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I promise you if you can stop making these three really common mistakes, you will stop sounding like a non-native a lot faster than you think.

Let's learn what these mistakes are in this lesson. Hi, everybody. This is Elliot from ETJ English.

Now, lots of you might know already that I have had hundreds and hundreds of students and usually when people join my course and they first start learning with me, they take something called an accent evaluation.

This is where I listen to them speaking and I tell them exactly what their problems are. I tell them what needs to be fixed, what sounds good, what sound bad?

And generally just kind of give some advice. There are three really, really common mistakes which most students tend to make three really common mistakes which we spend a lot of our time working on throughout the course.

There are more than just three really common mistakes, but these three are the ones which I would say about 90% at least of my students who join my course have problems with.

So I want you to see do you make these mistakes? Maybe you've worked on perfecting them already. But if you do make these mistakes, I'd suggest you start working on them now.?

Problem number one is the most common. This is the issue which almost all of my students have when they join my course. And this problem is the difference between /i/ and /i?/, so we have a short vowel /i/ and a long vowel /i?/.

You might notice the difference in my face shape already when I pronounce these two sounds /i/ /i?/... The most noticeable difference is the second sound is a long vowel and I smile a little bit more.

The reason I'm smiling more is actually because my tongue is going higher in my mouth. So when we raise our tongue higher, the mouth will close more because the jaw comes up and we create more of a smiling shape to produce an /i?/ sound. But when we produce the /i/ sound, this is where my students have a real big problem.

I've had students from all over the world having problems with pronouncing words like itch, because it sounds like each or hit because it sounds like heat.

And the problem might not be that they're making the vowel long when it's supposed to be short. Sometimes the problem is just the tongue position and the mouth shape. The two sounds are very, very similar. For the long vowel the tongue is higher as I said and for the short vowel, the tongue is just below the top teeth. So it's just near the sharp edge of the top teeth kind of floating in the mouth and we don't smile as much.

Look at the difference. /i/ /i?/, you'll notice when you pronounce the /i?/ sound that the sides of your tongue should touch the side of your top teeth, but when you produce the /i/ sound that doesn't happen.

It's more of a relaxed shape with the mouth. So try a few words like hit heat, itch each, bitch beach and see if you can do it.

Some of my students it takes them months to get this right. They take training, they take lessons with me, but they really find it hard to get the this sound consistent. And they might find that sometimes they're pronouncing it right, but not all the time. This is where muscle memory training becomes really important.

The next sound which every non-native has a problem with is the th sound. Well there's actually two, there's the voiced th /e/ and the unvoiced th /θ/.

Now to pronounce these two sounds, the tongue has to go between the teeth (like this, like this), but I have many many students who pronounce the word (this as this think as think or think). (4:09)

And it's a real issue because a native pronounces the th sound correctly with the tongue between the teeth every time. Now there are some parts of the UK where is more common in a dialect with an accent and to say (think instead of think). Part of London have the style of speaking but it's not recommended for a learner to speak like this. I recommend someone who's learning a British accent to pronounce the th sound with the tongue between the teeth every time.

Now remember when we pronounce the th sound if we're talking very very fast there is a technique I taught in a previous lesson, which is that you can just tap the back of your top teeth, just tap the sharp edge of your top teeth to create a /t/ sound very, very quick, okay but it's really, really useful to do this uh when you're talking fast because sometimes it really is quite difficult to get your tongue between the teeth every single time but please try and do it when you can because you will stop sounding like a non-native really fast if you can consistently do this.

It's very, very easy to know that someone is non-native or that their English pronunciation isn't very good and it's usually with the th sounds that we can tell immediately. And the other number three is quite a broad a big issue. It's the letter r when we do and when we don't pronounce it now the r is (/r/) in words like red rat travel, right? But sometimes we don't pronounce, for example a word like work /w??k/, we say work, not work /w??rk/.

Now lots of students when they first start learning with me, they have a problem where they pronounce the r quite a lot. They'll say work /w??rk/ or course /k??rs/ or here /h?r/ instead of here /h??/. [感覺是英式和美式的區(qū)別?]

Also they might say my teacher /?ti?t??r/, instead of my teacher /?ti?t??/, I say teacher, ok or doctor.

Now we've talked about the schwa /?/ 中央元音 [挺重要的，可以研究下]?lots on this channel that's because it's about 30% to 40% of British English and it replaces the letter r a lot particularly at the end of words, tongue relaxed in the middle of the mouth and the mouth is very relaxed. It's the easiest sound to make in English. It's just /?/ in a word like teacher, doctor. Anytime a word finishes with an /?r/ American sound or international English sound, which you might have learned in school. British people pronounce it as /?/, but also the r is replaced by lots of different vowel sounds.

For example, as I said, work, the r is replaced with an /??/ sound. course, the r is replaced within /??/ sound, even with a diphthong 雙元音 such as air /e?/.

For example, the word share /?e?/ we don't say share /?er/ we say share, we're replacing it with what we call it diphthong a word like car /kɑ?/. We don't pronounce the r the end.

So vowels replace the letter r a lot. And when my students first join the course, they find it really difficult to know when we do and when we don't. A quick tip is that we actually only pronounce the letter r when there is a vowel sound after it.

So a word like travel, yes we will pronounce the (travel). That's because after the r is a vowel sound. But a word like pork, for example, we don't pronounce the r because after the r is a /k/, which is a consonant sound, okay so we're not going to pronounce the r and also of course we don't pronounce the r at the end of words really important to know that.

So I guess the final point 3, what I've been trying to explain is that my students have a problem with when we do and when we don't pronounce the letter r.

But that real problem generally is how to pronounce the vowels, how to use the vowels to replace the letter r.

Now there are lots of other very, very common mistakes which my students from all over the world make such as things to do with intonation and stress uh other particular vowel sounds, which are very, very common that they make mistakes with um...