Hey there! This is Andrea, your RealLife English fluency coach.
If you want to understand fast English speakers,
AND speak faster yourself, you have to know some secrets about how we speak English.
In other words, you have to know connected speech. This is how we speak. We cut or reduce some
sounds, we connect words, and some sounds change depending on other sounds within a phrase.
So, if you want to speak fluent and natural sounding English out there in the real world,
stay tuned, because this lesson is packed with useful information.
When you start to understand how we sound and flow while speaking English, you’ll learn that
it’s not really that we speak fast… I mean, some people do, but I and most people don’t…
What is really happening is that we manipulate sounds in such a way that it might sound as if
we're speaking faster, but we’re really not. We’re just adding the things I mentioned
before: reduction, linking and sound morphing. That’s connected speech!
And the problem is that at school they’ve taught you the wrong way.
They didn’t teach you how to train your ear. And so now you expect words to sound a certain way,
but because we use connected speech, we speak very differently from what you expect.
Although we’ll learn a bit about linking and sound morphing, the focus of today’s
lesson is going to be reduction, when we cut or reduce sounds within a word.
And there are two important things that you need to know.
When we talk about pronunciation in English, we have to know that words come under two categories.
We have content words, which we stress, meaning we say them a bit louder and more clearly.
Then we have function words, which we unstress, meaning we say them quicker, and less clearly.
These are the words that drop some sounds or syllables.
Function words are the smaller words that don’t have a concrete meaning, rather they,
as the name suggests, have a function, a grammatical function within a sentence. These are:
This brings us to the 'schwa' sound.
The schwa sound is very common in function words. The schwa sound is the “uh” sound in
In these words you can notice the strong vowel sound. But if you pay attention,
the other less obvious vowel sound is the schwa.
Many times reduction means making a word weaker by saying it with a schwa.
For example, the word CAN has a strong “ah” sound in it.
However, when we say it in a sentence we replace that “ah” for a “uh”, and so it sounds ‘kuhn’.
Now I'll teach you some common cases where reduction happens.
In pronouns. Many times pronouns
are function words, and as such, they reduce. In this case, it means that they drop a sound.
The h. I’m talking about: he, his, her. What did he do, becomes what di-dee do.
What is his problem becomes what iziz problem. Did you call her becomes Did-chew call-er.
So you'll hear both linking and sound morphing in these examples. Another pronoun that often
gets reduced is 'them' but here we drop the 'th' sound. I will call them becomes I’ll call-em.
Why didn't you tell them becomes Why didn-you tell-em. The two main prepositions that change
very drastically are of and to. We don’t say “of” we say “uv” or even just a schwa “uh” sound. Point
of view becomes poin-nuh view. One of a kind becomes wa-nuva kind. Then we also have for.
For each other becomes fuh-rea-chuh-ther. Before we continue let me ask you: Do you constantly find
yourself stuck in your learning? Well you are not alone, if you want to finally be able to
understand and speak fluent English in the real world, then I highly recommend you give our app
the RealLife English app a try. First of all with this app you can speak English anytime,
anywhere, at the touch of a button and discover other cultures as you connect with English
speakers from around the world. And guess what! It's all free. I bet this sounds like a dream,
right? Well, now it's a dream come true. So give it a try now. Just click here or in the
description below now or search for RealLife English in the Apple App or Google Play Store.
For this part I’ll give you some examples for you to repeat after me.
We’ll also bring Ethan on so he can show us the American pronunciation,
which might vary. These examples you’ll hear contain reductions, but also the linking and
sound morphing I mentioned before.For now, just focus on saying it like me or Ethan.
You know, the reason why we reduce sounds like this is because speaking
with reductions is more effective. It takes less effort. It’s not that we’re lazy,
fully-articulating-every-single-word takes a lot of effort.
Also, in order for you to get more sensitized to the sound reduction phenomenon in English,
think a little about how YOU do it in your own language as well.
Now, another time we consider it wasted energy to articulate the sounds exactly
as they read is when the last sound of a word and the first of the next one are the same.
Some examples are those are cheap prices. I need to stop at the gas station. I joined a book club.
We each have a ticket. Also, these sounds don't necessarily have to be the exact same sound. For
example, T and D are very similar, so in normal speech I say NEXT DOR actually as NEX-DOOR. The
T and the K sound also interact in the same way. MOST COMMON can be heard as MOS-COMMON.
We’ve arrived at the end of this lesson. I want to congratulate you for making it until the end!
Many get distracted and leave early, but you’re committed to
improving your pronunciation so good for you! if you haven't subscribed to our channel,
i encourage you to do it now so that you don't miss our next lesson.
let's quickly review some of the things we've learned today. when we speak in English,
we do it in a way that's easy and effective. We use connected speech, which is how we cut or
reducing sounds, we connect words and some sounds change depending on other sounds within a phrase.
We focused on reduction today. We learned about function words (words we unstress) and the schwa.
Then we learned that the pronouns that start with an H,
drop that consonant. So, we might say “where-izi? Instead of “Where is he?”
The prepositions of, to, for get weakened. We saw many examples of verbs with prepositions.
And then some examples of the same consecutive sounds, which when they occur, we only pronounce
them once. Ex: gas-station. For your next watch, I highly recommend you watch this lesson Ethan made.
It's called Stop Speaking School English - Start Speaking Real-Life English. Ethan take it away!