Live lesson: How to pronounce P/T/K in words and H review

Hello, everyone. This is a live lesson. It's a Thursday evening here where I'm at. And welcome everyone. I decided to go live to teach you a few things because my latest lesson, H, got a lot of great responses. But I also received a bunch of questions and I wanted to answer those questions in particular, do you deal with three important sounds, three very frequent and important sounds that I think a lot of non native speakers should know. Hi, everyone. Thank you for saying hi. Let me know where you're from. Hello. Hello. Hi. Thank you for joining. Tell me if you hear me. Okay. See that my hair is all messed up here, so I'll fix it. Hey, guys. Okay, so for those of you who are joining now, I just want to say that I want to quickly review the H lesson that I released just a few days ago. Now, it was a week ago and this is why I'm going live, because I haven't. I don't have a new video for you today, but I have a very interesting video for you next week. So today I want to review the H, answer questions if you have, and also talk about the P's, the T's and the K's. And I want to discuss that because one of my students had a great question about these sounds in relation to the H. So first of all, let me know if you've seen my video about the H sound, about the H, the silent H, and how to pronounce the H. Let me know if you've seen it and what you thought. Yes, I'm getting some. We have some Brazilians here and Iraqis here. And yes. So welcome, welcome, welcome. So the H sound is a sound that is not a very. It's supposed to be a consistent sound and it usually is, but it gets confusing to some speakers. Here's the thing, some speakers don't really pronounce an H sound in their language. That, that sound familiar to all of you, French speakers or Spanish speakers or Hebrew speakers. So sometimes even if you do have an H sound, you don't actually pronounce it or you don't have to pronounce it. And if you don't pronounce it, it's not a big deal. In English, it is a big deal when you have an H, you have to pronounce it unless it's a word that you shouldn't pronounce it unless it's a word that you can reduce the H. Okay. So basically you always have to hear this whisper sound when there's an H, except for the words that I talked about in my video, honor, honest, air, herbs. And I think that's it. I'm forgetting one. Honor, honest, air, herbs. And okay, so if you remember, let me know because I think I just forgot one. Hours. Hours. It's so obvious that I forgot it. Yes. So we have these five words that have an H at the beginning, but we don't pronounce it. Do not pronounce it, except for herbs that I think British speakers and South African speakers may pronounce it with an H, like herbs. And that's okay, but that's not the case for hours or honor and the other words. And then I said that sometimes when you have all these function words that begin with an H, like he, her, him, his, and have all of these words when they're not stressed, which is most of the time, then we reduce the age. So for example, Z coming. Z coming. I'm not saying is he coming. Right, saying Z, Z. I'm reducing these two words. Z coming. Tell her I'm coming. Tell her, tell her. Right, I reduced the H here. Tell her I'm coming. Now, of course I'm expecting you to repeat those words with me if you are at a space that you can actually do that. But if not, you can watch this video afterwards and practice with me. Remember, it's not enough to just listen and to hear what I'm saying and to understand it. I mean, that's great. But I really, really want you to practice with me all the time. When you watch my videos, when you watch other video teachers videos, always do it yourself and do it over and over and over and over again and even record yourself and listen to it. So you actually train yourself to make these sounds effortlessly and actually accurately. Because sometimes we think that we pronounce an H, but we don't really. So the only way to do it is actually by repetition and practice. Okay, so going back to the reduced words, we looked, sorry, we looked at examples like he and her. And there's also him. Tell him and give him, Give him this job. It's his call. Right? It's his call. I don't have to pronounce the H here. It's his bag. But if I'm stressing it, it's his bag. Right? I'm stressing the word his. Then I definitely want to pronounce the H here. I'm not going to say something like it's is bag. No, that just doesn't sound right. Okay, so only when you're reducing those words, drop the H. If you're not sure. Just go with pronouncing the H all the time. It's better than not pronouncing it when you have to pronounce it. Okay, so that's the thumb rule. If you're getting all confused, memorize the five words that you don't have to pronounce the H and just pronounce the H in all other cases. And then when you get more comfortable with it, then you can start reducing those H's in function words. Now, what I really want to get into is the P's, T's, and K's at the beginning of words. Now why is that? Because one of my students wrote to me today. Hey, I've been waiting for this lesson. Thank you so much. That's great. But I do notice that There are other Hs that are not spelled, but we actually hear them. So I was reading this and I was like, what is she talking about? And then she said, look, in the word apartment, there is an H after a P. And that's a brilliant observation, but it's not. Although it sounds like an H, it's not an official H. And here's the thing. When P's, K's, and T's appear at the beginning of words or at the beginning of stress, C syllables, they're aspirated, which means they have this little H sound right after. But it's a lot shorter than a regular H. It's almost unnoticeable. You can drop it and the word is still going to be. A lot is going to be clear. But you do want to pronounce it because it makes you sound a lot better. Look at the. Look at this example. Let's take the word pay versus pay. Do you hear the difference? Let me know in the comments. Do you hear the difference between. Again, pay and pay? Do you hear the difference between take and take? So the second option is aspirated. So it feels like there is a little age. Yes. Okay. The complete actor just told me that you do here. And Danielle. Danielle. Yeah. I don't have my glasses on, so it's hard for me to see your name. So you hear the difference. Great, great, great. Can you make the difference? Can you create that little H sound? Pay. So what is this? What is the sound? Yes, it's a little H. But I want you to think of it as if you're holding