Pronunciation · Words with fewer syllables than they look
How to pronounce “camera”
KAM-ruh
2 syllables · stress on “KAM”
In short
Say “camera” in 3 steps
- 1Two syllables in normal speech: KAM-ruh.
- 2Stress the first syllable.
- 3The middle e disappears — “kam-ruh”, not “ka-me-ra”.
The version to avoid
Commonly said as: ka-ME-ra — three syllables with stress in the middle
Many languages borrowed this word and kept three syllables with middle stress. English deletes the middle vowel and stresses the first syllable.
Hear real people say it
Model audio is consistent; real speech is not. Hearing several actual speakers is what makes a word recognisable when someone says it at full speed.
Real speakers
1 human recordingActual people saying “camera”, not a synthetic voice. Real speech varies — that variation is what you need to recognise, and what a single model voice cannot show you.
Recordings from Wikimedia Commons by Dvortygirl, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Full credits.
Practise it out loud
Reading about a sound does not change your mouth. Say it, hear it back, and fix one thing at a time.
Say it yourself
0/6 practisedListen first, then record. You get feedback on the individual sounds, the stress and the rhythm — no account needed, and nothing is stored.
Recordings are used only to generate this feedback and are not stored. Your accent is never penalised: IELTS scores intelligibility, and so do we.
The sounds inside this word
Each links to a full guide with mouth position, audio and drills. If a word keeps failing, the problem is usually one of these.
Who finds this word hardest
Your first language predicts which part of a word will break. These guides list the highest-impact fixes for each.
- Spanish speakers: Spanish has 5 pure vowels where English has around 20, so the highest-impact work for Spanish speakers is vowel contrasts (ship/sheep, cat/cut) plus the b/v merger and the extra 'e' that sneaks in before s-clusters (eSpain).
- Portuguese speakers: For Portuguese speakers (especially Brazilian), the top fixes are: final l turning into w ('milk' → 'miwk'), t/d softening to ch/j before i ('tea' → 'chee'), the helper -i after final stops ('big' → 'bigi'), and initial r becoming h ('red' → 'head').
- Turkish speakers: Turkish speakers most often need: the w/v separation (Turkish has one in-between sound), re-voicing final consonants ('bed' → 'bet'), the æ/e split ('bad'/'bed'), and dropping the helper vowel from initial clusters ('sport' → 'siport').
- Indonesian speakers: Indonesian speakers most need audible word-endings: final stops are swallowed and clusters simplified, deleting the -s and -ed that carry English grammar.
- Arabic speakers: The signature fix for Arabic speakers is /p/: Arabic has no p, so 'pen' becomes 'ben' and 'park' becomes 'bark'.
More words with fewer syllables than they look
Same pattern, same fix. Learning them as a group is far faster than one at a time.
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Frequently asked questions
How do you pronounce camera?
How many syllables are in camera?
What is the most common mistake with camera?
The full sound library
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