Hi! This is Gabriel Wyner from Fluent-Forever.com.
In these three videos, I’m going to show you the bare essentials of English phonetics
and spelling.
If you’re using one of my pronunciation trainers, don’t worry about memorizing any
of this; the trainer will do that for you. Just watch and pay attention. Everything you
see here will show up sooner or later within the trainer.
I’ll be going through English using the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA.
This lets us simplify this discussion a lot, since I only need to talk about 38 symbols,
many of which you may know already, instead of trying to wade through nearly 170 spelling
rules.
So lets get started.
We’ll break this up into three parts - the first will cover the English consonants, the
second will cover the vowels, and the third will cover a few of English’s spelling rules.
We’ll be discussing the General American dialect of English throughout this video.
That said, if you’re interested in learning British English, specifically Received Pronunciation
or BBC English, then I’d suggest you watch these videos first, and then watch a 4th video
I’m making on the differences between General American and Received Pronunciation.
American English has 25 consonants.
Now usually when I make these videos, I compare the language you’re learning to the sounds
of English,
but that’s not really going to work here.
Instead, I’m going to assume that you know a small set of sounds that tend to show up
in most languages, and then we’re going to use those sounds to explain the rest of
the consonants you need.
So, let me start by introducing you to a few sounds that you probably already know, and
then briefly mention where they’re made in your mouth. We’ll start in the front
of your mouth and move backwards:
So first, we have [b] as in Boy And [m] as in Man
These two sounds are made in the same place, by touching your lower lip to your upper lip.
B. M.
Then comes [f] as in Father. This one is made by touching your lower lip to upper teeth.
FFF.
Next, we have [d] as in Dog, [s] as in Snake and
And [n] as in Nail
These three sounds are made by touching the tip of your tongue to your alveolar ridge
- that hard ridge right behind your upper teeth. D - S - N.
Here, I’ll make one comment about that D sound for English.
In many languages, you make a “D” sound with the tip of your tongue touching your
upper teeth, and then the blade of your tongue - the part that comes right behind the tip
- is the part that touches your alveolar ridge. In English, you’ll pull your tongue a little
further back, so that the tip is at your alveolar ridge, which gives that consonant a more percussive
sound. You get “Dee d Dee” instead of “di d di”, like you might find in Italian
or Spanish.
Moving on, we have [j] as in yellow.
This one is basically the same tongue position as the [i] vowel - the middle of your tongue
is raised up near the hard palate. [i]. yellow
Last, we have [g] as in gopher. This one is made by pulling the back of your tongue up
to your soft palate. [g] Gopher.--
At this point, we’re going to revisit some of those sounds we just discussed
and use them to generate a few more consonants.
Let’s start with [s] as in snake. This sound, as we discussed before, is made with the tip
of your tongue near your alveolar ridge. Now there is another sound in English, made
in exactly the same location,
which sounds like this: “zzz” [z], which shows up in words like “zebra”
The difference between /s/ and /z/ is something called “voicing”,
which basically just asks whether your vocal cords are vibrating or not during the consonant.
You can get a feel for this by putting your hand on your throat and saying "SSSS".
You shouldn’t feel much beneath your hand. /s/ is an unvoiced consonant, and so your
vocal cords aren’t vibrating at all.
If you do the exact same thing, but say "ZZZZZ" instead, you'll find that there is buzzing
beneath your hand. ZZ is the voiced version of SS. These two sounds - S and Z - make for
easy to follow examples of voicing, because you can sustain them for a long period of
time. SSSS, ZZZZ. We can use this concept of voicing to add another consonant
to our repertoire - [v] as in “vote” - /v/ is the voiced version of /f/. You’ll use
the exact same mouth position - your bottom lip comes up to your upper teeth - /ffff/,
only this time, you’re going to engage your vocal cords. /vvvv/..vote.
Now voicing can get a bit more complex and interesting when we start talking about consonants
like B or D - consonants that can only last for an instant
Place your hand on your throat again and
say "B". When you do this, a few things happen in a very particular order.
First, your lips are going to be closed.
Then you'll start to feel buzzing in your throat, and air is going to build up behind
your lips. Mmmb. Then your lips will pop open-- mmbi! - and
you'll hear your B. The thing that makes B a voiced consonant is the fact that there's
buzzing going on BEFORE your lips pop open.
Now the letter B - which makes the /b/ sound in English - has an unvoiced partner - P.
To make that sound, 1. First, there's going to be no buzz and
your lips are closed. - it starts the same as B.
2. Then, air starts building up behind your lips without any vibration in your vocal cords
3. Then your lips pop open with a "p" sound
4. Then air starts to rush out for a tenth of a second - making a kind of exhalation
sound - HHh - And THEN, once you've heard that "H" sound, you'll start to feel buzzing
in your throat as the vowel - [i] - starts. “P!”
