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FAQs
Speaking
| 1. What is an accent? |
Broadly stated, your accent is the way you sound when you speak. There are two different kinds of accents. One is a 'foreign' accent; this occurs when a person speaks one language using some of the rules or sounds of another language. For example, if a person has trouble pronouncing some of the sounds of a second language that they are learning, they may substitute similar sounds that occur in their first language. This sounds wrong or 'foreign' to native speakers of the language.
Another kind of accent simply represents the way a group of people speak their native language. This is determined by where they live and what social groups they belong to. People who live in close contact grow to share a way of speaking, or accent, which will differ from the way other groups in other places speak. You may notice that someone has a Texas accent - for example, particularly if you are not from Texas yourself. You will notice the change since it is different from the way you speak. In reality, everybody has an accent - in somebody else's opinion! |
| 2. Why do foreign speakers have trouble pronouncing certain sounds? |
People have trouble with sounds that do not exist in the language (or languages) that they first learned as a young child. We are born capable of both producing and perceiving all of the sounds of all human languages. In infancy, a child begins to learn the important sounds in his or her language, and to disregard the rest. By the time you are an year old, you have learned to ignore most distinctions among sounds that do not matter in your own language. The older you get, the harder it becomes to learn the sounds that are part of a different language.
German speakers learning English, for example, are likely to have trouble with the sounds found at the beginning of the words "wish" and "this" because these sounds do not exist in German. So they may pronounce them instead as v and z - similar sounds that do occur in German. On the other hand, the German words schöne ('beautiful') and müde ('tired') contain vowel sounds that do not exist in English - so native English speakers learning German tend to pronounce these words with an 'English accent'.
It is well known that native speakers of Japanese often have trouble with the English l and r sounds. This is because the Japanese language does not distinguish between these two sounds. For this reason, Japanese speakers learning English find it hard to produce the right sound at the right time, and they also have a hard time hearing the difference between English words like "light" and "right". An English speaker would have similar problems trying to speak and understand Thai, which distinguishes between 'aspirated' and 'unaspirated' p. To see the difference, hold your hand in front of your mouth and say the words pot and spot. If you say the words naturally, you should feel a small puff of air against your hand when you say the p in pot but not when you say the p in spot. In English, p is always aspirated (that is, it has that puff of air) at the beginning of a word like pot, but not when it occurs after s. For an English speaker, trying to say pot without that puff of air is extremely difficult, and it would also be very difficult to hear the difference between a word like pot with and without that puff of air. In Thai, however, aspirated and unaspirated p are as different as English l and r. Using one in place of the other completely changes the word you have uttered (for example, from 'forest' to 'split'), just as replacing l with r in English would change lip to rip. Because English has different rules for the use of aspirated and unaspirated p, an English speaker learning Thai will make the same sorts of mistakes that a Japanese speaker makes while using English l and r.
It is not only individual sounds that can cause a person's speech to sound foreign. Sound patterns also differ from language to language. For instance, an English syllable may begin or end with a cluster of consonants, as with the str and ngths of the word strengths. On the other hand, in Japenese, a syllable contains only one consonant followed by one vowel - as in ma or ki. (The one exception is that a syllable may also end with an n, as in san.) For this reason, pronouncing English consonant clusters is hard for Japanese speakers, and they may produce a vowel sound between the consonants in a cluster.
Finally, the sentence structure differs from language to language as well. In Russian, for example, it is not necessary to have a connecting word like is in the sentence The house is very large. For that matter, no word corresponding to English the would appear in the Russian version of this sentence either. But a native Russian speaker learning English who says only House very large will sound distinctly foreign.
Sometimes two languages will allow the same sentence form, but in different situations. English, for example, allows a word or phrase to be moved to the front of the sentence in certain contexts:
(l) Spaghetti I like (but lasagna I hate).
This same word order is allowed in Yiddish; the difference is that Yiddish allows it to be used in a much broader range of contexts. So a native speaker of Yiddish, seeing that English has the same word order possibility, might say something like:
(2) My brother has no idea how to save money. A house he is buying now.