your breath, closing your lips. Let's practice the P. For example, close your lips. Build up the tension, the pressure there, right? The air is pushing out, but you're holding it. And then you're releasing it with this strong puff as if you're. You're coming out of the water and you have to breathe out. Pay. It feels like there is. It's a little whisper. You're not even starting your voice. Pay. And that's the thing. Peace and not peace, people and not people. Pitch and not bitch. Because then it may sound to native speakers like, all right, B, I, T, C, H. We don't want that. When you have this whisper, it's very clear that it's a P sound. Pitch. Let's go to K. A K sound represented with the letter C or the letter A, and sometimes with the letter with the letters ch, cake, car, accomplishment. So it's at the beginning of words, but also at the beginning of stressed syllables. Okay, so all these three sounds, the P's, T's, and K's, and in a second, I'll talk about why these three sounds behave this way. When they're the beginning of words and at the beginning of stressed syllables, then they're aspirated. There's this little H. Take. Tough. Atomic. Fantastic. It's not fantastic. Fantastic. So you want to have this little whisper. These three sounds are plosives, which means that the sound is created by the breath being held and then released abruptly immediately, unlike fricatives like an F or a th, where the air comes out slowly and smoothly. Okay, so the P's and T's and K's are stop sounds, and they kind of like explode. And also they're voiceless. So if we think of the B sound, it doesn't happen with a B sound because we're activating the vocal cords for this one. Bay. Right. Bye. We can do PI, right? But if we say pie, can I get a piece of pie? Piece of pie. Right. We definitely hear this H sound. So let's have a little recap. I'm not going to review the H. You've already seen the video. If not, go watch the video. That's my latest video. But you want to use the H when you're pronouncing P, Ps, Ts, and K's at the beginning of words and at the beginning of stressed syllables. Now, of course, when I'm saying k's, I'm not just talking about the letter K. I'm talking about the K sound. So P as in pay or apartment, as in cake or accomplish, and T as in tough and fantastic. Okay, good. So practice it for a little bit and let me know in the comments below how it's going. And that's it. But now I'm gonna go back to your questions, to your comments. There are a lot of them, and I don't have my glasses on. So let's see if you have any questions. If you do, keep on writing them here. And I have a few more minutes with you, so I'd be happy to answer some of your questions. Thank you so much for all your love. We have people from Sweden and Russia and Syria. That's incredible. Latvia. Hello, everyone. Okay, if you don't use age speaking, why are you writing it? The question of all questions. English is not a phonetic language. Sometimes there are sounds and letters that maybe 300 years ago used to be pronounced or a thousand years ago, but it's no longer pronounced. Something happened. The language evolved. People tend to drop it in certain positions, and then it just disappeared from speech. Spoken English, it doesn't mean that. And again, English is not a phonetic language. So anything can happen. And you have to remember that when you're reading, not just when you're. When we're talking about the age, when we're talking about everything. And also think about it, in English, there are 16 different vowels, vowel sounds, and there are only five vowel letters, right? A, O, U, I, E. But go try represent 16 different vowel sounds, which, with five letters, you're bound to have different sounds represented with the same letter. Okay. Because you don't have a lot of other options. And this is why English is not a phonetic language. So I always recommend to, you know, go back into listening to English before you trust the spelling or, you know, expect it to sound a certain way by the way it's written. Okay. Hello, Dominican Republic. So, Nicaragua. I saw a question there. Bad connection. I hope it's not my. My bad connection. Okay. Piece of pie. Yes, that's what I said. Greetings from Poland. Okay, I think. I don't see. I think I had a few questions. Okay, class and glass, put on glasses, please. I know it's in the other room. Also, I forgot my lighting. My lighting is in the other room here. It was a little quieter. It's my studio, my work studio. So I was working there. I was setting everything up and it was too loud and I wanted a quieter room. I came here, I forgot my lighting, I forgot my glasses. But it's all about the lesson. Glass and class. What's the difference? The first sound, a G sound versus a K sound. The only difference between those two sounds is the voicing. So for a K sound, the back of the tongue is pressing against the upper palate, the soft palate closing and releasing. For a G sound, everything is happening the same way, but you're activating your vocal cords as well. So. So if you put your hands here, you can feel it vibrating G G in comparison to K. K. That's the only difference. You don't need to change anything inside your mouth or with your lips. So class versus glass. This is called minimal pairs or a minimal pair because it's one where you have two words that are almost the same except for one sound and that change in sound changes the meaning of the word. And for non native speakers, this is what you should go for. Practicing minimal pairs for pairs that are not distinguished in your language. So for example, if there is no distinction between K and G in your language, these are the pairs that you want to practice, like Kate and Gate. Right. Another minimal pair. Or sheep and ship that I talk about quite often. Or run. And one. Okay, another minimal pair. So you always want to compare it to sounds that are not distinguished in your language, but they're definitely distinguished in English. So that's it. Anyway, I have a class in seven minutes, so I'm going to go get ready. It was a pleasure talking to you. I think I'm going to go with this live lesson once a week. I need to figure out a a day, so it's going to be a set day so I can answer your questions. I'll let you know so you can join in. But if you miss it, you can always watch it because it's going to be uploaded to my channel. So again, thank you so much for joining. Thank you for saying hi and for your lovely comments and, and love. And that's it. If you have any questions for future lessons, future videos, please let me know in the comments. So that's it. Goodbye for now. Bye.