How I improve my Pronunciation

Hey guys!
I hope you're having a fun and peaceful christmas break. I found some time to finally work on my pronunciation. I've learned that I have some problems with the th-sound, which is why I have been spending and will continue spending time on this topic. In addition to that, I devoted some time to minimal pairs. Let me explain to you in detail how I tackled these topics.

The Two TH Sounds

First of all, I had a look at Rachel's video about the two th sounds. She briefly explains the difference between the th-sounds which is very useful. The exercise at the end of the video didn't help me a lot as it's explained in a rather complicated way (that's what I think at least). So I searched for other sources on the internet and I stumbled upon this website: ESL Gold - Pronunciation - The Voiced TH sound. It provides a list of minimal pairs, challening words, common phrases and an oral reading exercise containing the voiced th sound. I recommend listening to the audio file and reading the words at the same time, because in my view it doesn't make a lot of sense to just listen to the audio without knowing how a word is spelled. For that I would open the audio file in a new tab so you can still see the list of words. BTW, the link to the audio file is on the top right corner, beneath the heading. It's a bit tricky because the link doesn't exactly catch one's eye.
What I like about this website is that the two speakers pause between the words and phrases. It makes it possible to repeat the word, although I must say you could also pause the video manually of course.
I must admit that I found these words quite challenging and that I never paid much attention to the difference between the voiced and unvoiced th sound. But this will be different from now on! ;-)

Minimal Pairs

One source I recently found and would definitely recommend is this website. You can find many many examples of minimal pairs and they even provide a short description of what is important about certain minimal pairs and what the main differences are between to miniml pairs.
What I like most about this website is that it is devided into the different sounds: vowel sounds, consonant sounds, initial consonant sounds and final consonant sounds. Also, the minimal pairs are categorized by elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced words. I am familiar with most words and their pronunciation of the categories elementary and pre-intermediate, but some of the categories intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced are really challenging.
Let me give you examples of the category advanced consontant sounds s - θ.
Symbol - thimble
Sawn - thorn
Suds - thuds
Do you think these are difficult?

Practice, Practice, Practice

If you read my previous blog post about vocab learning strategies, you might have realized that I am a great fan of Merriam Webster's dictionaries. On their website, they provide interactive exercises. When doing such an exercise, you first listen to a couple of words and then repeat them. At the end of the exercise, you do a short quiz where you hear a word and must decide to which sound category it belongs to. You can do the quiz a second or a third time.
On the screenshot on the right you can see that I did an exercise on f and v sounds.

I find these exercises really useful. They provide a combination of listening to a word, reading and repeating a word. And there are so many exercises! I just love Merriam Webster! :-D


That's about it so far. Most of these websites do not provide videos where you can watch how natives move their mouth and tongue. But next time I will focus more on sources like this (e.g. Rachel's English). I'll also give you more general hints on how I tackle pronunciation. CU soon, guys!