Here, He is buying a house now becomes A house he is buying now, just as in (l) I like spaghetti becomes Spaghetti I like. Both (l) and (2) would sound fine in Yiddish, but only (l) sounds normal in English; in (2) the speaker seems to have an accent.
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| 3. Are some sounds harder to pronounce than others? |
It depends on whether we are talking about first- or second-language learning. Native speakers of a language do tend to master some of its sounds before others. In English, p, m, n, h, and w are among the first consonants acquired by children, while z, j, v, and the two th sounds (as in think and this) are among the last to be mastered. But all of the sounds of a language are generally acquired before puberty by a native speaker. Typically, it's only non-native learners that have long-term difficulty with a sound. When you learn a second language, you may have difficulty with sounds that do not occur in your native language; for example, some languages have trilled r's, 'clicks' made with the tongue as air is taken in, or sounds made much farther back in the throat than English sounds. Surprisingly, though, the hardest sounds to learn may be those that are similar to, but just a bit different from, sounds in your native language. It seems to be very difficult to overcome the tendency to keep using the familiar sounds from your native language. In this sense, your native language causes 'interference' in your efforts to pick up the new language. |
| 4. What does it take for me to speak like a native speaker? |
There are three stages of learning spoken English. In the first stage, you will learn correct sounds and pronunciation of words like a baby age from 1 to 3. In the second stage, you will learn how Americans
speak short sentences like a child from age 4 to 6. Last, you will improve your fluency and be able to speak English subconsciously. If you learn the all stages correctly, you will speak like fluent English like a native speaker from 3 to 6 years. Therefore, please be patient and understand that it takes a child 6 years to communicate effectively.
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| 6. Should I get rid of my accent? |
Some people may have a heavy accent which troubles people from understanding you and some people have a light accent.
If you have a heavy accent, I would recommend you to improve pronunciation to help you reduce your accent. If you have a light accent and your accent does not affect your career, you may want to keep
your accent because your accent can be your identity.
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| 7. How can Pronunciation Patterns help me improve my English pronunciation? |
Pronunciation Patterns is based on phonics, a method for teaching speakers of English to read and write that language. Phonics is the most effective solution I have found to improve
English pronunciation.
Let me give you a mathematical calculation why the phonics solution is the most effective solution to improve your pronunciation. There are over 10,000 words you need to master to be able to communicate English effectively for everyday life. It means that you need to master the pronunciation of over 10,000 words
and you need to remember the phonetic transcript of 10,000 words. If you learn the 100+ patterns in Pronunciation Patterns which cover about 80% of English words, you will only need to remember about 2,000 phonetic transcripts instead of 10,000.
Let us say that you learn only two patterns and 30 sight words like "have", "pint", etc which don't follow any patterns in 15 minutes a day, you will finish
all 100 patterns and 2,000 in less than 2 months. Wow, you will have learned and mastered the pronunciation of over 10,000 words in 2 months. On the other hand, if you just learn and practice 30 word pronunciations a day by using phonetic transcripts only, it will take you over 300 days to learn all 10,000 pronunciation. Also, you will find out that you will
forget most of them after 300 days unless you have a really good memory.
In addition, Pronunciation Patterns has many advanced features like auto-play, recording and play back, your own word list, calendar, online resources, sentences, etc, to help you improve your pronunciation. Because we want our customers to love our product before buying it. Therefore, we highly recommend you to try our demo to find out whether Pronunciation Patterns is the right solution for you.
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| 9. Why is learning spoken English so hard? |
There are the following reasons why learning spoken English so hard assuming that you have mastered the written English:
1. If you didn't learn spoken English from a native speaker at the first time or the correct pronunciation, you are more likely to have learned it wrong and you will have to relearn it, making learning more difficult because you have to rewire your brain to get rid of your old, wrong pronunciation. Therefore, It is very important to learn the correct pronunciation from software like Pronunciation Patterns or a native speaker.
2. If you learn spoken English at an old age, you will have to build your mouth muscles to pronounce some sounds which do not exist in your native language. Because you don't have those sounds, you will have the tendency to find a similar sound to replace it and the replaced sound will become your accent. Again, it is very important to learn the correct pronunciation at first.
