12. American Intonation: What They Don't Teach You In School

Welcome to the Influency podcast. I'm Hadar, and this is episode number 12. And today we are going to talk about intonation. Hey, everyone, thank you so much for tuning in for another episode. And as I was recording the first sentence of this episode, I thought of doing something completely different. Something like, welcome to the Influency podcast. I'm Hadar, and this is episode number 12. And I thought to myself, I wonder what you would think about it. Would that sound strange to you? Because it's not the usual pattern of speech that I use. Or. Or if you've been listening to a few episodes already, you know that this is not how I start my podcast because I always have the same melody. Welcome to the Influency podcast. Right? I stress the same words, welcome to the Influency podcast, and I go down. So you've gotten used to this musical pattern that I use when I introduce myself. So if I were to use something completely different, you would have noticed it. Now I'm telling this and I'm saying to myself, I should have done it. I should have recorded it differently and then discussed it. But hey, I know I can rerecord it, but then it won't be as authentic as this discussion. So I'm going to leave it at that and give you some food for thought, because this episode is about intonation, the melody of the language. And actually, this episode and the next episode are going to deal with intonation. Intonation is the melody, and it's a part of a larger idea that is called prosody. Prosody is like the opposite of pronunciation. If pronunciation is the actual formation of the sounds, how you make the sounds, and the actual sounds that form the language. Prosody is how you put it all together. It's basically everything. It's rhythm, connected speech, stress, what words you stress in a sentence. Um, it's the melody, when you go up, when you go down, the infliction, it's the cadence. All of these things comprise your speech, and they're considered prosody. I often refer to it as intonation, but to be honest, intonation is just the melody. Prosody is so much more than that. And. But the common usage or people usually refer to it as intonation. So I'm going to go back and forth between those two terms and explain it every time that I use one of them. So today, in this episode and in the next episode, episode 13, I'm going to dive deep into intonation. And intonation is really important. A lot of times, people cling onto pronunciation and they think that pronunciation is what they need to know and how to pronounce the right sounds and practice it. But they don't put a lot of focus on how to put it all together. And then they still sound unclear, even though they invest a lot of time and energy into improving their pronunciation. Because it's not one thing or the other. These two things go together and ultimately comprise your speech. And usually when I teach my students and I coach them, I tell them it's not that pronunciation is more important or prosody is more important. You have to understand what are the elements that are used in English that are important for clarity that you are not using currently. And it might be some sounds, but it also might be some speech patterns, intonation, rhythm, how you break down the sentence, phrasing, and all of that that causes you to be unclear. So I usually create for my students this hierarchy chart where they know what are the top three elements that they need to work on. Sometimes it's sounds, and sometimes it's related to intonation and prosody. So it really depends on the speaker, on the native language, on the experience of the speaker, so on and so forth. This is why I decided to dedicate two episodes to intonation. Today we're going to listen to the audio version of my video that discusses the fundamentals of American intonation. It's called American Intonation, what they don't teach you in school. Which is exactly that. I wish someone had taught me that in school when I first started learning English. And in the next episode, episode 13, I will give you some tips and tricks on how to improve your intonation, your melody in English, what you can do, some practical steps that you can do on your own if you want to improve your intonation in English. So let's listen to American intonation, what they don't teach you in school.

