🔊 Audio — Hear Every Sound & Drill

Note: the sounds themselves can't be stored as files here, so this page uses live links instead. Every link below opens audio you can play immediately — either a clickable IPA chart or real native speakers saying the exact word in video. Tap, listen, repeat, move on.

---

1. Clickable IPA Charts — Hear Every Sound

Tap any symbol on these charts to hear it. Use them alongside the phonetics tables on the parent page.

Drill: open the American chart, tap /ə/ ten times, then tap /ʌ/, /ɪ/, /æ/. These four are where most of your vowel errors live.

---

2. YouGlish — Hear Real Natives Say the Word

This is the most useful tool on the page. YouGlish finds real YouTube clips of Americans saying a word in a natural sentence — not a dictionary robot voice. Tap a link, listen, hit next for another speaker.

Your problem sounds

Connected speech phrases

These show the linking and reduction happening in real speech:

what are you doing · I don't know · a lot of · going to be · let me know · get back to you · kind of · I should have · what do you think · hold on a second

Any word works. Just replace the end of the link: youglish.com/pronounce/YOUR-WORD/english/us

---

3. Dictionary Audio (Single Words, Fast)

When you only need one clean reference pronunciation:

• Cambridge — gives both UK and US audio side by side: dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/WORD
• Merriam-Webster — American only, very clear: merriam-webster.com/dictionary/WORD
• Forvo — ordinary native speakers, multiple accents per word: forvo.com/word/WORD/

Cambridge is the best habit to build: it shows the IPA transcription next to the audio, so you connect symbol → sound every time you look something up.

---

4. Articulation Videos — See Inside the Mouth

For the sounds you physically can't produce yet (American R, /θ/, /æ/), watching tongue position matters more than listening.

• Sounds of Speech (University of Iowa) — animated articulatory diagrams for every American English sound. The old website closed when Flash ended; it now exists as an iOS/Android app. Search "Sounds of Speech" in the Play Store.
• Search YouTube for "Rachel's English" + the sound name — free, and she films close-ups of mouth position for each phoneme.

---

5. How to Put Your Own Audio Inside Notion

You can store actual audio files on these pages — it just has to come from you:

1. Record yourself on your phone (voice recorder app) saying a drill block.
2. In Notion, type /audio on a new line → Upload → pick the file.
3. It becomes a playable bar inside the page.

Why this is worth doing: record the same paragraph on day 1 and day 30, drop both into this page, and play them back to back. Progress in accent work is invisible day to day and obvious across a month.

You can also paste a YouTube or SoundCloud link on its own line and choose Embed — it plays inside Notion without leaving the page.

---

6. The Listening Routine

The rule that makes this work: you cannot produce a sound you cannot hear. Spend the first week listening far more than speaking. Ear first, mouth second.