3. If English is not your first language, often you will have to translate first before you can speak out your ideas. Not only can it cause delay, but also can it be embarrassing if you mispronounce words or misuse words or phrases. Because of this, English learners become afraid of speaking out even more.
Still not convinced, read this interesting article "Reading and Brain."
Solutions:
1. Use Pronunciation Patterns to learn the correct pronunciation and practice them until you build up the mouth muscles and your subconscious accept them as the right pronunciation.
2. Learn American accent tips in Pronunciation Patterns and try to speak like an American. It is not necessary to speak like an American. However, it will help your career if you speak more like an American than a foreigner because your colleague will understand you better. Here is an example, "Can you spell it?" If I just pronounce the sentence as one word at a time, it will be difficult for American to understand you because they get used to hear it as "Canu spellit?"
2. Talk to native speaking friends and let them correct you. You would rather to make one-time mistake than life-time mistakes. |
| 10. Can Pronunciation Patterns help me speak English like Americans? |
Yes, Pronunciation Patterns has 30 accent tips to help you understand how Americans really speak. For example, Americans sometimes say "what is this?" as "whats this?" and sometimes as "Whatis this?". This is called sound linking and you need to learn when to link two words to sound like an American. Download our demo and you can access all 30 accent tips free.
In addition, Pronunciation Patterns Network Edition has an advanced build-in media player which can play all the lessons in slow speeds to help you hear how American link words together exactly.
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| 11. Can Pronunciation Patterns help me eliminate my accent completely? |
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Pronunciation Patterns certainly can help you reduce your accent, but to eliminate your accent will depend on you own.
Based on my personal experience, to eliminate your accent, you have to have a strong desire, be a really good listener, have a good memory, and have a talent to imitate sounds. That is why most musicians can speak multiple languages without much accents. Also, the older you become, the more difficult it will become to eliminate your accent because your brain is already wired for languages and it is almost impossible to rewire them for a new language.
However, I don't want to discourage you from trying to eliminate your accent. If you use Pronunciation Patterns, I will promise you that your pronunciation and accent will improve, you will speak like an American, and people surrounding you will tell you that. It is very important to remember that you goal is to improve your communication, not to be an actor/actress. By the way, even professional actresses like Penélope Cruz still have accent. |
Listening
| 12. How can I improve my listening? |
To improve your listening, I highly recommend you to improve your pronunciation to help you improve your listening if you are an adult. If you have learned the correct pronunciation of a new word, you will be surprised that you will hear the new word on TV, radio, and daily conversation. However, if you learn the wrong pronunciation of a new word, you will never hear anywhere unless you speak of it. For example, the word indict is pronounced as indite. If you learn the correct pronunciation, you will hear the word on TV News.
Pronunciation Patterns list similar words to help you improve your listening. For example, Pronunciation Patterns lists words lake, lick, lack, luck, lock, look, etc to help you hear the differences among those words.
Pronunciation Patterns has build-in media player which can play audios and videos in slow speeds to help you improve your listening.
Last, because English has the soft schwa sound and some soft ending consonant sounds which are very hard for non-native speakers to pick up. Don't be frustrated because there is no much for you to do. Nevertheless, you can learn our accent tips to learn how to reproduce them yourself even you don't hear them. Eventually you will hear them and it will take a long time.
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| 14. Why can't I hear Americans say the article a, an, and the? |
The articles are very hard to be spotted or heard by non-native English speakers because they are pronounced as the soft schwa sound and linked with the previous ending consonant sound. In addition, many languages don't have the articles. For example, I would like to have a cup of coffee. Here is how Americans would say "I'd liketo havea cupof coffee." You can see that rather speaking one word at a time, Americans group two words together to speed up and you don't hear the short words such as would, to, a, and of."
