*Please note that this post is geared toward pronunciation teachers with a background in speech pathology or linguistics. However, language learners may find this information useful as well! Did you know that dictionaries use broad phonetic (or phonemic) transcription of words? While you may see...

Meet my best buddy, Mr. Mouth.  Creepy? Yes. Useful? Couldn’t possibly live without him. You can probably tell that this mouth is well loved. I didn’t quite realize how ragged he looked until I took a picture of him to send to a friend. What makes...

While the “-ate” ending certainly looks like it should be pronounced the same as the word “ate” (e.g. “I ate a delicious doughnut.”) this is not always the case.  There are many different words with this ending, such as “accurate,” “educate,” “graduate,” and “estimate.”  Some “-ate”...