So using these same examples of B and P, let's talk about a new topic, aspiration.
Let's say both of those letters, but this time, put your hand a couple of inches in
front of your mouth when you do it. B. P. If you’re making that P sound right, you’re
going to feel a big puff of air when you say it
"P" - and that puff of air is aspiration. P is an aspirated consonant. And to be really
precise, the aspiration happens in that tenth of a second between when your lips pop open
and the vowel - i - starts. It's when you're making that "H" sound.
And unlike voicing, which only has two options - voiced or unvoiced, depending upon whether
there's buzzing going on before your lips pop open or not - aspiration can come in different
amounts, depending upon how long you wait between when your lips pop open and you start
the vowel. If you wanted to sound especially strange, you could take a really long time
before you started the vowel: Phhhhi -
In that case, you'd be making a P sound with MORE aspiration than the one in English.
And, if you wanted to sound especially French or Italian,
you could start the vowel immediately, as soon as your lips pop open: PI! PI! - in that
case, you'd be saying a voiceless P without any aspiration at all. PI! I’m going into
this in a lot of depth, because aspiration varies a lot between languages and affects
3 really important consonants in English -
The one we just mentioned - P, which makes a [pʰ] sound as in Paper.
T - which makes a [t] sound, as in table. T is the voiceless, aspirated version of our
[d] sound.
Note here that the tongue position of T and D are the same - you’re using the tip of
your tongue against your alveolar ridge, so it’s going to sound more percussive than
a lot of other languages - you get “T” /t/ “T” instead of “ti”/t/ “ti”,
like you might find in Italian or French.
The last of our aspirated consonants is K, which makes a [k] sound, as in cape. It’s
a voiceless, aspirated version of /g/. We can kind of squeeze one more consonant out
of this aspiration discussion,
since there’s one consonant in English that’s basically ONLY aspiration - if you exhale
and say ‘hhhhh’, then you’ve made the English consonant [h] as in Hang. There’s
nothing happening in your mouth, and all that’s really happening is that you’re letting
air flow through your open vocal cords before you start whatever vowel comes next. Hang.
While we’re on the topic of consonants made at your vocal cords, we can add in a strange
little consonant known as a glottal stop. This consonant is basically what happens when
you try to say a vowel with your vocal cords closed. As air comes through, it’s going
to pop them open and make a [] sound. We use it in English before words that start in vowels,
in phrases like “Uh oh” and “it _IS_ true”. We don’t go “uhoh”...we go
“uh oh” - with a sudden start to that “uh” and another glottal stop before that
“oh”. Uh oh! For phrases like “It IS true”, really strong glottal stops can make
the difference between a very emphasized phrase: “It IS true” and a more matter of fact,
unemphasized phrase: “it is true”. We only have a few consonants left to discuss.
First off, let’s cover a pair of dental consonants. These are consonants made using
the tip of your tongue against your upper teeth.
There is a voiceless one - θ as in think. And a voiced one “[ð]” as in there.
If you have trouble making this consonant, try starting with the consonant /s/ and then sticking
your tongue a little further out to touch your teeth - /ssss/ - tthhhhh. /sss/ -/thhh/.
There are even word pairs that can
contrast those two sounds, like sink and think. Sink, think.
You can use the same concept to go from /zzz/ to /THHHH/ - zzzz THHHH. Zen, then.
We can make another pair of consonants by starting with /s/ or /z/ and then going in
the other direction with our tongues.
Instead of going forward from /s/ - /th/, we can go back /s/ - [ʃ]. [ʃ] as in shack
is made with the tip of your tongue just a bit behind your alveolar ridge. /SH/ shack,
which you can compare to “sack” - sack, shack.
There’s a voiced version of this -[ʒ] as in beige, which you can find in the exact
same way. /zzzz/ /Zhhhh/. Beigge.
One little nuance I’ll add for these two consonants is that you’ll make these sounds
a little more accurately if you also round your lips just a little bit.
It’s not “Sshhhhh” (open mouth), it’s “shhh” - rounded lips.
These two consonants show up a lot in combination with /t/ or /d/, giving you the unvoiced [tʃ]
as in in Chew, which is literally just a combination of /t/ and /sh/ - /t/ /sh/ /ch/ chew.
And there’s the voiced [dʒ] as in Gel. Which is just /d/ and the /zh/. /d/ /zh/ /dzh/
gel. We only have 4 consonants left.
We’ll start with [ŋ], as in song or hung.This is a pretty common consonant across a lot
of languages, so more likely than not, you have this one in your repertoire. It’s basically
just an N that you make with the back of your tongue instead of the front. So you close off your
mouth using the back of your tongue, as if you were about to say g, and then allow the
air to come through your nose, and you get this NGGG sound.
