Learning new vocabulary is so great.
And learning where to stress the right syllable in that word is even more important.
My name is Jill Diamond and today we're going to look at syllable contrast.
What is the difference between stressed syllables and unstressed syllables so that you can get
the rhythm of American English.
Today, we're going to talk about rhythm.
Specifically, there's two things we are going to look at: we're going to look at the contrast
between the stressed and an unstressed syllable.
In order to do that, we need to understand what the length of a syllable is.
My first question to you is what is a syllable?
A syllable is how we divide the words to pronounce better, to put a special accent when we need
to pronounce in different way.
I'm going to stop you there because the key word that you used is "divide."
How do we divide a word?
That means a syllable is a unit of sound that contains one vowel sound, that's what makes
a syllable.
Then we get into stress, syllable stress.
What is syllable stress?
That's where we put the accent.
My next question is: what do we do on the stressed syllable of a word?
We need to try to effort our voice to pronounce longer or shorter, but with a special accent
in the syllable to put the word more understandable for others.
That's when we start to get into the contrast between what's stressed and what's unstressed.
Accent -- when we talk about accent -- it means we need to use more intonation in our
voice.
When you talk about effort, we can emphasize a stressed syllable by making it longer, louder,
and higher in pitch.
I want you to listen to this.
"Jim works hard.
Jim works hard."
Does that sound like equal stress or contrasted stress?
Are the syllables the same length or are they different?
I think it's the same.
I heard, "Jim works hard."
… has the same structure.
I don't need to do any effort to any of the words.
You're going to do an effort, but it's the same effort.
Each one, if you look closely, only has one syllable.
"Jim," one vowel sound, one syllable, "works," one vowel sound, one syllable, "hard," one
vowel sound, one syllable.
Say that for me.
Jim works hard.
Good.
Now, say it together more quickly.
"Jim works hard."
Again.
"Jim works hard."
Okay, good.
Now listen to this sentence.
"Jim always works overtime."
Listen again.
"Jim always works overtime."
Can you start to hear a contrast here?
Yes, here when you started to pronounce "always," you put a special accent, more effort to pronounce
"always" and also "overtime."
The first syllable is accented.
Same thing here, we have three syllables, "overtime," and the first syllable is stressed,
it's longer, it's louder, it's higher in pitch.
So, we get "Jim always works overtime."
You say it.
Jim always works overtime.
Listen to this, connect it better.
"Jim always works overtime."
Jim always works overtime.
You got it.
Now we start to hear the contrast.
Let's come over to the board here and I want to take a look at some more sentences.
Let me tell you what we're going to do here.
I'm going to read you these eight sentences.
I'm not going to stop in between them, I want you to listen for the contrasted sentences.
Which one has those short syllables and long syllables because there's a contrast between
the syllables.
I'm going to give you the pen, there you go.
Thanks.
Just put a check mark next to the sentences that have a contrast between stressed and
unstressed syllables.
Here we go.
Number one: "Use two stamps."
Number two: "The bigger the deal, the more cash you need."
Number three: "Working smarter is better than working harder."
Number four: "Drive me home."
Number five: "Big deals take cash."
Number six: "You need more postage on this."
Number seven: "Work smart, not hard."
Number eight: "I need you to drive me home."
You're surprised, but you got it correct.
Let me tell you why.
There's two things here and I'm going to let you ask me a question.
Listen, there's two things here.
If you look here at number two, we have words like bigger.
Bigger.
How many syllables are in that word?
Two.
Big-ger.
That automatically tells us that one syllable is stressed and one is not.
Which one is stressed?
I think it is the sound "big."
Yes, it's the first syllable.
That's right.
So that in itself is going to give us that contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables.
Let's look at an example like this.
Read number eight to us.
I need you to drive me home.
"I need you to drive me home.
I need you to drive me home.
I need you to drive me home."
Do you hear musically how there is a contrast?
"I need you to drive me home."
