Introducting: AXNting

I’m excited to share a new resource with you today. It’s called AXNting and you can see a 1 minute introduction below.

For a long time our students have been asking for a video accompaniment to The Sound of English, which is naturally static as a book.

What’s covered?

The idea is to take the practical phonemic approach found in The Sound of English and really get inside each sound. So this course covers some more advanced areas that the first course didn’t:

– Phonetics
– Allophones
– Mouth movement (rather than position)
– Diacritics
– Vowel grids
– RP vs GB/SSB

I expect the most useful feature will be the mouth movement animations, which anybody who follows us on Youtube or Instagram will be familiar with as I’ve been releasing shorts and reels with this feature as I was developing it this year.

Why animated whiteboards?

I’m not a big fan of the current trend for videos of people talking endlessly into smartphones with captions. And let’s face it, nobody wants to watch me for hours on end in order to improve their pronunciation, though I did give it a try:

The feedback was mixed, ranging from “I can’t focus on the material” to “I’m calling the police!”. 

A different approach was needed…

I wanted these videos to be concise – under 3 minutes each, and visually engaging.

And here they are, 44 animated videos (which is one for each sound but you knew that already) on whiteboards, and each one is between 1 and 3 minutes.

You can see one of the videos here. 

What next?

Over the coming weeks and months new videos will be added every week, branching more into connected speech then intonation.

AXNting is now included with all Pronunciation Studio courses, or you can buy a subscription to get access to all of our learning resources.

If you’d like to keep up to date with the course as I add more, including a weekly free lesson, sign up for the AXNting email here.