How to Make the AA [æ] Vowel - American English Pronunciation

Do you want people to understand you? Do you want to understand more of what you hear? Then you need to improve your pronunciation.

An excellent place to start is with vowel sounds. While there are only 5 vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u), there are nearly 20 vowel sounds. That means that even if your English is advanced, you're probably not pronouncing everything as well as you think.

One sound that I hear students have problems with all the time is the "long a" sound (also known as AA or /æ/). That's why I made today's lesson.

In this video, I'll show you exactly what the "long a" sounds like, how to make the sound with your mouth, challenge you to see if you can hear the difference between the "long a" and other versions of "a," and give you plenty of opportunities to practice out loud.