The core content of English pronunciation is composed of word pronunciation, the liaison law, and sentence intonation. The current trend of English pronunciation training has a dominant tendency to focus on the intonation patterns of sentences but underestimates the correct pronunciation of individual words. Without a doubt, I am absolutely opposed to this trend. Looking back on my 17 years of teaching English pronunciation, I have found that many English majors (not to mention students of other majors) cannot pronounce lots of common English words correctly. Since English pronunciation is an integrated art like an orchestra, speaking English requires a good command of word pronunciation, liaison, and intonation. I believe that the fundamentals of English pronunciation start with the correct pronunciation of individual words. Implementing the liaison law and sentence intonation without correct word pronunciation would be worth nothing.

 Let’s distinguish between three major types of English pronunciation errors that are commonly heard from Korean speakers learning English as a foreign language. The first type of English pronunciation errors is caused by the so-called ‘spelling pronunciation’ which heavily relies on the invalid correspondence between each spelling and its sound. In English, the relationship between spelling and pronunciation is known to have one-to-many correspondence rather than one-to-one. Korean speakers tend to be ignorant of this correspondence. For example, Koreans show a tendency to unconditionally pronounce the English letter ‘o’ as a rounded vowel which is produced in the Korean word ‘five’. So, many Koreans pronounce the words ‘history, society, memory’ as /histori/, /sosai∂ti/, /memori/ with no hesitation. Take a look at phonetic symbols of these words in a dictionary. What you will see are /hist∂ri/, /s∂sai∂ti/, /mem∂ri/. The phonetic symbol /∂/ represents a middle central vowel as in the English word ‘an’. If you grasp the problem of spelling pronunciation related with the letter ‘o’, then you will probably show better pronunciation of English words like lemon, original, professor, opinion, and solution’. In addition, Koreans used to mispronounce the first vowels of ‘modify, bonus, and oven’ as /o/. They should be pronounced as /a/, /ou/, and /∧/, respectively.

 The second type of errors is generated by our very strong insensitivity to changes in pronunciation caused by changes of part-of-speech. More precisely speaking, we tend to ignore the change of word stress and vowel quality caused by the change of part-of-speech. For example, we usually pronounce the first vowel of ‘expect’ and ‘expectation’ as the same vowel /i/. But the sound /i/ for the first vowel of ‘expectation’ causes obviously incorrect pronunciation. Despite the change of part-of-speech, we usually tend to maintain the same vowel sound of the base word, which is prior to its change of part-of-speech. To be more specific, the first vowel of the verb ‘expect’ is pronounced as a weak vowel /i/ since it is not assigned a word stress. When the word changes to the noun ‘expectation’ after suffixation, a secondary stress falls on the first vowel and the vowel is pronounced as /e/ which is phonetically a bit stronger than /i/. The same phenomenon appears in word pairs like ‘explain-explanation’, ‘expire-expiration’, and ‘exhibit-exhibition’.

 The last type of errors shows up from the pronunciation of a specific set of English words that we call ‘foreign words’. They come to be spoken quite often in our daily lives. Chances are fair that you mispronounce many English words familiar to you since familiarity may obscure your attention. I’d like to ask you to pronounce the following words one after another; ‘Amazon, basic, casino, England, finale, halogen, magician, octave, Persia, uranium’. How many words did you pronounce correctly? If you could pronounce at least seven words correctly, I guarantee that your English pronunciation belongs to an advanced level. On the other hand, if you could pronounce less than three words correctly, I would say your English pronunciation belongs to a beginner’s level. The inflow of foreign words is increasing as time goes on. Thus, you should pay more attention to how to pronounce them correctly.

 Native English speakers would probably be good at inferring the meaning of what you say when you just mispronounce one or two words. However, if you mispronounce several words consecutively in a sentence, you will probably push them beyond their limits of inferring. Consequently, they will end up failing to understand what you mean to say. What that means is that you come to fail in communicating with them and, eventually, you will hear ‘Pardon me?’ or ‘Excuse me?’ from them, sometimes with embarrassing reactions. When repeatedly put in this situation, you will lose your confidence in English pronunciation. You don’t have to blame yourself for your pronunciation errors, though. You have never been trained before to pronounce individual English words correctly.

 In this vein, the first step for those who want to pronounce English well is to give priority to implementing individual words properly like native speakers. Of course, the next step to be an advanced speaker is to learn and implement finer liaison law and various intonation patterns. These days it has become really easy to check the pronunciation of English words through various dictionary apps which can be downloaded and installed on your mobile phones. Such apps support recorded word pronunciation of native speakers, not to mention written sound symbols of each word. If you neglect to look up English words in such readily accessible resources, improving your English pronunciation might prove to be a hard goal to achieve.