Today we are going to look again at one of your comments,
this time about phonetics and something that is useful but can get complicated.
Khaled Says: Could you make one video with Aspirated sounds in English please?
Well that is a great question and I have been meaning to do a video on aspirated sounds, so here goes.
First of all lets explain what aspirated means.
If you put your hand in front of your mouth and speak
in any language you will feel air puffing out of your mouth on certain sounds.
Some sounds produce the puff of air and others don’t, the ones that do are aspirated,
that is what it means.
Remember thought that I don’t think people learning English should get too into phonetics
because it gets very complicated and it will be a distraction from learning English
if you go into too much detail.
The subject of aspiration is useful to know but it gets very complicated very quickly.
Like with all my videos I am only presenting to you
what I think is useful for learning English as a second language.
Remember that when you start trolling the comments with comments about tiny little details.
If you are just learning English as a second language,
trust me you’re opening up a can of worms if you get too into this.
So lets just keep it simple.
In English, vowels and diphthongs are never aspirated
only certain consonants and technically only
/p/, /t/ and /k/
Those are the only sounds that are aspirated.
So when you say these sounds a puff of air should come out of your mouth.
You can check to see if you are doing it right by putting your hand infront of your mouth
or you can use a little piece of paper to see if it moves, like this.
/p/, /t/, /k/
Here are some example words.
potato, twitter, quick
It does get complicated because these sounds are more likely to be aspirated, or are aspirated more
if they are at the beginning of words than at the end.
Also, the letter that comes next makes a big difference to how much a word is aspirated.
Aspiration changes a lot in different regional variations of English.
Really you can aspirate all sound in some contexts, it does not really just belong to these sounds.
So, If you are just learning a little phonetics to help with your pronunciation of English as a second language,
I wouldn't recommend going much further than this.
But if you are studying phonetics and you want
to know the minute differences between aspiration in a Birmingham accent and a Welsh accent then go ahead,
but you are watching the wrong videos.
Well what do you think? What aspects of phonetics have you found useful that others might not have considered.
Why not share your experience with us in the comments below.
Well I hope that’s helpful, if it is, please give me a thumbs up and ‘share’ this video
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Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time.