Ice cream? A lot of soy in? I had to color?
I-- I go to... Hey! Has this ever happened to you?
Have you ever been listening to natives and it sounded nothing like what you were expecting?
Well, in today's lesson we will look at some of the main sounds in American English as well
as connected speech patterns. So if you want to improve your pronunciation and even be able
to understand fast speaking natives, then this lesson is for you. And here at RealLife English
every single week we make lessons like this that help you to stop feeling like a
lost and insecure English learner and become a confident natural English speaker. So join our
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So if you've been learning English for a while, you probably already know that often
instead of saying "going to" we reduce it to "gunna." For example "I'm gonna go change"
or "I'm gonna go get another espresso." However, did you know that we can reduce gonna even more?
Well, I'm 'unna get another espresso. Uh... More latte? And if you want to take it even
a step further, you can reduce "I'm going to" to I'ma. Now, this used to be considered more
street English, but now all the time it's becoming more common in everyday English.
Jokes on you they was always friends now I'ma get my immunity.
If you're like most learners, then you're probably terrified of accidentally saying
"I'm going to go to the bitch", right? This is because it's very difficult for most learners to
distinguish between the long EE and the short IH sound in English. But really it's quite simple,
it just requires a lot of practice to make sure that you're saying the right sound and so that
you can identify it when you hear it. So we have the long EE where you have to kind of smile so...
And the short IH is much more neutral, your mouth barely moves.
Let's look at some examples to help you to practice this.
Another interesting reduction that happens in pretty much every accent of
English is the 've or of preposition being reduced to an uh, schwa sound in English.
So this happens when we have a contraction. For example...
Which we can all reduce just to that schwa sound: However this also happens with the word "of"
which we get rid of that v sound and it just becomes a schwa as well. So we have phrases like
It's pretty amazing how this happens in the negative form as well. So if we want to say...
That can become a contraction: But then it can also be reduced even more to:
All right, so let's do a checkpoint to test how you're doing so far. We're going
to have a couple more of these so always be prepared for a quiz. So the first question,
listen to the clip and try to identify which version of the going to reduction you hear.
Now listen to me and fill in the blanks.
Now you read the sentence out loud first and then listen to me say it
to compare to see how you did with pronunciation.
I hear learners pronounce incorrectly the past tense of regular verbs all the time. It's this
-ed ending that tends to trick people up because we can have three different possibilities for
how to pronounce this. So we can have a T sound at the end in words like worked,
fixed, watched. We can have just a d sound at the end in words like played, stayed, tried.
And if we have a t or a d before the past tense, then we get a full ed sound.
So that's in words like wanted, decided, rented.
Maybe you've noticed before that Americans often change the t sound in words where the t comes
between two vowels. We call this an American t and it sounds very similar to the r sound in some
Latin languages like Spanish and Portuguese. It's just a quick tap of your tongue behind your teeth.
So let's look at some examples: However this doesn't just happen
in individual words, it can happen in connected speech as well where we have a word ending in
a t and being followed by a vowel as long as it's also preceded by a vowel. So for example:
By the way, why don't you practice some of these pronunciation skills that you're
gaining in today's lesson with learners from all over the world? Now you might be asking me
"How can I do that? I don't know anyone from other places!" We made it super simple for you
with the RealLife App. Now this is the only place where at the touch of a button
anytime, anywhere you can connect with learners from around the world and have
fascinating conversations about whatever interests you. Be that your passions, your jobs,
your dreams. Just look at what one of our users Clyde says about his experience. He says...
Just like Clyde you can improve your speaking skills and, again, practice everything that you're
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The schwa is perhaps one of the most important sounds to master in English and unfortunately it
doesn't exist in a lot of other languages. It's the simple unstressed uh uh sound.
