hey everyone it's Jennifer from Tarle speech with your pronunciation question.
We have three words today choir a singing group
inquire to ask and inquiry an act of asking for information
Kind of a tough lesson today but hang in there i'm gonna make it as easy as possible.
Okay so word number one choir - spelling really confuses people.
Been getting a lot of questions about the ch sound I plan on doing a video about that
the letter ch I should say n Not the sound, the letter c h,
can be pronounced as a k, they can also be pronounced as a ch, and sometimes as an sh.
But today we are going to pronounce them as a k. So we're going to say the word choir we're going
to start with that k w sound. So to say the k tip of the tongue is down the back of the
tongue is pulled up and then we're going to move to the w sound by puckering your lips, kw kw kw.
Next we're going to add the vowel ire, and to do that you're going to open your mouth really
wide so that the tip of your tongue can be low, and the back of your tongue can be pulled up.
Then you're going to close your mouth to a square tense lip shape for that er part of this vowel
sound, and again the tip of your tongue is down or the back of your tongue can be flipped back.
Let's put that all together kw ire choir choir choir.
And that word has one beat or one syllable - choir We are going to use the word choir in the
next word when we say inquire. w We are going to start with the short word in. And
to do that, we're going to have the short i sound the ih sound. Your lips are relaxed your mouth is
slightly open and the tongue is just at the top of the, um, just at the level of the top teeth.
And then you're going to touch the tip of the tongue to the back of the top,
top front teeth for that n sound, and the air is going to move out of your nose. So in
and then move to choir. So because this word is two beats we are going to have to stress
one of the beats of the word and unstress the other. So what does that mean.
We are going to stress choir in this case. It's going to be louder, longer, and higher in pitch.
That means we have to unstress the in part, which needs to be lower in pitch, softer, and
shorter. The vowel will be shorter so let's put that all together: inquire inquire inquire.
Now for inquiry. This gets confusing because the stress is going to shift
to the beginning of the word, and when we do that, we are going to have to stress the in part. That
means the vowel is going to get shorter in this middle part of the word. So we're no longer going
to say ire, we're just going to say er in query, and end with that re, and to do that r sound,
we've talked about it already, and then e - tongue is high and flat and your lips are smiling.
So let's put that all together in query inquiry inquiry inquiry
Let's give them all a try
choir choir choir inquire inquire inquire
inquiry inquiry inquiry and altogether
choir inquire inquiry inquiry inquire choir
One more time i kind of messed that last one up a bit - choir inquire inquiry And now for a sentence
The inquiry is to inquire about choir job openings.
Give it a try people are going to notice the difference. If you found this helpful please
share this with a friend and give us a like. Check out our products on google play and itunes
and all of our class options at Tarle speech. Thanks everyone have a great weekend!