IPA

In the beginning, you need to learn how to pronounce every word as you learn it. After few weeks, you will learn to recognize rules of pronunciation, and it will get easier. Also, find out what kind of problems have speakers of your native language, and focus on overcoming them, because there is a good chance you are making them too, without knowing.

I collected links for you: common mistakes made by learners of English: Spanish, Russian, Thai. There are more such collections.

You also need to decide if you want to learn American or British spelling and pronunciation (difference is small and no big deal). I suggest American, because it has more free resources.

There are many systems how to write sounds of languages. IPA ( International Phonetic Alphabet) is universal (for any language, has much more sounds than English language uses), and linked wikipedia page has examples of all sounds, so I recommend it.

Try these links, and plan to return back in few weeks

• Introduction to IPA
• subset of IPA for English
• Clickable IPA chart with sounds for every IPA "sound"
• And some more IPA charts with sound
• IPA with exercises
• BBC Sounds of English

At first, don't worry too much about mistakes (imperfect pronunciation is better than being silent) and learn the system used by your dictionary. But soon, compare your system used by your dictionary with sounds from free tools.


Here are websites with sound for whole words:

English Club

EnglishClub.com has excellent guide to pronunciation. Best way to hear the difference is "minimal pairs" - word pairs which differ only single sound (and have different meaning).

Wiktionary

Simple English Wiktionary companion project of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It has explanation of about 25 thousands words in simple English, with sound.

Merriam-Webster

Merriam-Webster online dictionary has sound for every word. Warning: every page loads lots of advertisement (which pays for website).

Lingorado

Lingorado online converter of English text to IPA is excellent for preparing your own training materials. It can create side by side transcript, so it is easier to see where you are.

Internally it uses Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary which has no advertisement (very plain text page) and uses their own (simple but a bit confusing) text notation (not IPA and no sound).  Whole dictionary can be downloaded. You may consider it if your internet is expensive, to have it on your own computer.

YouTube

YouTube has many videos with pronunciation training. I found few good ones:

• Sounds of English Vowels and Consonants - 2

But far better and more fun way is to learn pronunciation with songs and funny rhymes

Let me know if you found more.

And if you think that English pronunciation is hard, try to learn some African click languages or tonal languages: Thai has 5 tones, but Cantonese (Hong Kong) has 9.

Next: Songs and Rhymes