Welcome to the audio companion webpage for English Phonetic Symbols by Olé Noé. Here, you will find the audio tracks for each of the exercise pages in our print and digital product. This tool is perfect for learners of English as a foreign language who want to improve their listening and pronunciation of English spoken in the U.S. and Canada. The exercises can also be used for articulation therapy in adults. All audio tracks were recorded by Founder Noé Erazo, a native speaker of English and Spanish in Houston, Texas. We believe that intelligibility and comprehension is the most important thing you should focus in improving your pronunciation.

Visualize the sounds
You can learn English sounds that are new to you by comparing them to the sounds that you know. This technique is called “cross-language perceptual training” (Strange, 2007). Focus on the similarities and differences between the new sounds and your native sounds. Which English phonemes appear most like a sound that you already know? If you’re a visual learner, you can compare the English phonemic inventory chart with your native language’s phonemic inventory chart by visiting the ASHA phonemic inventories webpage.

Practice the sounds
Would you like to know if you’re pronouncing the exercises correctly? Try using Siri or another speech recognition software on your phone. Read the exercises in English Phonetic Symbols, listen to the audio track, and then repeat. Did the software type your spoken words correctly? Accent modification, also known as accent reduction, requires practice and persistence. Keep fine tuning your pronunciation until the system understands you correctly.

Download audio
Download audio tracks (zip format 37MB)
Listen to individual tracks by page number, visit olénoé.com/ipa/#.mp3

References
Strange, W. (2007). Cross-language phonetic similarity of vowels: Theoretical and methodological issues. In O.-S. Bohn & M. J. Munro (Eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning (pp. 35–56). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.