About this ebook
About the author
Smith Tony is a linguist and language acquisition specialist with over fifteen years of experience teaching German pronunciation to speakers of English, French, and Mandarin. He holds a master's degree in Phonetics and Phonology from the University of Freiburg and completed doctoral coursework in Second Language Speech Acquisition at the University of Tübingen. His research has focused on the perception and production of non-native phonemic contrasts, particularly the acquisition of German front rounded vowels and dorsal fricatives by English speakers.
From 2012 to 2019, Tony directed the pronunciation curriculum at the Goethe-Institut in Munich, where he designed intensive training programs for advanced learners preparing for academic and professional positions in German-speaking countries. During this period, he developed the Articulatory Progression Method—a systematic approach that teaches German sounds in order of articulatory complexity, building from sounds that share features with English to those requiring entirely new motor patterns. This method, documented in his 2018 paper "Sequencing Phonetic Instruction for Adult Learners" (Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 49(2)), forms the pedagogical foundation of the present book.
Tony's work extends beyond the classroom. He served as a pronunciation consultant for Deutsche Welle's language learning division from 2015 to 2020, contributing to the development of the Nicos Weg pronunciation components and creating the phonetic guidelines for the DW German news reader training program. He has delivered workshops on pronunciation pedagogy at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, the European Association of Language Teachers, and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
A native of Stuttgart with Swiss German family background, Tony grew up code-switching between Standard German, Swabian, and Swiss German dialects. This early exposure to systematic phonological variation sparked his lifelong interest in how speakers acquire and maintain multiple sound systems. He currently divides his time between Berlin and Freiburg, where he works as an independent pronunciation coach and develops digital tools for phonetic self-assessment. German Pronunciation Mastery is his first book.
