Pronunciation · Everyday words people get wrong
How to pronounce “months”
MUNTHS
1 syllable · stress on “MUNTHS”
In short
Say “months” in 3 steps
- 1One syllable. Build the ending in slow motion: mun … th … s.
- 2The tongue tip touches behind the teeth for /n/, moves between the teeth for /θ/, then pulls back for /s/.
- 3Fluent speakers often simplify this to “muns” at speed, which is perfectly intelligible.
The version to avoid
Commonly said as: MUN-thes — inserting a vowel, or reducing it to “muns”
Three consonants stack at the end: /n/, /θ/, /s/. Very few languages allow that cluster, so learners break it up with a vowel or delete the middle 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
1 human recordingActual people saying “months”, 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. Dvortygirl assumed (based on copyright claims)., 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.
Don't confuse it with…
Minimal pairs isolate the exact contrast this word depends on — the fastest way to train both ear and mouth.
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.
- 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).
- 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).
- 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.
- Vietnamese speakers: For Vietnamese speakers one issue towers over all others: final consonants.
- Thai speakers: Thai allows very few final sounds, so English word-endings are the top priority: 'rice' → 'rai', 'bill' → 'bin'.
- 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').
More everyday words people get wrong
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 months?
How many syllables are in months?
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