Hello, everyone.
This is Chris from Learn British English Free.
This lesson is about, possibly,
the most important vowel sound.
It is called the “schwa” /ə/
and, if you have a look at the British Council’s Phonemic Chart,
it is perhaps the easiest sound to make as well –
a very lazy sound.
Kind of like, “uh”,
the sound as in
“about”
“observer”
and at the end of “teacher”
“uh” /ə/, just like that.
Very short and easy.
The reason I’m talking about it today is
I want to communicate to you about how common it is.
If we are talking about a lot of words,
we think of the pronunciation,
we will probably think of how we are going to say it
as correctly as we can.
But, in reality, when we are speaking quickly,
we often substitute a lot of the vowel sounds
for the schwa /ə/ sound.
Here are some examples for you:
The indefinite article: “a”
“a”
I think it’s fair to say that, most commonly,
it’s actually pronounced as /ə/.
Basically a schwa sound, simple enough.
You can say “a bus”,
but a lot of the time, we will say:
“A /ə/ bus”.
With the definite article, “the”
“The” /ði:/ it’s often pronounced as.
But, also, again perhaps more commonly,
“The” /ðə/
“The bus”.
This next example is fairly complicated,
but I think it’s interesting to show how common the schwa is.
“Should have” can be contracted to “should’ve”.
We put an apostrophe after the “d”
and then it’s “ve” because we take away the “have”
and it becomes “should’ve”.
And you can hear that I’m making a very short schwa sound,
so if you are familiar as well with the International Phonetic Alphabet,
you can see, in the notes below the video,
I’ve written out what it’s like
and I’ve put the schwa sound /ə/
in brackets cos it’s that short.
“Should’ve” /ʃʊd(ə)v/
In a different video I made before,
I talk about a common mistake
that especially native speakers make,
where they think that, instead of “should have”,
they should say “should of”,
and it could be for other things as well like:
“might’ve”
“could’ve”
But this is simply, I believe, a mistake,
because the schwa sound makes it sound like “of”
but, actually, it’s the contracted “have”.
So “should’ve” /ʃʊd(ə)v/ sounds a bit like “should of”,
but, actually, it should be “should have”.
I hope that was an interesting example.
Furthermore, right at the bottom there,
the Cambridge Dictionary suggest that
“should” (the word itself)
can be pronounced using the schwa as the vowel sound.
They’re probably right.
I was thinking it’s more the vowel sound /ʊ/ like in “book”. /ʃʊd/
I think most people say it like that but, again,
if we are speaking quickly,
might be substituted by schwa /ʃəd/
It’s so simple to do because it’s very quick and easy,
therefore, over time, we will use it as much as we can.
Thank you for watching,
this was about the power of the schwa /ə/
I will be back soon.
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and my main website is
http://www.learnbritishenglish.co.uk/
My name is Chris.
Many thanks for watching.
Bye for now.