Hi, everybody. I’m Doctor Don here to give you some more tips and
exercises to use to improve your English pronunciation skills.
This is my third video in a series on pronouncing initial consonant clusters. Later,
I’ll show you how to do medial and final consonant clusters, diphthongs, and vowels.
Keep watching and practicing this series, and your English pronunciation will improve.
In the first two videos, which you can find linked below,
I showed you how to pronounce consonant clusters with the L and R sounds. In today’s video
and the next video I will show you how to pronounce consonant clusters with
the S sound. There are lot of these, so I’ll need two videos to do it.
Let’s start with an easy one: SM. To make this sound, try saying the word “some”
and then shorten it until you’re only making the “sm” sound. Like this: Some… Small, Smack,
Smog, Smug. Try to repeat these words slowly, then quickly. Small Smack smog smug.
Now let’s try: SN. To make this sound try saying the word “sun” and then shorten it
until you’re only making the “sn” sound. Like this: Sun. Snail, snore, snout, snooze.
Try to repeat these words slowly, then quickly. Snail, snore, snout, snooze.
Now let’s try: SP. To make this sound try saying the word “sap” and then shorten it
until you’re only making the “sp” sound. Like this: Sap. Span, speed,
spoil, spur. Try to repeat these words slowly, then quickly. Span, speed, spoil spur.
The next clusters are spelled differently but pronounced the same way. The clusters are spelled:
SC (like in the word scam) or SK (like in the word skill). But the sound is always an
S sound matched to a hard K sound. Try to say the word “sack” and then shorten it until
you’re making the “sk” sound. Let’s look at some different examples for each of these spellings.
Scan, score, scum. Try to repeat these words slowly, then quickly. Scan, score, scum.
Now the SK spelling. Skill, skeleton, skull. Skill, skeleton, skull.
Another cluster similar to the previous two is SCH. This one is sometimes pronounced like SC or
SK, as in the example word SCHOOL. You make this sound the same way as the previous two examples:
School, Scheme, schism. School, scheme, schism. But sometimes this word is pronounced SH. Say
the word “hush” and the sound at the end of that word is the one you want.
Words using this pronunciation are: SCHWA, SCHMOE, SCHTIK. That one’s pretty hard!
The last cluster is SH. You pronounce it the same way as the previous example words
SH. This is the more normal spelling for this sound in English.
Try to repeat these words slowly, then quickly: shape, show, sheep, ship.
Here are some challenge sentences for you. Try to say these quickly. The small snail sped to school.
The short schoolboy is scarily smart. I snuck a spear from the smoking shed.
Practice those clusters and I’ll be back later to show you the fourth set.