met a Canadian woman, Olivia, at her first exchange.  Olivia asked Hina what countries she'd been to, what her hobbies were, if she knew another woman who also came to the exchange.  It turned out that both Hina and Olivia had been to the United States, so they talked about that for a while.  Olivia liked books too, and she recommended that Hina try reading Harry Potter.  Hina hadn't met the other woman, so Olivia introduced the two of them.  After the exchange, they all went out for a coffee, to get to know each other better.  When Hina got home she told her host family about the coffee shop, and they said they'd been there too, and recommended the latte's.

Ali spent a lot of time listening to the people at school, his soccer buddies, his room mates.  He was trying to develop a feel for what sounds natural in English.  When he learned a new phrase he would note it down in his memo app, and then tried it out on his teachers at school or room mates.  Sometimes they'd smile, surprised he knew such things.

Hina had studied a lot about English grammar and translation in school in her home country, but now that she was in Canada, she was having to think, and respond quickly in order to keep up in the conversations she got into.  She told Ali that sometimes she felt nervous, meeting new people.  He replied that he understood how she felt, but the more they practiced speaking and listening, the easier it would become.

One of their classmates, Maria, told them about a Taylor Swift song, "Shake it off."

"What does that mean?" Hina asked.

"It means you should believe in yourself.  You don't need to worry about people who criticize or disrespect you.  Haters gonna hate.  That's their problem not yours."

"I think that's a good message.  Stay positive.  Do your best."

Hina and Ali weren't sure what 'haters gonna hate' meant at first, but just from the context, they guessed it meant that people like that are going to do what they want, and we shouldn't worry about them.

Ali sometimes had trouble understanding one of the guys at his soccer games.  That guy spoke quickly, and used a lot of slang.  He started asking,

"Could you say that again?  What does that mean?"

Eventually, the guy slowed down, and explained more.  Ali was grateful.

Meanwhile, Hina started getting more serious about taking notes.  She started watching lectures on Youtube, and after the lecture was over she'd try to type out a summary of what she'd learned.  She'd sometimes have to go back, and check, but it slowly got easier.

Every once in a while, Hina would go back through her notes, looking for phrases she could use more at school or in her conversations with her host family or people at the exchange.  She always tried to keep the things she was learning fresh in her mind.  She would sometimes organize her notes by topic making them easier to find.

She got to talking with Ali about "gonna."

"I think it means 'are going to.'  Haters are going to hate.  It's talking about the future."

"Or is it like a generalization?" 

"Yeah, maybe.  Same kind of thing."

She got out her grammar book from school, and looked up verb tenses and the future, and that helped her understand better.

"What do you think your weakest area is?" she asked Ali.

"I guess listening, especially like the news or lectures and stuff."

"I started watching lectures on Youtube."

"Ah good idea."

"What do you want to do when our course finishes?"

"I think I want to study some other subject using English.  Like computers or business."

"Oh that's a good idea."

When you learn a language, do you use any of the strategies that Hina and Ali use?