1 A guided tour of commonly mispronounced words: Introduction

This course is concerned with words that are most commonly pronounced wrong by non-native English speakers. When you click on any word, you can see its pronunciation written using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is standard among contemporary English dictionaries.

If you can't read IPA yet, don't worry; you can listen to the pronunciation in both American and British English after clicking on the loudspeaker icon.

Throughout the course, if you are logged in, you can click on any word in any chapter, not just the highlighted words. Try it, click on any word in this paragraph. It will show its meaning, pronunciation, and word forms.

You can also use keyboard shortcuts, if you have a keyboard connected. Arrow keys and h, j, k, l keys can be used to move around. The keys a, s, d, and f put a star on a particular meaning, sentence, pronunciation, or word form, respectively. You can also move between word forms in the widget using the i and o keys and open the dictionary popup using the u key.

This course mostly consists of short overviews of words like the following:

height – the pronunciation is as if it were written “hight”. The “e” is there just to confuse foreigners.

wolf – this is one of very few words in which a single “o” is pronounced as [ʊ] (as “oo” in “good”).

Greenwich – you may know this word from the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) standard. Just remember that there is no green witch in Greenwich.

colonel – is there a kernel inside a colonel (a military officer)? Well, at least in pronunciation, there is (they are pronounced the same).

When you come across a pronunciation that you find surprising, use the red star to save the word for later. You can review all your saved words in the Vocabulary section in the left menu.

Of course, feel free to star (using the blue star) as many meanings as you wish, too, if you are unsure about a particular word. Reviewing the meanings with their example sentences really helps, as does checking the dictionary for all meanings.

The same goes for word forms. If you are ever in doubt about an irregular past tense or a spelling variant, use the green star, and the Vocabulary section will help you remember them in no time.

After finishing this course, you will have learned over 300 words. If you master them all with the help of the Vocabulary section, good job! Your knowledge of English pronunciation will be better than that of the vast majority of non-native speakers.