English may seem simple to native speakers, but for those whose primary language is not English it is quite difficult to master the pronunciation of words. A new English speaker has to not only learn new words, but unlike most other languages, say French or Italian, the speaker must learn what words to emphasise so that sentences sound correct.

The pronunciation in English can be improved by working on the words that are to be emphasised.

A 'stressed' language. English is a stressed language - this means that some are given more emphasis in their tone than others. There will be a mixture of stressed and unstressed words, depending on the type used. Follow these rules to help you improve your pronunciations.

Identify which contain or describe the content. Content words are pronounced with more emphasis or stress. Content words happen to be crucial because they provide the most information. Some of these are verbs, adjectives, nouns and adverbs.

Below is an example of a sentence with underlined.

Jane walked to the corner to catch a bus.

Read out the sentence and listen to yourself as you read it. Did you pronounce the underlined content with more emphasis? Think about what you're saying, and if it's a content word it needs to be emphasized.

Determine the functions. English also has words called functions words. True to their names, these are join ideas or separate phrases within a sentence. Functions may have an ambiguous meaning. Functions can be any determining word such as the, a; or auxiliary verbs such as am, were; prepositions such as before, after; or conjunctions such as but, and; and finally pronouns such as they, she. They're not too important to anyone listening other than to string the sentence together properly. Function words do not to be stressed for this reason. Look at the same sentence above and stress the function words less. It sounds as if you are swallowing or saying it by using less breath.

Jane walked to the corner to catch a bus.

Putting it all together. You have just learned the basic ideas for proper English pronunciation. You should now take time to practice what you've learned. Get any English language book and read a few sentences. Try not to emphasize function words and pay careful attention to stressing content . Doing this in combination with many hours of conversation with native English speaking people, will help you to improve how you pronounce your English.

Tiffany Provost writes about language and education for www.HowToDoThings.com.