Learning the American Accent: Common Error on Words that Start with P

If you speak Arabic, Indian English, French, Italian, Russian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, German, Dutch, Czech, Hungarian, Ilocano, Indonesian, Portuguese, Urdu, Romanian, Tamil, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Polish, Punjabi, Burmese, Bulgarian or Yoruba as your first language, you may have an error pattern when you say words in English that start with the letter P.  Speakers from these language backgrounds will say the “p” sound as an unaspirated p, which means it does not release the stopped air.  This makes it sound like a ‘b” to the American listener.  For example, the word pie sounds more like bye.

Try saying the words below.  Put your hand in front of your mouth to make sure you release the stopped air.  You should feel a puff of air on your hand.

pie
paper
please
page
pop
pretty

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