What is the English Pronunciation mistake that learners of English make with this sound here
that could be stealing your confidence, making you hard to understand, and even affecting your career in English?
Well if you're a non-native English speaker who wants more confidence
and more influence when you speak English, then in the next two minutes I'm going to give you the simple
five-step process that you need to pronounce this sound clearly
and I'm going to show you how to stop confusing it with other sounds too.
So let's dive right in!
The vowel sound is the English vowel sound /æ/, okay.
As in 'cat' or 'bat' or 'hat,' which is what I'm not wearing.
And people often confuse it with the /e/ sound as in 'bet.' They also often confuse it with the /​ʌ​/ sound as in 'but.'
And even the /aɪ/ and /eɪ/ diphthongs it can also be easily confused with.
So let me walk you through the five things that you need to know to pronounce this sound clearly.
The first thing, as you'll see in the picture above here, is my teeth.
It's really really important, when you pronounce the /æ/ sound, to be showing your teeth.
And just to exemplify how important that is; this picture is a screenshot that I took the other day
when I was going through and editing some video content.
And I saw myself make this sound, and it exemplifies all the points that I teach when I actually teach this sound here
on YouTube, and to my clients, and to my course students. And it really is very very important.
I made this sound in a real sentence and I made it exactly like I'm going to teach you here
and I'm going to show you all the important aspects that you need to know.
So step one; the teeth. You can see my teeth when I'm making this sound.
You can also see that my lips are why when I make this sound, okay. My lips are so wide
/æ/
that if there was two pens on either side of my mouth
and they went up to my eyes they would poke me in the middle of my eyes.
You don't want your mouth closed like this. Your mouth is wide, okay, my mouth is also wide this way, okay.
It's so wide I could squeeze two fingers in between my teeth.
/æ/
'Cat,' 'hat,' 'bat'
Okay.
So this goes on to the next point; when my lips are this wide
they're this high
and my teeth are showing
/æ/
There is tension in my lips
/æ/
to make them that wide.
And that is a really important thing to know, okay.
One of the main mistakes I see people making with this sound is not having their lips wide enough
and also not having the top of their teeth showing
/æ/
and it's only by having your mouth this wide in all different directions, here, here, here
that I get nice /æ/ sound, okay.
The other important element is my tongue.
Look at the picture. Where's my tongue?
/æ/
It's in the front of my mouth, okay. And that's really really important.
So if I just list off the five elements that you need to know to get this sound correct:
You've got one; width
/æ/
So wide you can poke your eyes /æ/
Two, height;
/æ/
So wide, space for two fingers.
/æ/
Three, teeth;
/æ/
Okay. So wide you can see my teeth
/æ/
Four is tongue;
/æ/
My tongue is at the front of my mouth
/æ/
just behind my teeth
/æ/
And then five, which I haven't mentioned yet, is the length of the vowel sound;
Is it a long English vowel sound?
/æ/
No, that's not right. It's a short English vowel sound
/æ/ 'cat,' 'hat,' 'bat.'
It's a short English vowel sound, okay.
So there are the five things that you need to know to pronounce this sound clearly, okay.
I often hear this sound being confused with /e/ as in 'bed,' where the height of the mouth
/e/
Isn't wide enough this way
/e/
For /e/ you should only have space for one and a half fingers in between your teeth
/e/
For /æ/ there's space for two
/æ/
I also heard being confused with
/​ʌ​/
Okay.
Where the /​ʌ​/ sound the tongue is further back in the mouth
/​ʌ​/
As in
'cut'
Okay.
And my lips aren't as wide.
'Cut'
I also hear it being confused with the /eɪ/ diphthong.
/aɪ/
Now, what are the differences there? Well step one; the /eɪ/ diphthong is a transition between two sounds.
/aɪ/
So /æ/ short, /æ/. /aɪ/
it lasts for longer. That's the first difference there.
Step two;
/aɪ/
My lips aren't as wide
/​ʌ​/
/aɪ/
And also for /aɪ/ my tongue
/​ʌ​/
starts further back in the mouth
/​ʌ​/
The tongue is almost as far back, but not quite as far back, as the /​ʌ​/ sound is in 'run.'
'Run'
/aɪ/
The tongue is more in that position, okay.
So right there you've got the simple five-step process to make this sound correctly.
The five things that you need to be aware of to master this sound.
I've also just shown you the sounds that you need to be aware of that you don't confuse it with.
If you want a complete master class on all the confusing vowel sounds in English
then I'm going to link two videos I think up here on this side.
I'm going to link two videos for you that will give you complete vowel sounds trainings on all these confusing sounds
and I really really highly recommend watching both of them if you really want to speak English clearly and boost your confidence
then that's going to be hugely valuable for you.
and in the next video, that's going to be coming in the next seven days, I'm going to be giving my ultimate mouth warm-up
which is actually one of the most important things to do if you want to sound more clear in English
more like a native, have more confidence when you speak, because the warm-up that I'm going to be showing you in the next video
is going to show you how to transform how air moves around in the mouth
and that's going to do a huge amount in making you sound more like a native, okay.
To give you an idea, I've just taught this workout to one of my clients who's a native Mandarin speaker
and just like that, it completely changed the sound of his voice and he now sounds much much more English when he speaks
which, for him, is quite important for what he's working on, okay.
So that's it for this lesson. Make sure you've got notifications turned on because
that lesson is going to be really really valuable for you and I've got some more really exciting tutorials coming up.
if you've been a longtime subscriber to the channel, thank you for being a subscriber I'm back now with weekly tutorials.
The last month has been really busy which is why I haven't been posting so much.
But I'm back and I'm really excited for all the tutorials that I'm going to be delivering to you in the next few weeks, okay.
So make sure you've subscribed and turned notifications on.
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