How to improve your American accent: Reduced sounds

When working on speaking English correctly, we often focus on correctly pronouncing all of the sounds in words.  Mispronounced sounds can make your speech difficult to understand.  It's important to understand which sounds in your speech contribute to your accent.  (To learn more, try a free screening or sign up for an assessment of your speech.)  When you want to sound more natural when speaking English, however, it is helpful to know that in flowing speech, native speakers leave out or reduce some of the sounds.  Pronouncing everything can make you sound unnatural.  Just like linking, where sounds run together, reducing is a way that speech flows more easily.  Here are some examples:

to becomes t':  today = t'day, tomorrow = t'morrow, to go = t'go
We run the word "to" into the following word or syllable, dropping the vowel oo.  Listen to the examples below.

the jumps on to the next word:  the store = th'store, the matter = th'matter, the weather - th'weather
We shorten the word the and run it onto the following word when the word after "the" is stressed.  We use vowel schwa on this word in most contexts, not vowel ee (the = thuh, not thee).  You can hear this in the recording below.

are loses its vowel sound, or sounds more like er:  what are = what'r, who are = who'er, those are = those'r
We reduce the word are and tack it on to the previous word in some cases.  It sounds more like a short vowel er.  Listen to the recording below.

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