In fact, a lot of times I like to tell my students that, you know,
we tend to think culturally the English speakers are pretty lazy and this is reflected even in
the language because this sound is super lazy. You don't really do anything with your mouth,
you just barely open it and go uh uh. And this is really important, because it's the most common
sound in virtually every accent of English. It's also a sound that we'll use when we're speaking,
so don't fall into the bad habit of using the same sound you'd use in your native language. Try
using the schwa sound instead. So that would be something like: I don't know. Uh... I'm not sure
And almost all unstressed sounds in words and sentences have this schwa sound in them. So
let's take a look at how you can find the schwa sound in a word. First you need to look at or
listen to the word and isolate the vowel sounds. So let's use the word construction, for example.
Next you'll find the primary stressed syllable in that word.
And then, finally, as we heard before. Usually unstressed syllables use that schwa sound,
so probably besides that stressed syllable all the other ones will be schwa's.
By the way if you want to learn all about how to find and use the schwa,
we made this lesson recently talking all about it as well as a podcast really diving deep
into how to master the schwa sound and sound more natural when you speak English. You can find those
by looking in the description down below. All right, are you ready for checkpoint number two?
Let's take a look at that simple past tense pronunciation
that we covered before. Be sure to pause the video if you need. All you have to do is look
at the different words and sort them to how they are pronounced. You ready? Let's go.
Another type of word that we almost always reduce is pronouns. And some of these will even drop
letters so that's the case with pronouns like he, him, her and them. We drop the h or we drop the th
in the case of them. So let's listen to how this sounds in real sentences.
This is a super tricky sound in American English. So much so that if you have confusion around it,
you should definitely check out the full lesson that we made all about it. But let's look at it
briefly in today's lesson. So we have this t plus vowel plus n, first of all we're going
to pretty much fully drop the vowel. It almost disappears altogether. Next, when we make that t,
typically when we make a t, we do a plosive sound right. What you're going to do is stop your tongue
behind your teeth before that plosive sound is able to be made. So let's look at an example.
And the final thing is that by doing that by pulling our tongue up,
we're going to force the air out of our nose to make that n sound. So it becomes:
If that end sounds hard for you, just practice it and because you're naturally blocking here,
it will eventually come out. Just try to feel that sound in your nose. Just to give you a few more
examples, I'll say them and then repeat after me trying to say it as closely as to how I said it.
Let's look at some more sound morphing. So we have two more cases with the t and the d combining with
certain vowels. And this happens in certain words with the y. Particularly with the pronoun YOU. Now
if YOU is preceded by a d or a t, those two uh sounds come together and they morph. So if we
have a t and a y it actually becomes a ch sound. If we have a d and a y it becomes a J sound. So
let's take a look at some examples to make this more clear. I'll say them and you repeat after me.
However we can reduce this even more to a schwa sound. That often happens with the pronoun you
is that we'll change it to ya. By the way, using gotcha can be
a really great alternative to saying "I understand" or "I heard what you said"
And in the same way, here we can say: All right, yime for your final checkpoint
and then we have one more pronunciation tip before we wrap up today's lesson so first
read the sentence out loud and then listen to me say it to check your pronunciation.
Alright now listen to me and choose the correct option
Now while this last sound doesn't interfere with your communication,
it does help to add extra nuance and helps you to sound even better and more natural when you speak.
So did you know that there are two ways that you can pronounce the s sound?
It can either have a s sound or a z sound. But how can you know when it's supposed to sound like
or when it's supposed to sound like z. So let's take a look at an advanced trick
so many times the s in nouns and adjectives has a s sound. Let's take a look at a few examples
the S in verbs tends to have a Z sound. So let's look at some examples of verbs with this.
Pretty cool isn't it? Check out these examples with full sentences. The s's in blue have a s
sound while the s's in red have a z sound. If you don't use what you learn, knowledge is useless.
You know, the letter s in english is such a fascinating sound and we
just don't have the time to cover all about it in today's lesson. So would you like
another lesson that's talking all about the different nuances of the s sound in English?
Then be sure to leave a comment down below saying I want another lesson all about the s sound. If
there are many requests, then we'll definitely create a lesson on it to keep learning more about
pronunciation. Then next I highly recommend that you check out this lesson where we give
you some tips on how you can speak English faster. So let's check out a clip from that.