Hey everyone, Jennifer from Tarle Speech with your pronunciation question. Today's question
is um about two homophones which are words spelled differently have different meanings
and are pronounced the same and a word fact and when we add the article a to it to say
a fact how do we say the different words so our words today I am actually going to show
you are affect and when it is spelled with an A that is the verb and the verb means to
change or to influence and then we also have a noun the um effect which is to change as
a result of something so the big difference here is that the um affect with the a is a
verb and affect with the e is a noun and those words are pronounced exactly the same we are
going to contrast this today with the combination a fact lets take a look at affect first actually
lets take a step back and look at the first syllable in both of these combinations so
we are going to start both of these actually all three of these I should say the homophone
pair and a fact with the schwa syllable uh. so to do that you are going to open your mouth
its going to be very relaxed and the syllable is going to be very short uh then we are going
to move to part two for the homophone pair they are both are going to be pronounced with
fect fect and fact is going to have more of an open vowel so fect with more of a closed
short e and fact with more of an open short a sound so how do we do this so for this short
eh sound I have been getting a lot of questions about this lately your mouth is going to be
relaxed and it is going to be open eh what about your tongue think about having your
tongue the tip of your tongue just below the top teeth its not touching just think about
it pointing at your uh teeth pointing at this lowest part of your top teeth eh eh eh and
we are gonna add the f sound to do this you are going to gently bite your bottom lip inside
or outside for the ffff sound move to that eh sound and then you are going to end with
a k t to do this, tip of your tongue is going to be down for the k with the back of your
tongue pulled way up k t and then you are gonna flip your tongue all the way to the
top of your back front teeth for that t sound and lets put it all together affect affect
affect we are gonna contrast this with a fact and to say fact again beginning and ending
are the same you are going to just open your mouth in a wide round circle that is going
to allow your tongue to get low in your mouth the front of your tongue will be very low
in your mouth and the back of your tongue will be pulled up ah ah ah so again we have
eh eh eh and ah ah ah so lets try these affect affect affect a fact a fact a fact affect
a fact and now for a sentence I have a way for your to remember things this is a fact
affect as the verb is an action and will start with the letter a effect as a noun is the
end result and that will start with an e give it a try I know people are going to notice
the difference if you found this helpful we would like and a share it really does help
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