Accent Adventure Podcast: Improve English Pronunciation | Learn American English | Learn British English

A while back I published an article and also a video where I focused upon pronunciation of the so-called “ash” sound (æ) in American English. You see, back then I’d just realized that the letter ‘A’ can be pronounced differently in certain words despite the phonetic description not revealing anything different about it. Let’s take, for example, the following two words: Drank /dræŋk/ Flat /flæt/ On both occasions, the “ash” sound (æ) represents the letter ‘A’, and previously I would have thought the letter ‘A’ gets pronounced identically in both words “drank” and “flat”. Turns out that nothing could be further from the truth – on many occasions the “ash” sound gets pronounced as ‘E’ (as in the word “men”; it's pronounced the same way in the word "drank" as well!) in American English; however, at the time of writing the original article I was still a little bit confused about the whole thing. Now, more than a year on, I received a comment from Juhapekka (he’s a prolific commentator on my blogs) where he s