About skills to improving pronunciation Hello everybody. I am glad to be here. I had my first English intermadiate lesson yesterday, and I like the teacher very much. He gave me a lot of skills: websites, you tube channels, and he is very nice. In one of the channels, I realized that some teachers don't agree with the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) for teaching. As a french and spanish teacher, I do agree in part with this statement. Usually, when I give to my students the IPA (you know the French pronunciation is very, very difficult), they reject those symbols because they are too difficult. What happens then? Students write down the pronunciation with the normal alphabet, and it's not useful. My teacher showed to me a new skill: Forvo. It is a great pronunciation dictionary; it includes a lot of languages. So I think he is right, but at the same time I am right too... Why am I saying that? Because there are a lot of skills for learning a language. And it depends on the student's profile. For me, for example, when I noticed the existence of the sound schwa and I saw the IPA symbol written, I understood a lot of things (I finally got the about word's pronunciation, for example). But for most of people, Forvo is the right option, because I am a professional, but not everybody is one. On the other hand, we have a lot of skills for pronunciation: shadowing, speaking alone to the mirror as he says, repeating, learning by heart lyrics and sing them. In my case, with my students, recently I began to emphasise on songs. It is very funny. Everybody wants to sing La Marseillaise... I sing La Marseillaise very often. It is OK. The more glamorous French singers now are Zaz, Barbara, Carla Bruni... in my experience. Thank you for reading me. See you soon.