Have you ever wondered ‘what is a homophone?’; have you ever wished that you knew how to
pronounce homophones in order to avoid being misunderstood?
Well in this video, these are exactly the thing to do.
Homophones are quite simply words that sound exactly the same but have very different meanings.
And there are many, many, many of them.
For instance ‘court’ and ‘caught’: so ‘court’ as in ‘a court room’ and
‘caught’ as in ‘I caught a cold’ or ‘I caught someone before they ran away’.
And because there are so many of them you'll be surprised at just how many people mispronounce
these homophones and then they wonder why they aren't understood in live speech or they
wonder why people ask them to repeat themselves.
So I thought I'd make a five part series all about the most common homophones and how to
pronounce them see you can avoid those sorts of mistakes.
And today we're gonna focus on the word ‘pore’ or should I say the words ‘pore’ so we
can have ‘pore’ as in ‘the pores of our skin’ we can ‘poor’ as in ‘a poor
person’ - someone who is financially poor - we can have ‘paw’ as in ‘a dogs paw
or a cats paw’, or we can have ‘pour’ as in ‘to pour water’.
And you may have noticed that I said all of those four words, that have four very different
meanings, in exactly the same way: so I said a /p/ at the beginning with your two lips
coming together /p/ and then I used the vowel sound /or/.
So even though ‘poor’ is spelt very differently to ‘paw’ ‘pour’ and ‘pore’ they
sound, for a standard British English speaker exactly the same.
So they start with that /p/ sound and then they’re made with the vowel sound /or/ where
the lips are rounded in the vowel sound is very long - ‘poor’.
So copy me: ‘I am financially very’, ‘I am financially very poor’; ‘would you
pour the water?’, ‘would you pour the water?’; ‘look at my dogs paw’, ‘look
at my dog paw’; ‘I can see every pore of my skin’, ‘I can see every pore of
my skin’.
So if you’d like some more help with how to pronounce the /or/ vowel sound then click
here and it'll take you to another video.
But if you’d like to learn more about homophones and how to pronounce them see you can avoid
any embarrassing mistakes then why don’t you click here and download a free e-book
that I created that works primarily on the pronunciation of the /or/ sound and four other
commonly mispronounce vowel sounds.
But what I send you two days after you download the e-book is a free gift that contains all
of the most common homophones with audio and descriptions about how to make the sound.
So why don’t you click here, download that free ebook get started on these five most
commonly mispronounced vowel sounds and then wait for that free gift and really start to
make improvements with your common mispronounced homophones.
So if you liked this video then why don't you click like so that you can find it easily
again, and consider subscribing to this channel because I post weekly videos here every Tuesday
at 8:30 PM GMT local London time - so I hope to see you here next week.