Manual of American English Pronunciation

The American accent is truly the very prerequisite of coolness these days: to "nativize" oneself in the rich American popular culture requires a considerable mastery of that peculiar pronunciation, and such mastery is not that easy to attain unless one is prepared to spend countless hours through immersion in movies and songs, or better yet, through a stay in the US.

Aspiring for coolness might be one possible motivation, an addition to the repertoire of accents to impress friends and relatives might be another; the average student should find this book a required material whatever the drive for the endeavor. I actually used the book as a self-study, and I found it tremendously helpful especially after the jargon-laden introductory books on phonetics baffled me to no ends. There is something very pleasing to the analytical mind: logical explanations, instead of reliance on learning through repetition, are given in places they are warranted.

The authors decided not to adopt the full IPA transcription for the sounds, a choice which at times bothered me, as it is hard to switch between one system of transcription to another when using another book. Schwa (mid central rounded) and carat (open-mid back unrounded) are not distinguished, probably on a wise consideration that such distinctions are not phonemic and only unnecessarily complicating.

I go an used copy of this book in the year 1988 when I was an English teacher for TOEFL in Taipei. As I taught "listening comprehension," which was the weakest area for Chinese students, I tried hard to finding as much relevant reference as possible. Unlike a lot of difficult/academic TESOL books, among the dozen reference books I got, Manual of American English Pronunciation proved to be the easiest to comprehend, most practical and most resourceful. This manual was organized in such a logical and easy-to-understand way that most English teachers and students alike would find it easy to absorb and put into daily use. As its title suggested, it should be used as a manual instead of a book.

The best part that helped me most was "Lesson 16, The Sandhi of Spoken English." In this chapter, the authors introduced the various forms of Sandhi-forms of English that were commonly seen, for example, reduction of unstressed function words, the disappearing of "t" and palatalization. I saw WOWs in most of my students' eyes when such knowledge was revealed to them. "No wonder I simply couldn't understand spoken English, " I guessed that was their feeling and I was glad to help them decode the mystery.

I got on Amazon to see if there's an updated version I can buy. I look forward to its fifth edition.