Hi there and welcome back to my channel Learn Academic English I want to help English learners
be successful in school and work and one of the things that's so important is to feel confident
in your pronunciation that's why today I have a short lesson on the difference between the vowels
/ɛ/ and /ae/ before we get into the pronunciation I just want to let you know that it's totally fine
to have an accent it's normal to have trouble with English vowels because there are so
many vowel sounds but if you have trouble with these two vowels it's an easy thing that you
can improve and work on and it will help other people understand you more clearly let me give
you a quick example the other day I was listening to an interview and I heard the woman who was not
a native speaker of English say the word tex over and over again tex tex and I thought is she saying
text like to send a text on your phone finally according to the context I realized that she was
saying tax but because she was mispronouncing the vowel I understood the word text instead of
tax and so this is an example of how knowing the difference between these two vowels and knowing
how to pronounce them clearly can help you to be understood better so let's first take a quick
look at what is the difference between /ɛ/ and /ae/ well the vowel /ɛ/ sounds like the vowel in
pen or bet the mouth is open but not too much /ɛ/ the vowel /ae/ as in cat or bad is more open
now if you want to get into the details of how to pronounce the vowel /ae/
check out my video that I have all about the vowel sound /ae/ but you want to notice that your
tongue is going to be behind your bottom front teeth so if you look in the mirror you can see
/ae/ and you're going to open your mouth a little bit more now notice also that you don't
need to open your mouth a lot sometimes when I see people teach this sound I see them going
/ae/ you don't need to open your mouth so much because native speakers don't open their mouth
like that and you might not feel comfortable doing that so try to say it with a little bit more open
bad
notice that if you maybe put your thumb in between your teeth that's about how
much your mouth is going to be open maybe a little bit more /ae/ the trick
is that you need to open your mouth enough that your tongue comes down ah
okay let's look at some example words first we will practice pronouncing them separately and then
we will do them together so you can practice the difference we have pen bed text left said bed men
pens and then for /ae/ we have pan bad tax laughed sad bad man
pans also I want you to notice that in English vowels that come before
voiced consonants are a little bit longer so in all of these words we have a voiced
consonant at the end and the vowel is going to be a little bit longer sad now compare that
with the word sat like I sat down sat sad can you hear how this vowel is a little bit longer
now let's practice them together we'll practice the first the /ɛ/
and then the /ae/ and try to make the difference clear pen pan
bed bad text tax left laughed
said sad bed bad men
man pens pans
so that's all I have for you today again if you want to improve this you're going to want
to practice as much as possible to help you feel comfortable pronouncing these two sounds but this
is a good way to start the vowels are different and it's important to pronounce them differently
and even if your language does not have the a sound it's not so difficult it is
something that you can do if you work on it let me know other words that you
can think of that have the /ɛ/ and /ae/ sounds in the comments below
and if you have questions be sure to let me know I'll see you again soon take care!