Prosody is concerned with properties that provide fluidity to speech: i.e., rhythm and melody. Rhythm means a regular pattern in the flow of things, such as the tick, tick, tick of a clock or the lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub of a beating heart. Melody means the ups and downs of voice. All spoken languages have rhythm and melody, but they differ in the way they occur and perform in speech. Speaking English fluently implies the ability to produce the rhythm and melody proper to English, the learning of which is the goal of this audiobook.

The rhythm and melody of English arise due to two characteristics of the English language: English is a stress-timed language and an intonation language. The former characteristic relates to the fact that English natives tend to distribute stressed syllables to occur at a similar distance in time, sounding TA-dum-dum, TA-dum-dum, TA-dum-dum. This regular timing in the occurrence of stressed syllables creates rhythm in English. The latter characteristic relates to the fact that English natives employ a pitch change to change sentences. Pitch used for this purpose is called intonation.

In English, identical sentences with different intonations can have opposite meanings. For example, the sentence “John seems like a nice guy” can have opposite meanings when maximal pitch is given to “guy” and to “seems”, respectively. (The word that receives the maximal pitch is called the focus word (focus words are in upper case)): John seems like a nice guy (speaker thinks John is nice); John seems like a nice guy (speaker does not think John is nice). Since intonation makes the voice move up and down, it creates melody.