ESL Pronunciation – The Pure Vowels
One of the harder steps for learning English pronunciation is to master all the vowel sounds common to English. Languages like Hawaiian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish have a basic five-vowel set, not counting diphthongs of two or more vowels in combination. Because of this, a simple way of learning English vowels is to group a basic set of eleven vowel sounds into five long, five short, and one schwa. The long vowels are the pure or classical vowels of the other languages.
