Welcome back to my channel Learn Academic English in today's video I'm going to continue my series
of pronunciation lessons with a quick lesson about how to pronounce words that end in the suffix ate
this is actually a little bit tricky and a common error so what you want to pay attention
to with this is the part of speech is the word a noun adjective or verb the reason is that the
pronunciation changes depending on the type of word that it is so let's look first at the noun
and adjective if the word is a noun or adjective then the ending the ate ending is going to be
unstressed it doesn't have stress and when it doesn't have stress the vowel reduces to the sound
uh as in but we're not going to pronounce it as a clear -ate it's going to sound like ut
look at the first example accurate accurate so the last syllable is not stressed we're
not going to say accurate we're going to say accurate accurate it's a short unstressed ut
appropriate passionate considerate unfortunate now notice here that if we add the l y unfortunately
it stays the same unfortunately unfortunately unfortunately
approximate now I have a little star here because I'm going to show you something about
this word in just a moment certificate consulate chocolate so these last three
are nouns but all of the other ones are adjectives and the noun and adjective follow the same rule
that the -ate is unstressed so it's going to sound like ut it's a short unclear vowel accurate
accurate okay let's move on to the next ones in the next group we have verbs and the verbs
have the a t e with a clear stressed syllable look at this example tolerate so the eight
sounds like the number eight eight now here what you should notice is that there is a
primary stress and a secondary stress what that means is that there's one syllable that has a
bigger stress and then there's another syllable that gets kind of a medium or a less strong
stress so it's still stress but it's not as big as the first one look at this example tolerate
tolerate tolerate tolerate so the first syllable gets that big primary stress and then the last
syllable gets a medium stress and what happens when there's a medium stress the vowel is going
to be clear just like in a stressed syllable the vowel is clear tolerate tolerate negotiate
communicate communicate hesitate appreciate
approximate so I have this star here because you can notice the difference between the adjective
approximate and the verb approximate and there aren't very many of these pairs there are a few
where the noun or adjective and the verb have exactly the same spelling they are
going to have little bit different meanings and definitely a different pronunciation approximate
approximate dedicate motivate immigrate so that's the difference between the nouns and
adjectives and the verbs these ones usually are especially tricky because when people see the a
t e they want to pronounce it as eight actually I was listening to a podcast a few days ago
and they were interviewing a person who is from Brazil and she speaks English as her second
language and her English was excellent but she was talking about the consulate and a certificate and
for both of those words she pronounced it wrong she pronounced it consulate and certificate
but because it's a noun it should sound like consulate certificate so this is a common error
but once you know the rule you can get it let me know if you have questions and I would love to
know if you can think of other examples of these words is it a noun or an adjective or is it a verb
let me know in the comments below what examples you can think of and i'll see you soon take care!