Training Pronunciation: More Rhymes

As I mentioned in Songs and Rhymes, you can train pronunciation with songs and rhymes.

All are from Lit2Go and have audio, like all Lit2Go reading materials.

Easy start is simple nursery rhyme like Rain, rain go away

Rain, rain go away, reɪn, reɪn goʊ əˈweɪ, Come again some April day, kʌm əˈgɛn sʌm ˈeɪprəl deɪ, Little Johnny wants to play. ˈlɪtəl ˈʤɑni wɑnts tu pleɪ.

Or limerick The Old Woman of Leeds

There was an old woman of Leeds;	ðɛr wʌz ən oʊld ˈwʊmən ʌv lidz;
Who spent all her time in good deeds;	hu spɛnt ɔl hɜr taɪm ɪn gʊd didz;
She worked for the poor	ʃi wɜrkt fɔr ðə pur
Till her fingers were sore,	tɪl hɜr ˈfɪŋgərz wɜr sɔr,
This pious old woman of Leeds!	ðɪs ˈpaɪəs oʊld ˈwʊmən ʌv lidz!

Pronunciation transcription is made with Lingorado, as I said on IPA page.

You can save the text on your computer, format it and print.

Few more easy rhymes (with audio) from Lit2Go:

There was an Old Man with a beard

There was an Old Man with a beard,	ðɛr wʌz ən oʊld mən wɪð ə bɪrd,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!—	hu sɛd, “ɪt ɪz ʤʌst æz aɪ fɪrd!—
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,	tu aʊlz ænd ə hɛn, fɔr lɑrks ænd ə rɛn,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”	hæv ɔl bɪlt ðɛr nɛsts ɪn maɪ bɪrd!”

There is a Young Lady whose nose


A was an Apple pie

Mistakes Made by Thai Learners of English

Mistakes made by English learners with Thai as a first language.

There are many pages

• 10 common errors in pronunciation
• 10 grammar mistakes
• few more mistakes
• Research paper English Pronunciation Problems of ThaiStudents
• 10 mistakes (Facebook  mostly in Thai)
• Typical mistakes noticed on the streets, including confirming negative answer
• 13 error types and 27 problems (with minimal pairs training)
• Yes confuses farangs - Thai sentence ends with "Yes". Great way to confuse farangs
• Hard to pronounce: 

1. consonant clusters: find - fine, st in question
2. difference between R and L
3. S at the word's end (very common in English, never in Thai)

Tongue twisters:

• Thirty thousand thieves thought it was Thursday and drank milk from a thistle shaped glass.
• red lorry, yellow lorry
• clock, schedule, bulb, Scotland, squirrel, colonel (IPA: klɑk, ˈskɛʤʊl, bʌlb, ˈskɑtlənd, ˈskwərəl, ˈkɜrnəl)

Graded Reader

Graded reader are articles specially adapted for different grades of student, from elementary to advanced. On lower level, they have limited vocabulary and use simple grammar, gradually increasing.

There are many available, with and without audio, just google for "graded reader".

I found you few:

• Lit2Go HUGE collection (many hours of audio, sorted by level, theme, book collection)
• ESL Fast
• News in Levels and Jokes in Levels

Online English Resources

Free online English Courses

• The best collection of link for English learners - advice about accent, listening, reading and writing, selected video links. Worth bookmarking.
• edX.org has hundreds of free courses, like TOEFL Test Preparation, Conversational English Skills and many more
• Voice of America - Let's Learn English
• British Council
• BBC and BBC Learning
• English for Career Development at Coursera is free (and many more, some with a fee and possible financial aid)
• Omniglot
• Wiki Learning English

You may want to try several courses. It will cost you nothing, just your time :-)

I really like edX.org, because many courses use the same platform, and it is easy to use (started by MIT and Harvard Universities). I used edX.org for multiple courses, most were good experience. Reading courses is free, and for a small fee, you can get a certificate of the completion.

Rules of Pronunciation

There are many guides online, problem with most of them they all use different notations, some use custom notation, some use APA (American Phonetic), very few use IPA. As you can imagine, irregular "rules" for pronunciation is also major obstacle for American (and English) children to learn reading.

