The 6 Elements Of English Pronunciation With @Firuzeh| #ShareTheMic

Hey everyone, it's Hadar and welcome to my channel. Today we will continue to pass on the mic to different teachers with different voices. And today we have Firuza who is going to talk about pronunciation essentials. Let's welcome her. Hi, everyone. My name is Firuza and I'm so happy to be here. Thank you so much, Hadar, for this amazing opportunity. And I would like to use this opportunity to talk talk about pronunciation. I want to talk about the six different components of pronunciation, six different aspects of pronunciation that all together make up our pattern of pronunciation and hence our accent. I want to tell you that if we really gain the knowledge of and master the practice of, if we acquire the theory of and the practice of these six different components, we can have a really clear and understandable pronunciation and hence a good accent. Because after all, what's a good accent? A good accent that empowers you to be as expressive and communicative as you can be. Now, the first one, the first component is the topic about pronunciation that is really commonly overlooked. And there is so much confused conversation about around pronunciation that is the result of this. And it is the distinction between letters and sounds in English. These two things are completely different things. And when we don't make that distinction, it becomes really confusing. What we are talking about. A letter in English is a symbol that we use to represent and show sometimes up to eight different sounds. Eight different sounds. You know that we have two kinds of letters and sounds. We have consonants and vowels. We have consonant letters and consonant sounds. For example, we have this letter in English, which is letter T. It can represent up to eight different sounds in the American dialect. I have a video about that. I would love for you guys to check that out. I'm just gonna go over the different sounds very quickly. Sometimes it sounds like what we call a flap T. When we say water, it's not like D that is produced by letter D. It's softer than that. Your tongue is not supposed to touch your upper palate firmly. It just touches it lightly. So we say water bottle. It is. Sometimes it is what we call a glottal stop. The same mountain. Mountain cotton. Sometimes in the American dialect, we completely gloss over it. We don't pronounce it. We say Internet. In other dialects you might hear Internet. Sometimes it sounds like ch when we say situation. Sometimes it sounds like when we say conversation. And sometimes it's completely silent in all the dialects out there. For example, when we say soften or fasten your seatbelt. And then we have this letter that is a vowel letter. Again, I have a video explaining all these different sounds that this letter represents. But to just very briefly go over them. Sometimes this letter sounds like a long aw. We say college. Sometimes it sounds like a short. We say mother. Sometimes it sounds like a long OO. We say womb. Sometimes it sounds like a shirt. We say woman. Sometimes it sounds like oh. We say okay. And sometimes it's silent. We say comfortable. It is really important for you to understand that this distinction exists because it can eliminate a lot of the confusion that is about the pronunciation of letters in English. Number two, the second component is about one of these sounds and letters that we talked about. It's about vowels. It is about the distinction. Another categorization and distinction between long and short vowels. We have three sets of them in English. We have long and short. When we say shot, shut, gone, gun. So we say he's gone, but we say he was shot with a gun. Gun. We say bog and bug. Another set is oo. And when we say pull and pull, we say, I shooed the dog and I should feed the dog. Should. Should. The third one is a distinction between e and I. When we say E, it's a long E. Like when we say reason, reason. And then we say, risen. The sun has risen. And we say, the reason for doing that very different, right? We say sleep and slip. I have at least three videos in which I talk about so many examples of these categories. I highly recommend you guys watch that now. The third element. The third element is word stress. Stress in a word is the syllable in the word, and syllable being the part of the word that has one vowel. Like when we say vol, na, ra, b, L, T, vulnerability, six syllables. So the part of the word that we emphasize that we put more pressure and stress on. For example, in the word vulnerability, the stress is on the fourth syllable, right? It is so important to get this stress right, because first of all, it's a personal thing. You know, you want to be confident about your pronunciation. You want to have part of the word to hang on to, to hold on to, to have that as the pillar of confidence. So we know that it is vulnerability. That's where the pressure is, and it makes you confident of your pronunciation. Another reason stress is so important, because if you don't observe the right stress, it can create a lot of confusion on the part of the listener, Especially if you're a listener as a native speaker who has not been exposed to a lot of different flavors of accents out there. You know, when a native listener hears the word that starts with pro. Okay, they expect to hear something like program or produce. They never expect to hear something like professor, because for them the emphasis is on fester. It's professor. And when you start with pro, the person expects to hear something different. So it requires a lot of mental and intellectual effort, if you will, on the part of the listener to want to adjust their understanding of what you're saying. And that can be uncomfortable for people. It confuses them without really knowing what's exactly confusing them. It's an interesting