This is for a different reason, it's because we have content words versus structure words.
Any time you have a pronoun or an article or preposition, that's going to start to give
you that short syllable, versus the nouns and the verbs that are going to give you the
longer syllables.
Say it for me "Need, drive, home."
Need, drive, home.
I need you to drive me home.
You got it.
These are the reasons why some of these are short and equal.
"Drive me home."
Versus "I need you to drive me home."
-- where there's long and short.
Nice job over there.
Thank you.
It's your turn to be in the hot spot.
What does that mean?
I want you to talk and I want to listen.
I want to listen, and I want to help you find that contrast in your voice.
Remember, you're looking for long syllables that are either nouns or verbs or adjectives
-- to show the contrast between the pronouns and prepositions and things like that -- or
you're looking for two syllable words, three syllable words, which means that some syllables
have to be longer than others.
So here is the assignment, I want you to come up here in a moment, and I want you to talk
about a recent work success.
It doesn't have to be revealing and it doesn't have to be super confidential, just something
that made you feel good about the work you were doing.
You think you can think of something?
I can do it.
Come on up here, you're going to go this part and I'm going to go over to your chair and
I'm going to listen and I'm going to take some notes.
It doesn't have to be long, Johnny.
I just want to hear that you're thinking and you're applying this notion of contrast in
syllables.
Go ahead.
Yesterday, I had a big surprise in my team meeting.
They were ready with all this planning to do during the whole following weeks.
Hold right there for one second, let me interject.
You say it for me, "They were ready with all the planning."
Say that for me.
They were ready with all the planning.
Some of the syllables are long and some are short.
"They were ready, they surprised me."
Tell me that again.
They were ready, they surprised me.
That's right.
Right there you're making your voice longer, you're making the syllable longer, you're
making it a little louder and you're making it a little higher in pitch, right?
Yes.
Tell me a little bit more.
They gave me another bigger surprise.
They were ready with all of the information to be ready for the next following weeks.
Hold on there for a second.
I want you to say for me, "Another big surprise."
Another big surprise.
They gave me another big surprise.
The word "another" is important, but "They gave me another big surprise."
They gave me another big surprise.
You hear the contrast between the stressed words and the unstressed syllables.
Want to tell me more?
When I start to do planning with them the next following task that we support it to
do that.
Hold on, what's happening right now is that everything going very fast, there's nothing
that's long.
You have to make sure you're throwing long syllables and not just go really fast.
Tell me again, what's another thing that happened?
Another surprise they had was they were ready with all plans to be completed during the
next following weeks, and I was so excited about that.
What I did was to invite all of them for the lunch time, and we went to the restaurant
and we had very, very good food and we really enjoyed the music that they had.
That was a very good time together.
Good, this is much better.
This is much better because what you're doing now is you're showing me the contrast.
You tend to speak quickly, and we don't want to just hear the speed all the time, there
has to be syllable that stands out.
There has to be something that stands out and that's what you started to do, you know
what I'm talking about?
Yes.
You can feel that, right?
I feel that when I need to put a special accent in my words to be more understandable for
others.
That's right.
It's not just on the words, it's on syllables -- so it's both.
Good.
Johnny, come on back to your sit here.
Let me just say this: syllable contrast, syllable stress is much more of a challenge for non-native
speakers than it is for native speakers, but even native speakers of English need to understand
that there's a certain value to certain words -- but to certain syllables.
It's really important across the board a good public speaker is going to use ... What did
we talk about?
Rhythm.
We talked about rhythm.
What is a good public speaker going to do with rhythm?
Can you tell me what is the first thing we talked about?
The contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables.
What is the second thing that we talked about?
When we talk about a syllable being stressed, what do we need to do?
We need to make it longer.
We talked about the length of the syllable.
When you remember those two things, you're going to have more rhythm, and then you're
going to be better at public speaking.
You did an excellent job today.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your participation.
Thank you.