Hello I'm Emma from mmmEnglish!
I've got a pronunciation lesson for you today,
one that I think you'll find incredibly useful.
I'm going to give you some tips
that will help you to pronounce
thousands of English words.
Words that end in -tion.
Now I bet that you're already thinking of some examples
of English words that end in -tion, aren't you?
There are so many!
This part of the word is a suffix,
a common ending in an English word.
Now words that end like this in English
are almost always a noun.
And the pronunciation of this syllable
is always unstressed.
It's always an unstressed syllable
which means it's really quick.
Yeah, -tion is pronounced
If it was written like it's supposed to sound
it would be like this..
Well phonetically it's
ʃ
ə
n
These are the phonetic symbols, the sounds,
not the letters.
ʃ - an unvoiced consonant sound.
ə - the unstressed vowel sound, the schwa.
And n - a voiced consonant sound.
Now bring all of those sounds together and you get
-tion.
It's really, really fast.
In fact, often the schwa sound
is absorbed into the consonant sounds.
Because it's unstressed, we hardly hear it at all.
So if you see it in a dictionary written like this,
it means that the sound is absorbed
into the consonant sounds around it.
Now these words are a special bonus for
Spanish and Portuguese, Italian and French
and German and Dutch native speakers
because there are patterns between
words in your language and words in English
which means you instantly know the meaning
of thousands of English words.
The pronunciation rules that you learn in this lesson
will help you to correctly pronounce
all of these words in English.
Okay let's build up
with some extra syllables to practise using this suffix
within some bigger words.
Okay? Practise out loud with me.
Caution.
Tradition.
Frustration.
Conversation.
Now there are a couple of exceptions
to this pronunciation rule.
Just a couple, so don't worry!
When the consonant sound
is the sound right before the -tion,
the pronunciation becomes /tʃən/ instead of
instead of
Question.
Exhaustion.
Digestion.
One of the wonderful patterns that exists in English
is that you can attach -tion to the end of many verbs
to create a noun.
It creates the noun that is the action of the verb.
I mean take a look at how many there are,
and these are just a few!
In an earlier lesson, I talked about
the importance of word stress in spoken English.
Using the correct word stress will help you
to sound much more natural when you speak English.
Like I said, the -tion suffix is always unstressed.
So which syllable should you stress?
It's actually simple, it's the syllable before -tion.
The stress pattern
is consistent throughout English pronunciation.
The syllable before -tion is the stressed syllable.
Action.
Caution.
Tradition.
Frustration.
Connection.
Donation.
Repetition.
Inspiration.
Construction.
Invention.
Infection.
Description.
Collection.
Interruption.
Population.
Celebration.
Innovation.
Transformation.
It's consistent across all syllables.
-tion doesn't have to be the final suffix either,
it can followed by -al or -ally.
Traditional. Traditionally.
International.
Internationally.
But the stress pattern is exactly the same - even now!
The stress syllable is the one before -tion
International.
Traditionally.
Well that's it for this lesson!
I hope that this little pronunciation tip
showed you just how easy it is to start practising
the correct pronunciation of all of these words.
Remember that there are thousands of them in English.
Make sure you subscribe and check out
some of my other pronunciation lessons right here.
Thanks for watching today and I'll see you next week.
Bye for now!