Hi, what's up? How are you? Hey, guys, it's Hadar. And this is the accents way. Today we are going to talk about American intonation. Now, I know that usually in this channel I talk about pronunciation, but don't get me wrong, American intonation is not less important and sometimes more important than pronunciation. And this is why I figured it. It is time to talk about American intonation. So today I'm going to open the wonders of American intonation so you can start listening to English rather differently. When we talk about intonation, we are talking about three things. One is the melody, the music of the language. When I go up in pitch When I go down hadar ta ta if I take away the words and I just play, play it. It's just like a song or a tune that I'm playing. Ta ta ta da da da da da da da da. So when you're listening to English or when you're speaking English, you also want to consider the melody, the notes that you're using. We're also going to talk about stress. Stress is what words you choose to stress in a given sentence. What are you doing? Or what are you doing? What versus doing? While there are some patterns and a neutral way of saying things, there's also a lot of freedom. Of course, it depends on the context, the attitude and many other things. But you first need to know the building blocks and the basis of what words are usually stressed and what words are not stressed for the most part. Now, lastly, we have rhythm. Rhythm is the real deal. It's the feel of the language. It's really owning it. Once you start using American rhythm, now you have to understand that English is a perfect balance between the long versus short, the high versus low, the stressed versus the effortless. And when you are able to balance between all these things in an effortless and clear way, this is when you become a strong speaker, one who is able to communicate their message in a clear and confident way. Now, today we're going to discuss all of these elements. But in the future I will release more in depth videos about each and every subject with many, many examples and more explanation. Before we talk about these elements, I want to talk about the different types of words. So in English, actually in any language, the words in the language are divided into two main content words and function words. Content words are words that deliver the content nouns like sister table, school verbs, go, run, swim, think, adjectives, beautiful, red, clean and adverbs, slowly, sometimes beautifully and fast. The other group is function words. These are all the small words that connect content words. They're essential to create a grammatically correct sentence, but when they stand alone, they don't signify anything. We don't know exactly what they mean. We are talking here about prepositions like on, in, at, verb b, m, is r, articles a and determiners like the this that. These are the words that non native speakers struggle with when they're trying to construct a sentence. Is it have been, has been, had been. So when we speak, there is always a strong preference towards stressing content words. Content words are the important words. If you say had been versus have been, the message is still going to be clear and but if you say red instead of blue, that's something completely different. So content words are always more important, and that's how we treat them when we think about intonation. Because content words are the words that are stressed usually, whereas function words are unstressed. And not only that, they're unstressed, they're reduced to a point that it's even not clear anymore. And I'll give you a few more examples in a second. Let's take, for example, the sentence. And I'm going to say it broken down a little bit. The glass is on the table. The glass is on the table. And now I'm going to talk about all three melody, word, stress, and rhythm. So first of all, stress, we need to decide what are the stressed words in the sentence. So let's first recognize what are the content words. The glass is on the table. We have glass and table, two nouns, and these are the words that I'm going to stress in this sentence. Not every content word is stressed the same. But for now, let's agree that these two words are the words that I choose to stress. This is where melody and rhythm comes into play. Stressed words are higher in pitch and longer higher in pitch, so they get a higher note. Ta da. The first note was higher in pitch, and they're longer. Okay, the glass is on the table. So notice that I raised the pitch for glass and table. The glass is on the table. Okay, so in terms of melody, when words are stressed, they're also higher in pitch. Now, one more thing I want to tell you about melody is that every syllable receives a different note in English, it is not the glasses on the table. Da, da da da da da da. The glass is on the table. It's not the glasses on the table. Not every word is going up and down, but I choose the stress words, and then these are the words that are going to be higher in pitch. And from there, I either go down or I go up. Every syllable takes me one step lower or higher. In this case, the glass is on the. So I keep going down because these are not stressed words. Tay. I'm starting a new word that is stressed, so I'm going to go high in pitch. Table. The glass is on the table. So that's melody. What words I choose to stress and go high in pitch. For now, while we choose to shine on the content words, the words that bring the content, in this case, glass and table, by going higher in pitch and prolonging them function, words play a smaller role in this show. They are reduced. We Kind of want to hide them. We want to reduce them to a point where they don't interfere or they don't compete with content words. So if we're going back to the glass is on the table, function words are the is on and another the. We reduce the vowel in those words to a schwa. A schwa is a really reduced vowel sound. It sounds something like this. To make the sound, we just drop the jaw a little bit. The tongue rests on the bottom of the mouth, the lips are relaxed, and we release sound. So the vowels in the function words reduce to this sound. Therefore, the word the. Okay, we don't say the glass. We say the glass. So the vowel there is a schwa sound. The the. And we connect it. It feels as if it's one word. The glass is turns into on turns into. And again we have another the. So it's not is on the.

It's.

