Pronounciation difficulty with -age words

[Amers]

Hi,

I'm tutoring a Korean man in conversational and business English, and we've run up against a pronounciation difficulty that I can't seem to figure out.

When he says words such as language, cage, engage, etc, he adds a hard 'e' sound to the end of the word so that the words end up sounding like languagee, cagee and engagee. When I speak the words immediately before he does, the emphasis on the hard 'e' is much less, but when he says the words on his own, the hard 'e' comes back right away.

Any thoughts on how I can explain the difference to him so that it comes automatically to him?

Amy

[eslweb]

It maybe useful to teach him the pronunciation grammar for this kind of situation. i.e. The e at the end of the word is to show that the a is a long sound. (When I was a kid we learned it as the magic e.) But in today's environment it would be better to teach the IPA version.

James

[Deborah B]

I found talking about language in terms of syllables helps. Since the -ee at the end of the word creates another syllable. See if framing, for example, "language" as a one syllable word helps. This pre-thought helped my spanish-speaking student when he would add an extra sound at the end of -ed words, so they would sound like "mobb-da" or "mobb-ed".