American Accent Training (Book and Audio CD, 2nd Edition)

This book is well written and gives you motivation to learn. But:
- the author speaks too fast - not that it's hard to understand, but we learn better if we start slowly (same for music). My mother tongue is french, and I speak all the time way too fast. To my french friends: this is not going to help.
- the book starts with intonation (also a great problem for french people) and to my point of view, it should be more systematic, starting with vowels in detail. Anyway, the part with the table and vowels was missing on the CD, I had to return it twice.
I ended up by buying "Mastering the American Accent" (Lisa Mojsin). I made a great progress already after 1 week. Good book for french students (on devrait commencer ca dès l'école, notre accent est toujours une catastrophe, mais ouf, les anglophones trouvent ca sexy ;-).

I can follow this book easily. And my accent seems better than before after I bought this book two weeks later. Two thumbs!

I have read the book, listened to the CDs and did the exercises, no improvement what so ever.
which ever changes in my accent I have acquired are e defined by a professional(after this feutal attempt I have turned to professional help ) as incorrect pronunciation (low level english, "non western").

The CDs that come with this book make all the difference! You can listen to SO much of this book, even the introduction of the book - not just certain exercises. There is a paragraph you read a few times in every unit, so you can gauge your own improvement by the end. This book focuses on stress and intonation which is what ESL teachers usually do not teach in their classes as much as pronunciation. I highly recommend this book with CDs.

I love this book. The intonation is great I love the most. It have lots of sentences with intonation. But on the other hand, the gap for repeating is so close, hard to do it. It should have been slower. However the dianogtis test is 100 bucks which is pretty expensive compared to the book. It should have cost around 50 bucks or lower otherwise main purpose is to make money from the test not from the book. I like the technique la la la, me me me, duh duh duh, but I don't like the rubber band technique for everytime you stress on words. It seems doesn't work at all. I love the linking like woundn't he= wun don ni, is he= i zi and so on. In general, the intonation was great compared to the book of Master American Accent that I have costing 70 bucks, it has more detail on linking but I don't like the intonation which is boring. I'd recommend anyone for the Master... book if want more on linking words and pronunciation. If Mrs Ann Cook slower on speaking, and lower the dianogtis test, the book would be the best seller. I love the intonation. It was great compared to many books that I bought.