My students always ask me "how can I sound more native?" "how can I sound more
British?" "how can I soften or lose my accent?" What I'm going to show you today,
guys, is this sound and how you can pronounce it to soften your accent a
little bit more. Hello and welcome back to pronunciation with Emma. If you're new
here then hello and welcome, my name is Emma but you've probably guessed that
from the name of my channel already, haven't you?
If you're interested in improving your British accent and pronunciation or if
you're a big fan of British English, then consider subscribing to my channel. I
post every single Friday. I tend to post about pronunciation, of course, if that
sounds like your cup of tea then hit that subscribe button. So let's start
with how we pronounce this sound. Now, you can see there are two symbols, that's
because it's a diphthong. A diphthong is basically when we have two vowel sounds
together in the same syllable and we transition from one vowel sound to the
next within the same syllable. So here, you can see we start with an /eə/ sound,
like Emma, and then we transition to a schwa if you want to know more about the
schwa and how to sound a bit more English, because it is the most common
sound that we have in English, go and check that out, I've put it down in the
description for you. So what we need to do now is transition from that /e/ to /ə/
so it should sound like /eə/ /eə/. so what natives tend to do when they're speaking
quite quickly is they pronounce it almost like a monophthong and they
pronounce it /e:/ /e:/. Let's have a look at some words together. So here are some
words with that sound in first position. We have air air notice I don't pronounce
that R, okay? That's very typical of British English. There are some varieties
where they do pronounce the R, however, in RP, that's Received Pronunciation, that
is the variety that is in the dictionary, we don't pronounce that R, okay? So here
it's just the diphthong /eə/ /eə/ or how natives normally say it, as that monophthong,
it becomes /e:/ /e:/. Another one is area area. The next one aeroplane
aeroplane. In medial position we have stairs, notice I don't pronounce the R, stairs
stairs. The next one, again, no R, tears tears. And the last one here, cares cares.
In final position we have bear, bear. Chair chair. Where. So you can see that all of
these words that have this diphthong, they have an R in the spelling and that
R tends to not be pronounced. You'll see that sometimes it is pronounced, that
depends if there's another syllable that comes after it but you can see,
especially if it comes at the end, we don't have that R pronounced there. If
you do choose to pronounce it, it's not wrong, there are some varieties in the UK where
we do pronounce that R either as a /r/ or as a trill like a "r" sound, particularly
in Scottish varieties of erm of English, I should say. Now let's practice with some
sentences. Where is the chair, where is the chair, said more naturally, where is
the chair. So you'll see that when I say it a lot faster it becomes more of that
monophthong rather than a diphthong, doesn't it? Where is the chair as opposed
to where is the chair. And the next one, the airplane is in the air, the airplane
is in the air, notice that I'm linking there. If you're
interested in learning more about linking, I will put that video in the
description for you. The airplane is in the air. That's it for this video, thank
you very much for watching and I hope you've learned something new. If you have,
don't forget to click the like button down below, that would be wonderful if
you did that. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to my channel.
I post every single Friday, as I said, about
pronunciation mostly, but I also go live as well from time to time too.
So I hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you very soon bye bye.