Have you ever wondered about the differences between the voiced and voiceless consonants:
voiced and voiceless sounds?
Have you ever wished that you could pronounce those differences clearly and effectively?
Well in this video that’s exactly what I'm going to show you how to do so let's get started.
Now, this video focuses on voiceless consonants.
Last week I made a video about voiced consonants and the link is in the top corner of this
page so maybe now or at the end of this video click on that and head over there and learn
more about voiced consonants.
But this video will focus on the voiceless consonants.
Just to do a quick recap the difference between a voiceless and a voiced consonant is whether
you can feel vibrations passing through your throat.
So if you put your hand on your larynx and say ‘sss’ which is a voiceless consonant
you shouldn't feel any buzzing, it’s just breath that comes up, just a hissing sound.
Whereas if you say ‘zzz’ then you should feel it buzz and that's a voiced consonant.
But someone posted in response to my last video, a question about the difference between
let’s say a ‘p’ and a ‘b’ or a ’t’ and a ‘d’ and they wondered how to tell
the difference between those two sounds: which one was voiced and voiceless.
A good exercise to use is to get a little bit of paper, put it in front of your mouth
and on a voiceless consonant you should see the piece of paper push forward and sort of
flutter and shake, but on a voice constant it really shouldn't move at all or maybe just
a little bit but not very much.
So if we compare a word like ‘pat and ‘bat’ (so ‘p’ at the beginning of ‘pat’
is voiceless and ‘b’ at the beginning of ‘bat’ which is voiced).
On ‘p’ you should see the paper move.
Watch this ‘pat’, ‘pat’.
As opposed to ‘bat’ where the ‘b’ is voiced, ’bat’, ‘bat’.
See it doesn’t really move a lot.
‘pat… bat’.
So that’s one way to tell the difference between some of those other consonants that
aren’t long like ’s’, ‘z’ or ‘f’ and ‘v’.
Now I'm going to give you a list of voiceless sounds and some words in which you can hear
them.
So have a look and have a listen:
P pat T toe
K coat F fat
TH thing S Sue
SH mesh CH church
H hot
A voiceless consonant is made without any vibration passing through your throat, so
you shouldn’t, if you had your hands on your larynx feel any vibration.
And with some of those other voiceless consonants like ‘p’, ’t’ and ‘k’, if you
held a little piece of paper in front of your mouth then you should see the little piece
of paper flickering as yo make that sound because of the air that passes out.
So if you liked and enjoyed this video then hit like so that you can find this video again
easily and consider subscribing to this channel because I post weekly videos here every Tuesday
at 8.30pm GMT (London Local Time).
And if you want any more information on voiced consonants then click on the link in the top
corner right now and it’ll take you to a video about voiced consonants.
And if you want any more information about other difficult consonant sounds both voiced
and voiceless then there’s a great free download over on my website it’s a 5 day
course.
And I’ve left a link at the end of this video and also a link underneath is a video
on YouTube so click that and have a look.
Speak soon.