hi everyone and merry christmas welcome to our little series on christmas words and
how to pronounce them. our lesson today is how do i pronounce the words fruitcake: which is a
cake made with dried fruits and nuts, gingerbread which is a cake or cookie flavored with ginger,
and a sugar cookie which is a small sweet crisp or chewy treat covered in sugar
and sometimes in icing. that's one of my favorite christmas treats. the lesson today is really going
to revolve around word stress and how do you stress compound nouns so all of these words are
compound nouns. and basically what that means is it's two words put together to mean a new thing.
when you stress something you make it louder higher in pitch and you have longer vowels.
that is opposed to unstressed which is the exact opposite softer lower and shorter. for most of
my students because vowels are so difficult this longer vowel and shorter vowel is key. again a lot
of students that i work with all of their vowels are similar in length so if you really work on
making your vowels different lengths that's really going to help with these compound nouns and people
will better understand you. again here are our words fruitcake gingerbread and sugar cookie.
how do we go about doing this. what you're going to do is you are going to stress word number one
in each of these cases word number two is going to have less stress
another key point is we're going to link these words together with no pause in between them and
make them one word. so i'm not going to say fruit cake. i'm going to link those words together with
no pause make them one word and i'm going to make this word louder longer and higher. fruit cake
fruit cake. same thing here i'm going to stress ginger link it to bread make that all one word.
ginger is longer louder and higher bread is shorter softer and lower. gingerbread gingerbread.
and then for a sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar cookie. so it sounds some of my
students say as if i'm saying these second words very quickly. and it kind of am because of that
shorter vowel. so let's give these all a try fruit cake fruit cake ginger bread gingerbread
sugar cookie sugar cookie. i do want to make one last comment for sugar cookie. that has that
dreaded short um ooh sound that we have in english it's not a very common sound but we do use it in
very common words. it is here. a tip for that is do not pucker your lips too much. it's not ooh
it's not sugar cookie. and don't relax them too much it's not sugar cookie. it is a nice in the
middle slightly rounded lips that are relaxed for that uh vowel. so again it's not it's not uh it's
sugar cookie sugar cookie. let's give those all a try again fruit cake fruit cake fruit cake
gingerbread gingerbread gingerbread sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar cookie.
my favorite christmas treat is a sugar cookie but i will also eat gingerbread and fruitcake.
so let me know what your favorite christmas treat is in the comments section. and give
it a try i know people are going to notice the difference. if you found this helpful
please share us with your friends as a little christmas present to them. and if
you need any extra help you can check out my site tarotspeech.com and my products at
google play and itunes thanks everyone merry christmas see you for the next video.