hello everyone I'm Jenna and this is learn academic English on this channel I help English
Learners like you who want to take their language to the next level in today's lesson I'm going to
give you a simple but important pronunciation lesson about homophones homophones what are
homophones homophones are words that have different spellings but the same pronunciation
homo means same and phon means sound so these are words that have the same sound there are many many
more homophones in English but today I'm going to be sharing just some of the most common ones with
you so first let's take a look at these over here and these are words that are homophones but you
should be able to guess that these sound the same based on their spelling you know that words that
have double e sound like e and most words that are spelled with EA also sound like /iy/ so we
have meet and meat see and sea they sound exactly the same there are other ones like beet and beat
but I'm sure you can think of more the next ones are hare and hair the this word hare is not very
common it means rabbit uh but these words sound exactly the same the next one's ate and eight
again based on the spelling you should be able to predict that these sound the same however not all
words that are spelled like this sound like /ey/ for example the word height however here with this
with the E this eigh is going to sound like a and most words that are spelled like this are going
to be pronounced with /ey/ as well so we have ate and eight next weight and wait similar situation
and finally poor and pour now this word poor is an example of a word that probably sounds different
in British English some people pronounce this word poor so that one might not be a homophone pair in
some types of English but in the US most people say these exactly the same poor and pour okay next
let's move over to some ones that are a little bit trickier we have our and hour here the H is
silent so these words sound exactly the same next flour and flower would and wood notice that the L
here is totally silent W would if this /U/ vowel is hard for you please check out my other video
that I have all about the /uw/ and /U/ vowels wear and where through and threw the past tense of the
verb throw and we have here three words that sound the same fore four and for this means meaning of
fore is like your forearm or something that's in the foreground okay in the next ones we have a
category that are even trickier or maybe more unexpected sun and son so even though we have
two totally different vowels these sound exactly the same won and one except accept now these words
are spelled very differently and this is a pair of words that native speakers will often confuse
because they sound the same but they are totally different now the reason that these sound the same
is because the first syllable is not stressed and as you know when the first syllable is not
stressed the vowel is usually reduced so the vowel is not very clear we say except and and accept and
finally writing and riding so here what's going on as you know the T in between two syllables
in American English will often change to a fast D this happens when the syllable before is stressed
so for example in this word writing the T changes to a fast D because it's in between two vowels
and the syllable before writing is stressed writing and as a result it sounds the same as
riding now most Americans will pronounce these basically exactly the same there's no audible
difference between them but in the context we know which word it is I'm writing I'm writing,
Susan What are you writing? I was riding a horse No, I'm riding my bike and the same thing goes
for the pair of words writer and rider they sound the same but context will let you know which one
the person is talking about in most cases I'm a writer I'm a writer so as I mentioned these
are just some of the homophones in English let me know in the comments below what other homophones
you can think of and if you have any questions about English pronunciation I will always be
happy to help please don't forget to give this video a like and subscribe if you would like
more lessons like this one and if you want to take lessons with me check the description box
below for a link to my online courses I hope to see you back here again soon take care