Basic rules

This page for kids compares APA and IPA and mentions rules.
Another good page with rules - more - 7 and 14 rules

Udemy is well-recognized resource for inexpensive online learning with lots of courses. It's pronunciation guide promotes inexpensive course  to improve pronunciation

Bilingual Comics

... or comics in two languages:

GoComics.com has comics in Spanish and same comics in English too. I checked:

• Calvin and Hobbes in English and Spanish are same images in both languages since Jan 1, 2011
• Tarzan in English and Spanish since Jan 7, 2007
• Dilbert on GoComics is out-of-sync, but Spanish version seems to be in sync with official Dilbert website (I started reading present and continued to previous strips). Wikipedia has info about main characters, you can check also version in your own language.
• Dilbert website also provides transcript of all text of the comics, which you can translate by Google to your own language (even if it is more work and less fun).
• If you get some comic in your own language, try to find it on Read Comics Online. For Spanish learners Eternaut is a famous Argentinian graphic novella. I was able to find free download with my limited Spanish (but I am not not sure how legal, so I do not post the link).

Comics

If you started from beginning, you know that comics are excellent reading material, because with just a few words (and a lots of pictures) you can advance story and have fun.

There are many online resources, my favorite is  Read Comics Online - it has thousands of comics of many types. Sometimes website asks you to solve a puzzle before loading the page: click on images of cars, street signs and similar. If you are not sure, click "reload" to request different puzzle.

Best way is to start reading some story you know in your own language.

Cartoons based on movies you likely know (or can watch before reading comics) for kids:  Monsters Inc (and 2), Incredibles, Toy story, Cars; for adults: Mission Impossible, Men in Black (and 2, 3 and prequel), 300 (Spartans), Jurassic Park (and 2), Terminator (and 2 and few more), Django Unchained, King Kong (and 2), Highlander, (and many more), Stargate,  Game of Thrones or sci-fi classics like Blade Runner (exact movie), 2001: Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Stargate, Indiana Jones

Cartoons based on books for young children: Classic stories for children, Fairy Tales,  Alice in Wonderland (and another, also as steampunk), Smurfs, Wonderful Wizard of Oz and for older children 1001 Arabian Nights and another, Sinbad, Alladin,

Educational comics like Cartoon History of the Universe (highly recommended), American Revolution (and more)

Comics about life of real persons like Fifth Beatle, Martin Luther, Death of Stalin, Rasputin, Battlefields: Night Witches (Russian night female pilots in WW2), Korean War, Napoleon's wars (drawn with incredible eye for detail), 47 Ronin ("story to know Japan"), or real places and times like life of immigrants in NY and Bronx in 1930, Jerusalem and Palestine, growing up in Tehran during Islamic Revolution, March to end segregation in USA, or North Korea (comic can show what documentary cannot).

Stories based on books: Three musketeers, Treasure Island, Last of the Mohicans, Dracula, Frankenstein (and retelling), Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Alan Poe stories, Moby Dick, Terry Pratchett's The Colour Of Magic

Children stories retold for adults, with sex and violence: Grimm Fairy Tales and Red Riding Hood as Japanese warrior and Founding Fathers of America as action heroes

Books for adults: Girl with Dragon Tattoo, who played with fire when kicked the hornet's nest;  Pride and Prejudice,

Alternative history (what if something in history happened differently) is popular: What if USA lost Operation Paperclip (arresting German rocket scientists) so UK developed space flight? What if Germans in WW2 developed enhanced humans (ubermen) and invaded USA (which is very well researched: did you know that it took full month to create enough plutonium for single "fat man" bomb, and year for uranium "little boy" bomb)?

Of course classic science-fiction are present: H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Dune, Ender's Game: Battle School, Command School and prequel Mazer Rackham, and more brilliant sci-fi: Forever War, Rock and Stone, Mercury Heat


Whole cult series like Watchmen (with prequels for each superhero in Before Watchmen series).

Star Wars, Star Trek have huge following. There is whole alphabet of action heroes: Aliens, Batman, Conan the Barbarian  all the way to Zorro (Predator, Transformers, Superman, Spider-man, , Ninja Turtles, Tarzan (and Jungle girl), James Bond, Hulk, Iron-man,) all have dozens of comics each - use search. And combinations: Batman vs Predator, Terminator vs Robocop, and so on.

If you are interested in Vikings, there are whole series. I really liked Valhalla, which explains different gods (like unexpected side of Freyja, godess of love in #8). And other popular Nordic gods like Thor (and 2, 3), Loki (and 2, 3), Sif, fighting in Ragnarok or in present, or historic Viking invasion.

Greek Mythology like Trojan War (and another), Odyssey, Minotaur, Oracle.

History of Roman Empire like Eagles of Rome, Britannia, Druids, Caligula, Murena

Wild West heroes like Jonah Hex, Lucky Luke (and another)

Cartoons for popular table games like Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons and video games like Tomb Raider

Or just intelligent fun in short strips, like Calvin and Hobbes (boy with his stuffed tiger).

And surprise (or not): Bible and Bible Tales,  Life of Christ and of course action heros: Jesus Christ: Demon Slayer and Klaus (Before becoming Santa).