Pronunciation · Academic and IELTS words
How to pronounce “genre”
ZHON-ruh
2 syllables · stress on “ZHON”
In short
Say “genre” in 3 steps
- 1Start with the /ʒ/ of “measure” or “vision” — a soft buzzing sh, not a j.
- 2Two syllables: ZHON-ruh.
- 3The ending is a weak schwa, not “ray”.
The version to avoid
Commonly said as: JEN-ruh or GEN-ruh — using a /dʒ/ or hard /ɡ/ instead of the /ʒ/ sound
The opening sound is /ʒ/, the rarest consonant in English. It appears in the middle of measure and vision but almost never at the start of a word, so learners substitute a more familiar sound.
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
2 human recordingsActual people saying “genre”, 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 No machine-readable author provided. Celestianpower assumed (based on copyright claims). and Dvortygirl, licensed under Public domain / 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.
- Mandarin speakers: Mandarin syllables end only in n or ng, so the single biggest win for Mandarin speakers is final consonants: keeping the ends of words alive, including the -s and -ed that carry English grammar.
- Hindi speakers: Hindi speakers' single highest-impact fix is the v/w merger: Hindi has one sound (व) where English has two, so 'wine' and 'vine' collapse.
- 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).
- Korean speakers: Korean speakers' highest-impact fixes are /f/→/p/ ('coffee' → 'copi'), /z/→/dʒ/ ('zoo' → 'joo'), the r/l alternation, and the helper vowel that sneaks in after final consonants ('finish' → 'finishi').
- Japanese speakers: Japanese has one liquid sound where English has two (making l/r the canonical challenge) and its strict consonant-vowel syllables invite a helper vowel after English finals (strike → sutoraiku).
More academic and ielts words
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 genre?
How many syllables are in genre?
What is the most common mistake with genre?
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