We reduce the vowel and we connect the words together. The glasses on the table. The glass on the table. The glass on the table. Now notice what happens. The is merges with the glass. The glass on becomes the n and th. Connect the glass. Okay, so we kind of like took these three words and squeezed them into one utterance. The glass on the table. So you get a sentence that is a perfect balance between the high and the low glasses on the. Between the long and the short glasses.

Right.

Glass is long, although it's one syllable, and is really reduced. And also the stress. So I invest more energy and I say it a little louder. Glass to be able to connect the words and to reduce them, I have to say the consonant softer too. Okay.

It's not enough.

So I have to invest less energy in those function words to be able to go through them smoothly and then be ready for the next content word where I'm going to go higher in pitch and I'm going to prolong them. Let's look at another example. What if I told you that five words can be shorter than. Than one word with one syllable? Five words are going to be shorter than one word with one syllable.

How.

Let's look at the next example. What are you going to do? The do is the verb here. And that's the word that I'm going to stress. Okay, Stress check. I know what word I'm stressing. Then I know that in terms of melody, this word is going to be higher in pitch because that's the word I want to stress.

Do.

Do. So I already know the ending. The beginning is a bunch of function words. So I'm going to reduce them. What turns into are. Turns into er. You. Turns into y. Going to. Turns into gonna. Gonna. So instead of saying, what are you going to. We say, what are you gonna. What are you gonna. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? So the do is longer than the entire first part of the sentence. It's longer than the entire sentence because five words versus one. One word with one syllable is longer than the first five. And this is why it's important to remember that rhythm is a result of your message, what you're trying to say. The words that you stress are going to be longer and louder and higher in pitch. The words that are less important for delivering your message are going to be reduced to allow everything else to stick out. In many languages, every syllable has the same beat. It doesn't matter if it's a content word or a function word. If it's stressed or unstressed, it receives the same. Same length. So a sentence like this is going to sound something like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Okay, so do is going to be super short. What is going to have the same length to. Is going to have the same length as do. What are you going to do? And then it's hard to understand what is the important part here. Okay, of course it's a simple sentence, but if we're talking about more complex sentences and there is no hierarchy between the words, it's really hard to get your point. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do? Let's take a look at a sentence with several content words. There are three coins in the box. There are three coins in the box. Here I chose to stress coins and box. So these words are high in pitch. There are three coins in the box. That's reduced. There are three coins in the box. In the. Also reduced. There are three coins in the box. I can also say there are three coins in the box. And when you hear that, you know that maybe someone else thinks that there are five coins. No, there are three coins in the box. Why are you confusing me? There are three coins. Why did you say there were five? Okay, so it's the same sentence, but stressing a different word means something slightly different. Now, I want you to listen up here. And this is really important. When we speak with a foreign accent, what we do is we apply patterns that we know from our native tongue unto English. We don't do it consciously. It's just that's what comes out organically. Now if we do that, if the patterns of our native tongue are different from English and sometimes contradictory to the patterns of English, the result is that the stress is not going to be clear. The message is not going to be clear. Because if you're applying external intonation and stressing things, let's say at the beginning rather than the end, and in English, you want to stress the ending usually, then what happens is that you end up stressing the wrong words. Although you know how to construct the sentence, the words are accurate, you don't make any grammar mistakes. But if you don't distinguish the right words, if you don't stress the right words, if you don't put the emphasis on the words that are stressed, then you become unclear. Then people may get something that is a little different from what you mean. So understanding that recognizing your patterns and listening to how native speakers speak really helps you understand how English should be spoken and advances you in becoming a stronger, a more confident and a clear skill speaker. Now I want to ask you what from everything that I discussed today, melody, rhythm, stress is the most challenging for you. What are you still struggling with? Please let me know in the comments below and don't forget to tell me where you're from and what is your native tongue and I will do my best to create more content and lessons that will help you resolve all the issues that you're facing. Thank you so much for watching. Please share the video with your friends if you liked it and you think that they may benefit from it. And don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and click on the bell to get notifications so you know when I'm releasing a new video. Have a wonderful week and I will see you next week in the next video. Bye.