Hello everyone, and welcome back to Pronunciation with Emma. In this video, we're going to be
looking at the /æ/ sound. So many of you watching this are probably thinking "/æ/?
That's not a difficult sound to make, Emma. Why're you doing a video about this sound?".
That's because for many speakers, they either don't have this sound in their language or
they pronounce it as an /e/. So for example, German speakers or Russian speakers, instead
of saying "mat", they say "met". There's no problem with that, but if you do want to get
the British accent spot on, then this is something you can work on, although, it's not a major
problem if you do say "met", so don't worry. So let's look at how we pronounce this sound,
then we'll look at some words, and then we'll practise some sentences together. So this
sound is very open. /æ/ /æ/. Let's just compare it to /e/ for a moment cause this
is where people get a bit confused. /æ/ /æ/ /e/ /e/. So you see my mouth is a lot more
open when we get to that /æ/ sound. /æ/ /e/ /æ/. For example, apple, apple. Careful,
not epple, epple. There's no problem with that. In south Africa they would pronounce
it that way, so if you're aiming for a South African accent, I mean, go for it, but if
you're aiming for a standard British accent, I mean RP (Received Pronunciation), then apple
would be the one to use. The next one ant. Ant. Not ent. Ent. Ant. Very open and very
short as well. I hear a lot of students kind of lengthening this vowel and saying like
aant aant or aaple. It's very short. Apple. Ant. The next one, actor. Ac-tor. Notice,
I don't pronounce that R, we have a schwa there. -tor. Ac-tor. Actor. Mat. Mat. Not
to be confused with met. Met. Mat. Mat. Another one is cat. Cat. Cet. Cat. And the last one,
fat. Fat. Now this /æ/ sound doesn't appear at the end of words, but if you do find that
it does, let me know in the comments because I've been searching high and low for a word
that ends with /æ/, and I can't find one. So there are no final position words in this
video for this sound. So just for those who are still a little bit confused about that
/æ/ and /e/ sound, you are very welcome to skip ahead to the sentences if you don't have
a problem with this, but this part of the video is just for you. Let's have a look at
some minimal pairs with /æ/ and /e/. Mat, met. Pat, pet. Sat, set.So you can watch that
part again if you need to practise and repeat. However, right now I'm gonna jump to the sentences.
So the first sentence, a very typical one that we find in my textbooks for this sound,
the cat sat on the mat. The cat sat on the mat. The cat sat on the mat. And the next
one, the apple looks bad. The apple looks bad. The apple looks bad. That's the end of
another pronunciation video, I hope you've enjoyed it and you've learnt something new.
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see you very soon. Bye bye.