Finish the word: how to stop losing the ends of English words

You’re chatting with a new colleague. You tell her, “I worked in a hotel for two years.” She asks, “Oh, which hotel are you at now?” You left that job ages ago. Your grammar was right, but somewhere between your mouth and her ear the -ed disappeared, and the meaning went with it.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Losing the ends of words is one of the most common habits Vietnamese speakers bring to English. It isn’t laziness, and it isn’t a bad ear. It’s your first language doing what it has trained you to do. Habits can be retrained, though, a few minutes at a time.

Why the ends of words go missing

In Vietnamese, only six consonants can end a syllable: /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/, as in đáp, mát, các, làm, bàn and làng. The stops /p t k/ are unreleased: your lips or tongue close, and the sound just stops. There is no final /s/, /z/, /f/ or /v/, and there are no consonant clusters at all.

English is the opposite. Almost any consonant can end a word, and they often pile up, sometimes four in a row: asked /ɑːskt/, next /nekst/, texts /teksts/ (Lê, 2014). A lot of grammar lives there too. The -s in books /bʊks/ and the -ed in worked /wɜːkt/ are tiny sounds with a big job.

Teachers have noticed this since at least 1987, when the guide Learner English pointed out that Vietnamese speakers often drop a final /s/ after another consonant. Recent studies show how stubborn the habit is, even for strong speakers:

Sixteen recent graduates in Hanoi, all at C1 level or higher, gave presentations in English. They still left out 28.4% of word-final /s/ and /z/ sounds. For an -s ending after a consonant, as in books or works, the figure was 50.7% (Disney & Le, 2024).
Eight proficient speakers from northern Vietnam were recorded reading English. Not once did texts come out with all four final consonants (Pazos Riaño, 2021).

So dropping endings doesn’t mean your English is weak. It means your endings need their own practice.

What matters most to your listener

You don’t need a perfect accent. You need to be understood. The linguist Jennifer Jenkins studied which pronunciation features matter most when people with different first languages use English together. Her Lingua Franca Core says that all the consonants are important except the two “th” sounds. Clusters at the start of a word must stay whole: string can’t become sting or tring and still be understood (Jenkins, 2002). Endings matter too, because -s and -ed carry grammar. Lose them, and you can become harder to understand (Levis, 2018).

So practise in this order:

Keep clusters at the start of a word whole: school /skuːl/, not cool /kuːl/; street /striːt/, not treat /triːt/. In one study of Vietnamese university students, most errors in clusters such as /str/ and /spr/ were dropped consonants (Tran & Nguyen, 2022).
Finish final consonants: white /waɪt/, not why /waɪ/; card /kɑːd/, not car /kɑː/.
Say grammar endings, even inside a cluster: worked, books, she likes.

Here’s some good news. Jenkins’s core accepts a small extra vowel, but not a missing consonant. So if street feels hard, a slow “suh-treet” is still better than “treet”.

A 10-minute daily routine

Open the free iGreener Practice Room. It saves your progress in your browser; sign in with Google to keep it on all your devices.

Train your ear (2 minutes). In Minimal Pairs, choose Final sound or no final sound: car / card, buy / bike, play / plane, key / keep. Then try Say the -s ending (book / books, work / works). Keep going until you get 9 out of 10.
Feel the ending (2 minutes). Say white slowly. Press the tip of your tongue on the ridge just behind your top teeth, hold it, then let go with a small, quiet puff of air. That light release makes /t/ easy to hear at the end of a sentence. Don’t add a vowel: white, not “whi-tuh”.
Use the vowel for /t/ and /d/ (2 minutes). Vietnamese has no final /d/, so wide often comes out as white. The clue is the vowel. It’s shorter before /t/ and longer before /d/, so kit has a shorter vowel than kid. Say white – wide, seat – seed and bet – bed, stretching the second vowel a little. Then do the Final /t/ and /d/ set.
Link it (2 minutes). Endings are easiest before a vowel, because the consonant can slide across: worked‿in sounds like “work-tin”, books‿on like “book-son”, likes‿it like “like-sit”. Say each sentence five times: I worked in a hotel. I put my books on the desk. She likes it a lot.
Check yourself (2 minutes). Record three sentences about last weekend: I watched a film. I visited my grandparents. We walked to the market. Listen back. Did every -ed survive? On other days, do a round of Dictation to catch endings in other people’s speech.

Why every day, and not one long session on Sunday? Spacing works for sounds, too. In a recent study, Mandarin-speaking learners who spread their listening training over several days improved about twice as much as those who did it all at once, and they kept their gains (Saito & Chen, 2026).

Common mistakes

Letting the extra vowel grow. A tiny vowel is a stepping stone, not a new syllable. Keep endings short and light.
Closing it the Vietnamese way. If you say white like mát, with a silent closure, the /t/ is easy to miss. Let it go.
Practising only single words. Word lists are the easy part. Always finish with sentences.
Starting with “th”. In Jenkins’s research, the two “th” sounds were the only consonants that could be replaced without causing problems. Clusters and endings come first.
Fixing everything at once. Choose one ending a week: -ed this week, -s next week.

Small sounds, big difference

Nobody expects you to sound like a newsreader. But when your endings arrive, your listener stops guessing and starts listening. Try the routine for two weeks, then compare your first recording with your latest one.

Start today in the Practice Room. And if you’d like a teacher to hear how you speak and find the right class for you, take the placement test. It ends with a short speaking recording.

Sources

Disney, S. J., & Le, N. C. L. (2024). Word-final /s/–/z/ omission in Vietnamese English. Languages, 9(10), 327. Also the source used here for the Vietnamese final consonants (citing Kirby, 2011) and for Honey’s observation in Learner English (1987).
Pazos Riaño, J. C. (2021). Phonetic and phonological transfer from Northern Vietnamese to English in consonant clusters and voiceless final obstruents. EPOS, 37, 185–209.
Tran, T. K. L., & Nguyen, A. T. (2022). Common mistakes in pronouncing English consonant clusters: A case study of Vietnamese learners. Can Tho University Journal of Science, 14(3), 32–39.
Lê, T. H. (2014). Lỗi phát âm thường gặp của sinh viên Đồng Nai ở phụ âm, tổ hợp phụ âm kết thúc từ tiếng Anh [Common English pronunciation errors of final consonants and consonant clusters by Dong Nai University students]. Ngôn ngữ và Đời sống, 10, 75–81.
Jenkins, J. (2002). Global English and the teaching of pronunciation. TeachingEnglish, British Council.
Lingua Franca Core. Wikipedia, summarising Jenkins, J. (2000), The Phonology of English as an International Language, Oxford University Press.
Levis, J. M. (2018). Consonant clusters and intelligibility. In Intelligibility, Oral Communication, and the Teaching of Pronunciation (pp. 86–99). Cambridge University Press.
Saito, K., & Chen, S. (2026). Optimizing L2 phonetic learning: Spaced vs. massed training schedule. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 48(2), 491–512. Published online in December 2025.

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