phenomenon. So we want to be clear in our communication. So we want to avoid that. In order to do that, we want to find that pillar of stress, the part of the word that we want to pronounce and enunciate more emphatically. In order to demonstrate how important stresses. I again have another video in which I give at least 50 examples of this. I also want to talk about this a little bit here, giving you some examples. For example, let's take a look at this word. If you put the stress in the beginning of this word, the O becomes emphatic, it becomes a long aw. We say object, and it's a noun that means item, or it sometimes means purpose and objective. If you put the stress on the second syllable, the O becomes a schwa sound, the most common vowel sound in English. So we say object, object. To object to something means to protest, to disagree. We say attribute the stress in the beginning, the A becomes a attribute, and it means a characteristic. If you put the stress on the second syllable, it becomes attribute, which means to say that something is caused by something else. For example, you attribute something to something else. Again, go and watch those videos to see all these words that completely change because of the change of stress. The fourth one, the fourth one is set and stress. Sentence stress is really important. It makes up the melody in our speech, the rhythm and the prosody in the speech. And it is so important in English because we have it in every single sentence we make. You know, English is what we call a stress timed language, as opposed to some other languages, most languages that are syllable timed languages, which means in some languages, every syllable has pretty much the same weight. In English, it's not like that at all. Some syllables are totally disregarded, overlooked. They're never stressed. They're almost never stressed sometimes, and sometimes, depending on the meaning, they get the stress or they lose their stress. If you will imagine a natural forest in which trees are of different lengths and sizes. That's English with words having different stresses. So you go up and Then you go down and the pitch increases and the volume goes up and then it goes down. Based on the meaning. In some languages, it's like an orchard, an apple orchard. All the trees have the same height, length, they're tall, or they're all short. Every syllable has pretty much the same weight and pitch and volume and ring to it. Now, sometimes there are words that are almost always unstressed. We call them function words, words like articles like when I say the almost always, but not always because we have some exceptions. If you want to emphasize. So for example, we say I saw Maria Carey, and then you say the Maria Carey. The means that specific one. So you emphasize that 99.9% of the time you don't emphasize it. And then we have content words. When it comes to content words, sometimes in one sentence, one word can get more emphasis and stress because of its relevant importance in that specific sentence. So, for example, if I say, I've learned so much from this YouTube channel about verbal communication, in that sentence I emphasized so much, I've learned so much from this YouTube channel about verbal communication, I might change that. I might say, I've learned so much about verbal communication. From this YouTube channel, I can say, I've learned so much from this YouTube channel about verbal communication. I don't know about you. So I change that by the change of stress. The fifth one is intonation. Intonation is when you end a sentence a certain way. The pitch and the tone changes at the end of the sentence. Primarily, we use intonation to communicate two things. Sometimes a sentence changes from being a statement to a question by the change of intonation. So for example, if I say she's happy, she's happy. I'm asking a question. If I say she's happy, she's happy, it's a statement. So a lot of times questions have rising intonations and statements have falling. But then when it comes to questions, if I say, where are you going? Where are you going? Is it where you're going? Is that where you're going? Again, in questions we have falling and rising intonations. Sometimes you communicate your level of certainty through your intonation. If I have rising intonation, I'm less certain. I'm less positive about what I'm doing a lot of times. So for example, if I say I'm really trying to work on my verbal communication, feels like I'm not really self assured about that. But if I say I'm really trying to work on my verbal communication, my verbal communication to the way I end the sentence now, the last point is about blending of the sounds. It is such an important point in English pronunciation. We blend the sounds. We mix the sounds. The sounds are fused together all the time. Consonants with consonants, vowels with vowels, and vowels with consonants. So, for example, take a look at this. What is this word? This is law school. It could also be law school, right? Because the way the words, the sounds are blended, it could be two different things. Another very important rule is that when a word ends in a consonant and the next one starts with a vowel, which we always blend the sounds. For example, if your name starts with a vowel, we say, my name is Ali. If we have two vowels, one word ends with a vowel. The other one starts with a vowel. We kind of combine them. We say, law abiding. Law abiding citizens. Don't say law abiding. Law abiding. Law. Law abiding citizens. And sometimes if the first word ends in the same consonant that the next word starts with, we just pronounce it as one consonant. We say, big girl. Big girl. Okay, so that was all I had for today about pronunciation. I really hope that I can keep in touch with you guys and you guys will continue on this journey that you've started. And Hadar, thank you again.