Today I'd like to talk to you about something that can be incredibly effective in how you
sound when speaking English.
Today we're going to explore pitch.
For those of you that don't know, pitch is the highness or lowness of your voice and
it's actually incredibly essential in American English.
We use pitch in order to express our emotions and attitude through a change in our intonation
or the tone of our voice, and we also use pitch in order to express stress, when we
make certain syllables longer, louder and higher in pitch.
If you're not familiar with word stress and how it works, please be sure to sign up for
my free email course, Sound More Natural in English in Just Five Days at soundmorenatural.com,
but I'll give you a brief overview right now.
Word stress is when we make one syllable of a word longer, louder and higher in pitch.
And it's very important that you don't forget this higher in pitch.
A lot of people get the longer, or the louder, or both correct,
but they forget the higher in pitch.
And this is because English has different pitch variations than other languages.
Some languages have more pitch variation than English and others have less pitch variation
than English, but it's really important to learn how to control your pitch in order to
sound more natural in English.
What happens for many non-native speakers is that they start sounding a little robotic
when speaking because they don't have a lot of pitch variation in their voice.
Their tone tends to be pretty flat and they sound a little bit like a robot:
What do you want from me?
Right? Something like that.
What is it that you think is true?
Right? I'm exaggerating a little bit for the purposes of this video, but a lot of people who are
non-native speakers have this very flat pitch because it's not part of their native language
or it's used a little bit differently.
But in English we use pitch variations throughout our sentence, and this is both women and men.
If you listen to native English speaking men, you're going to hear the same thing that you
hear in my voice.
If you're not creating this pitch variation in your speech, the person who's listening
to you is going to have trouble understanding you because their ear is expecting to hear
this pitch variation, especially on stressed words and stressed syllables.
So what we want you to start practicing is pitch.
I want you to start thinking about your pitch and start thinking about
how you can use it more effectively.
And then as we start to explore different stress in words, different stress in sentences
and also different stress and different intonation patterns, you're going to
be able to create these pitch variations.
So I'm going to give you a quick exercise that I use with my clients in order to help
them practice their pitch variations.
Because at first changing your pitch and varying the sound of your voice might feel a little
stressful or it might feel forced.
It might feel challenging because you're not used to doing it, especially if your native
language doesn't have that much pitch variation.
And this is something that you want to practice before or as you continue to go deeper into
word stress and intonation and reducing your accent because you need to start including
this type of pitch variation whenever you're speaking.
But if you're having trouble with it or you feel like it's not possible for you, you need
to break out of that mindset and just realize that you actually
can practice your pitch variation.
So let's think about your baseline pitch. Right?
So this is the pitch that you have kind of when your voice is resting.
And I want you to just use a nonsense sound like "da," right?
So my baseline pitch might be da da da da da da da da da da da da.
So that's a baseline pitch.
Then I go a little higher: da da da da da da da da da da da da da da
da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da
So now I'm at my baseline again, right?
So you can go as many steps as possible for you.
It's really not essential.
I think I did five because I apparently can, but you can do fewer.
You can do as many as are natural for you.
Now let's try going below so this is da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da
Okay, it's starting to get a little uncomfortable for me.
But if you notice, you can just practice one step above or one step below your baseline
and that's going to be a noticeable pitch variation that you can use
in order to produce word stress.
So if we start with the baseline: da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da.
Right?
You can start noticing just an up and a down, up and a down, up and a down.
If you spend three or five or even 10 minutes practicing this pitch variation and starting
to notice how you can vary from your baseline pitch, you're going to start noticing it's
easier to do when you're speaking and you're saying certain words.
So for example, let's just use the word education. Right?
EduCAtion - my pitch goes up on "a," right, eduCAtion, that's part of the word stress,
longer, louder and higher in pitch.
Right? EduCAtion.
So I need to just have one step above my baseline pitch in order to make it very clear that
that's the syllable that's stressed.
So you really need to start emphasizing those pitch variations so that people can follow
what it is you're trying to say and they're able to understand
that you are using stress correctly.
In future videos, I'll talk more about how you use pitch variations in order to express
yourself with intonation, but I wanted to give you an exercise that you can use to get
started right now so that you're prepared for those future videos.
I hope this tip was helpful for you and you now understand why it's so important to learn
how to vary your pitch and how to control your pitch in order to
sound more expressive in American English.
I look forward to sharing more videos with you soon.
Once again, I'm Kim from englishwithkim.com.
I am your guide to the essential conversation skills you need to sound more natural in English.
If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it with a friend.
I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Have a good one.
Goodbye.