In this video, I'm going to give you ten easy words that you can use to learn the schwa sound in English.
These are words you already use everyday in your English speech, and if you spend just a
few minutes working on them every day, you'll be amazed at the improvements. I'm going to give you
ten words and we're going to end by looking at the most common word in the English language which,
if you master, will make a huge improvement to your English speech. As you may have noticed,
I'm here on a plane and that's because I'm going to America for a few days. Now I hope
you were listening correctly there, and if you were, you will have noticed I said 'America,'
and 'America' is a brilliant word for this video because it's got two schwa sounds in the word.
/ə/ at the beginning and /ə/ at the end. So even before we get started with word one, you're getting a bonus
word here, 'America.' Now, let's dive into the rest of the words. In the first five words, the
schwa sound appears at the beginning of the word.
Word one is:
Word two:
Word three:
Word four:
And word five:
Those five words the schwa is in the first syllable of the word.
In the next five words, the schwa will either be in the second or third or last syllable of the word
and this can mean that it's often harder to pronounce the schwa sound correctly
and that's why it's gonna be really really useful to actually practice these words.
So word number six is:
Word number seven:
Word number eight is:
Word number nine is:
And word number ten, and it's quite a difficult one to get it correct but it's worth practicing, is:
And now, before we get to the bonus word, which is the most important word in the English language,
what I want you to do is actually comment below in this video let me know which schwa words you
find most difficult. So, are you finding words most difficult, like 'colour' for example where
the /ə/ is at the end? Are you finding words most of you're like 'farmer,' where the /ə/ is
at the end but the first syllable is stressed? Let me know which words that you are finding the
most difficult and then I'll be able to make another video on those words specifically.
So the bonus word. The most common word in the English language is:
You use this one all the time, all the time in English. 'The,' 'the car,' 'the house.'
As you can see right now I'm on an airplane,
'the airplane.'
In my hand here I'm holding the microphone.
'the microphone'
So there is the most common word and most important words, in the English language.
And as an extra bonus, I'm going to give you one more bonus word.
And that is:
So, almost just as common as the in the English language is 'a,' as in
'a microphone,' 'a car,' 'a plane,' 'a bottle.'
So I really want you to spend time working on in particular 'the,' and 'a.' Practice putting it into loads of different situations
'the car,' 'the house,' 'the plane,' practice putting it in the words I've given you, so when you say 'farmer,'
you can say 'the farmer,' and then getting to schwa in one block of speech. So practice this and it's
really going to make a huge huge difference to your English speech.
A big difficulty that I find a lot of my clients having and a lot of non-native speakers having they're trying to learn the
schwa sound, is they often confuse it with the /​ʌ​/ sound.
So what I want you to do right now before you actually learn these words is, go to this video here
and that's actually going to show you how to tell the difference between these two very important sounds in English, okay.
So watch this one next and that's really really going to help.
Give the video a thumbs-up if it helps you, I really hope it has. It's just little short things like this that could make
such a big difference to your English speech.
So, subscribe to the channel for more videos that are coming out like this on a weekly basis
to help you speak better English and get better results.
I'll see you in the next video!