To learn how to speak like an American, you would need to download our free demo and learn the accent tips. |
| 15. Why are there so many different pronunciations for one English word? |
There is not one definitive answer for the question. I understand that it can be confusing when it comes to choose which pronunciation to use. For example, the word hot can have American hot and British hot. I highly recommend you to learn just one and stick with it. You will understand people who use different pronunciation from the context. If you use Pronunciation Patterns, you will learn American pronunciation. |
| 16. Why do I feel Americans speak so differently from me? |
If you feel that way, most likely you mispronounce many words. When we learn English, we have the tendency to read English words as written. In fact, many English words contain silent letters and some letters in English words does not sound as written. That is why spoken English is very hard to learn. If you are an auditory learner, you may pick up your mistake quickly. However, if you are a visual learner and have a strong ego, you may stuck with your wrong pronunciation. Therefore, I recommend you to try our demo to learn the rules such as silent rules in the program. |
Reading
| 17. Can I use Pronunciation Patterns to help my children learn phonics? |
Even though Pronunciation Patterns was designed to use phonics to help non-native English speakers improve their pronunciation, it has been known that some of our customers use it to teach their children as young as just 3 years old to learn new words. The latest Network edition allow you to set the word size to help you narrow down the words for your children. Click here to learn how to teach phonics to your children with Pronunciation Patterns.
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| 18. Why should I use Pronunciation Patterns to learn or teach phonics instead of other software? |
Unlike other phonics software, Pronunciation Patterns provides non-linear learning and teaching solution. You can simply go to the Rules section in the program to learn any rules you will need to learn. Also, unlike other solutions, Pronunciation Patterns groups 4,000 words by the rules to help you see the patterns and practice them. In addition, Pronunciation Patterns links to online animation to make learning phonics fun and interesting. |
Sales
| 20. Which Pronunciation Patterns edition should I purchase? |
It all depends on your needs. If you just want to improve pronunciation or learn phonics, the Professional 3.0 will be sufficient. If you want to improve your pronunciation and reduce your accent, the Professional 4.2 is your choice. If you want to have a lifetime English learning tool, you may want to consider our latest Network edition 5.0. |
| 22. I have read the reviews on Amazon.com. How do I know they are written by your paying customers? |
I perfectly understand your concerns about validity of our reviews because improving pronunciation and accent is an extremely difficult task. That is why we choose Amazon.com as our platform. The very first review was written by my customer
Qu Wen who encouraged me to put Pronunciation Patterns on Amazon.com after he found it extremely helpful. After learning that you have to register as a Amazon.com customer with your credit card information to post review, I decided to ask my customers to post their reviews on Amazon.com only to support us
when I receive their feedbacks. So far, I have collected over 60 reviews from all walks of life. If you see Real Name icon, the person is using his/her real world identity. If you see Amazon Verified Purchaser, it means that the person purchase Pronunciation Patterns from Amazon.com. If you have any questions on any reviews, just contact us and we will show you the purchasing receipt and email from the person to prove the review is posted by our paying customer.
I also learned from my customers that Pronunciation Patterns can be overwhelming to use at first because it has too many functionalties which are designed to be effective and easy to use. Therefore, I always want my prospective customers to download the free 30 day trial first to see if it is suitable for them because we don't want our users to waste their money on a product which can not offer a value to them. If you have any questions on how to use the program, please feel free to contact me. |
| 23. I find Pronunciation Patterns too expensive for me to purchase because I am a student, could you offer me some discount? |
I understand that Pronunciation Patterns can be expensive for students to purchase because I have been a student myself. However, I always work with students to help them purchase Pronunciation Patterns.
Because sometimes we pay more than $2 for you to just visit our site, it becomes difficult for us to offer the program at a lower price than $180 while we need to make a profit to keep improving the program for you. Therefore, we offer free upgrades to people who post their experiences on Amazon.com to support us after using the program for 45 days. |
| 25. Why should I purchase your product over another similar product? |
I think that you should buy a product you find it most helpful to you. Pronunciation Patterns can be the software solution for you if you
have tried to improve your pronunciation for years and nothing has worked for you. Personally, I, a visual learner, have been trying years to improve my spoken English myself and I found phonics is the most effective solution for me. I only hope
that you can give Pronunciation Patterns a chance by trying our demo. Also, I have learned that some of my customers purchased many different solutions before they found Pronunciation Patterns. Therefore, it may help you save hundreds of dollars by simply trying our free demo.
