Manual of American English Pronunciation

The American accent is truly the very prerequisite of coolness these days: to "nativize" oneself in the rich American popular culture requires a considerable mastery of that peculiar pronunciation, and such mastery is not that easy to attain unless one is prepared to spend countless hours through immersion in movies and songs, or better yet, through a stay in the US. Aspiring for coolness might be one possible motivation, an addition to the repertoire of accents to impress friends and relatives might be another; the average student should find this book a required material whatever the drive for the endeavor. I actually used the book as a self-study, and I found it tremendously helpful especially after the jargon-laden introductory books on phonetics baffled me to no ends. There is something very pleasing to the analytical mind: logical explanations, instead of reliance on learning through repetition, are given in places they are warranted. The authors decided not to adopt the full IPA transcription for the sounds, a choice which at times bothered me, as it is hard to switch between one system of transcription to another when using another book. Schwa (mid central rounded) and carat (open-mid back unrounded) are not distinguished, probably on a wise consideration that such distinctions are not phonemic and only unnecessarily complicating.