By Olga Smith
Almost all non-native English students make a pronunciation mistake with the sound /ʌ/ as in “duck”. Why is this sound so tricky? There are two main reasons:
It is spelt with “o, ou, u” and students make a mistake by pronouncing it with /ɒ/ as in “box” because in many languages the pronunciation is the same as the spelling. In English, spelling and pronunciation are not the same because English inherited many words from other languages such as Latin, French and German and they left the spelling the same but anglicised the pronunciation. Below are the words where most students make a mistake:
“company, country, front, stomach, oven, London, tongue, mother, love, money, other, monkey”
Speakers of some languages, such as Russian, for example, tend to open their mouths too much when pronouncing /ʌ/ and end up with the sound /a/ as in “pasta”.
We recommend that you check your speech organ position for this sound in our video course Get Rid of your Accent Part One and then practise the sound with the apps Elocution Lessons, Get Rid of your Accent and Business English Speech. Lesson 9 in all apps and the video course.
If you fail to pronounce this sound correctly, your speech might be difficult to understand. You will see from the comparisons below that if you do not make this sound correctly the meaning of the word will change:
dark - duck, last -lust, branch - brunch, stark - stuck, hot-hut
Very often, our students ask us how they can know where to use a particular sound. We recommend paying attention to the spelling and then practising with all our apps. The more you practise, the quicker you will see the pattern.