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| 26. What is your return and refund policy? |
We are striving to provide the best return and refund policy to ensure that you are satisfied with Pronunciation Patterns. We offer 45 days money back guarantee if you are don't see improvement after 30 days or don't love Pronunciation Patterns. We highly recommend you to try our demo first before purchasing it. |
| 27. How long will I receive my CD? |
All CDs will be shipped within 2 business days and it takes 5 to 7 business days for USPS to deliver the CD within the US. If you reside outside the US, it will take about 10 to 15 business days. However, we can offer you the online subscription edition to use while you are waiting for the CD. |
| 29. Has Pronunciation Patterns been used by institutions or schools in a group setting? |
| Yes, we are proudly to say that Pronunciation Patterns is being used not only by institutions like American Express and schools like Lake Summer Community College, but also received very positive feedback from them. If you represent a school or institution, please contact us and we can forward their positive feedbacks to you. Also, please contact us for the volume discount information. |
Technical
| 36. Does Pronunciation Patterns have speech recognition to check whether I pronounce words correctly? |
Yes, the latest Pronunciation Patterns Network Edition use Mircosoft Speech Recognition technology to help you check your pronunciation. If you use Windows Vista or 7, you will have a better result than Windows XP. For Windows XP users, you will need to downloaded and installed MS Speech Recognition Engine if not installed previously.
To use our speech recognition feature, just say "Start Listening" to activate the feature. Then you can speak any words or sentences to check your pronunciation. If you speak sentences, please learn our American tips on sound linking first because your will have to apply the sound linking rule to have the program recognize what you are speaking of. For example, you should say "spellit" instead of "spell it" or "I didit" instead of "I did it". |
| 38. Can I just purchase the online membership? |
Yes, you will be able to purchase the online membership. Unfortunately, since the accent reduction and grammar solution is not finished yet, we don't want to offer it to you right now. It will be available shortly - approximately two months, so please come back and make the most of it. |
| 41. I got malware on my machine, can you help me get rid of the malware? |
The reason I posted this question is that my computer got infected by a vicious malware and toke me few days to get rid of it. I was really frustrated with those hackers because they will attack any web sites to implement those malwares. Here I want to share with you how I get rid of the malicious malware.
1. Download exefix_vista.zip which will fix your exe association if you find out that when you can't run any applications but a virus-like program. Let me explain this to non-technical people. Sometimes, malwares will change the exe information in your registry to make your Windows run its program only. Therefore, you can't run any other program to get rid of this malware. You can google File Assocation Fix to find the right fix for your Windows if you are not using Vista.
2. Download Malwarebytes, a Anti-Malware software, from CNET and run a quick scan to try to get rid of malwares.
3. If you still see weird things like redirect your web browser to unknown web site or anti-virus web sites, it means that you still have malwares on your computer. Now, you need to do the following steps.
4. Restart your computer and press F8 and then restore your computer to an early point at which you think you didn't have malwares.
5. After restore your computer to that point, do a quick search to list all the files installed after the date in which you think you got malware and remove or move the files which look suspicious to you to a different location.
6. Lastly, restart the program and hope for the best. By the way, the last malware I got is called ave.exe which directs to many vicious web sites. |
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If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact us.
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- If your friends don't tell you have improved your spoken English after using Pronunciation Patterns for 30 days as my other customers wrote on Amazon.com, you will get your 100% money back.
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- Created by Xin Wang MBA who has been through learning English himself and have improved his oral communication skills to complete the Carnegie Mellon MBA program, ranked one of top 20 MBA programs in the US by Business Week and Wall Street Journal.
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- Our customers include students from top universities, supervisors, stroke survivors, hearing impaired, etc. Our customers ranges from 6 year old children to 70 year old aphasia patients.
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- Download our free ePal edition to help you improve your pronunciation. Yes, it is free and registration is required
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- 45 day money back guarantee to ensure you are 100% satisfied with our products.
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Over 80 reviews posted on Amazon.com by our customers to support us. 100% satisfaction guaranteed.
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- Serving customers with different language and professional backgrounds and native English speakers since 2005 and received 100% customer satisfaction.
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- Using by institutions like American Express India, GE India, Marshall University, Lake Summer Community College, etc to help their employees and students. Contact us to learn how happy our customers are and our unbelievable volume discount.
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We recommend you to use our demo for 30 days to see whether Pronunciation Patterns is the right software solution for you because we believe 100% customer satisfaction.