So here’s son, with a normal, front N, and sung, with that back, NG sound.
Next up, we have [w] as in water or wet. Most languages have an /u/ sound of some sort,
and the /w/ in “water” is basically just a very short, very intense /u/.
The important ingredients here are as follows:
First, your lips - they need to be in a tight circle, like this:
And second, your tongue - it should be pulled up and back, so that the back part of your
tongue is close to where you’d say /g/ or /k/ - way back there. /u/ /w/ /water/.
Our final two consonants are the English L and R - which can be really problematic for many speakers.
Let’s start with [ɫ] as in Leak or Lee.
Many languages do have some kind of L sound - usually, the tongue position looks something
like this: The tip of your tongue touches right behind
your upper front teeth, and the rest of your tongue is further down, allowing air to escape
on both sides of it. It sounds like /l/, /li/ - which you’ll find in Italian, French,
Dutch, Cantonese, Portuguese, German - lots of common languages.
The L in English is a little bit different. The tip is in a similar place, but the big
difference happens with the back of your tongue - in English, it’s raised up,
so instead of /li/, you get /Lee/. Li [li], Lee [ɫi]. li, Lee. The English L has an ULLL
sound in it, coming from the back of your tongue. For most people who have trouble producing
this consonant, the most helpful thing you can do will be ear training. The better you
can hear this consonant and exactly how it differs from other consonants, the better
you’ll be able to produce it.
With that said, let’s move on to a closely related and equally challenging consonant,
the English R - [ɹ] as in rat.
A good sounding R has three different ingredients, relating to what you’re doing with the back
of your tongue, the front of your tongue, and your lips.
Now I said that that R is a closely related consonant to L, and I said that because the
back of the tongue is in nearly the exact same position for both consonants. LLL-RRR-LLL-RRR
- The back of the tongue for R is potentially a little bit higher but only barely.
Let’s look at what you should be doing with the front of the tongue - that is naturally
quite different from L - with L, the tip of the tongue touched your alveolar ridge. For
RR, you’re going to bring the tip down a bit, so it’s hanging out right in the middle
of your mouth. RR. So... if you do those two things - keep the back of your tongue way
up and the front of your tongue in the middle of your mouth, you’re going to get an “eerrr”
sound, which is most the way there.
But you can get a bit more accurate with your R sound, by also paying attention to your
lips. Specifically, look at what happens when you round them, as if you were about to say “oo”
“eerrr”...RRR…”eerr”...RRR - that lip rounding is going to make that RR sound
just a little bit more clear and more native sounding.
Once again - this is a consonant that you need to learn how to hear before you can really
work on producing it well. So work on ear training first - ideally with minimal pairs
- before you worry too much about what your tongue and lips are doing.
With that, we’ve covered all of the consonants of English.
To quickly review... We began with 8 sounds you likely already
have in your native language:
There was [b] as in Boy
And [m] as in Man. Both of these consonants were made with your lips pressed together.
Then came [f] as in Father - bottom lip to upper teeth
Three alveolar consonants, with your tongue against your alveolar ridge:
[d] as in dog, [s] as in Snake And [n] as in nail.
[j] as in yellow, made with the middle of your tongue up near your hard palate
And [g] as in Gopher, with the back of your tongue up against your soft palate.
Then we talked about voicing and introduced you to [z] as in zebra, the voiced sibling
of [s] And [v] as in vote, the voiced sibling of [f]
Then we got into a big discussion about aspiration and covered 3 consonants in English that tend
to be more apirated then you’re probably used to:
[pʰ] as in paper.
[tʰ] as in table And [kʰ] as in cape.
Then we covered a couple of consonants that occur way down in the vocal cords - the simple
exhalation , [h] as in hang.
And the glottal stop [ʔ] as in Uh oh!
Next, we started from [s] and then went forward or back to create 4 more conosonants. Bringing
the tongue forward to the upper teeth, we had [θ] as in think.
And a voiced sibling, [ð] as in there.
And pulling the tongue back behind the alveolar ridge, we got to [ʃ] as in shack,
and its voiced sibling[ʒ] as in beige.
There were also two combination sounds, adding a [t] or a [d] to get [tʃ] as in chew.
And [dʒ] as in gel.
Then we did an N at the back of the throat, [ŋ] as in song.
And a short version of an [u] vowel, [w] as in water.
Finally we covered the hardest consonants in English, [ɫ] as in Leak , made with a
raised front and back of your tongue.
And[ɹ] as in rat, made with a raised back of your tongue, and rounded lips.
And that’s it for English’s consonants. Next up, the English vowels.