American English Vowels- Tricks to Improving Pronunciation & Sounding like a Native English Speaker

hey guys it's Victoria so in this video I wanted to share some very important information with you about the American English vowels now I recently made actually individual videos for each and every American vowel so if you haven't seen that I'm gonna link it for you right up behind me and I think you'd find it really helpful but today's video is gonna be a little bit more big picture so I'm gonna be telling you kind of the way I want you to think about American vowels in general and you're gonna get a really good understanding of why they are so hard to master we're also gonna be debunking the biggest myth that so many of my clients have been told when they first learned English and in my opinion it makes how you conceptualize American vowels way more confusing so the first thing I want you to know is that English is what's called a stress timed language basically what that means is that within a sentence in English certain words are gonna be shinier than others by shinier I mean more interesting and in English we accomplished that by playing around with a combination of three different variables there the variables of loudness pitch and length so an English sentence shows what the winner is by making it more interesting that is a really complex topic in and of itself and I'm gonna be putting up a lot more videos about that so if you're interested in that please subscribe and YouTube will tell you when those are ready but for now all I want you to know is that that exists as a concept because it's really really important so what's the myth that so many of my clients have been told it's that English falls into this beautiful clean binary system of long vowels and short vowels for example I will be told that E is a long vowel and it is a short vowel now if that was the full picture this would not be as long a video as it's about to be because the English vowel system has so many more variables that you have to know about that you have to take into account there is not a long and a short vowel well there is but as you'll really quickly see there's a lot more layers that you can put on top of those baseline lengths and that's gonna change the whole picture in tirely so to get us rolling the first variable that affects the length of an American English vowel is this idea of tenseness or laxness I know what so it's really easier than it initially seems tense vowels are vowels that actually use tension right that's why they're called tense the tension within these vowels is gonna be in and around your tongue in your vocal tract and in and around your throat now the majority of American vowels are tense and that makes them very different than a traditional e vowel system in which the vowels are clean and short and precise and do not use very much muscular tension so here's the thing tense vowels yes they use muscular tension but the other thing that you need to know is that they have a minimum baseline length that you have to hit for it to really count as a real tense vowel so I might have a client and he might say a word and he might in fact say the sound absolutely correctly in terms of what the sound quality should be but if he doesn't hold the sound long enough to meet the criteria for say a tense vowel it's not gonna be wrong but it will sound bizarre it would be like instead of saying that's a dog if I said that's a dog the aw was the right sound but it wasn't long enough to actually fulfill its minimum requirements so as I said most of the English vowels are tense and I'm gonna read them for you guys in just a second along with their IPA symbols so IPA is the international phonetic alphabet and I just wanted to give you a really quick caveat here as to why some of the symbols I use for transcription may not be the same as the symbols that you are seeing in say an online dictionary so online dictionaries use phonemic transcriptions without getting into like the really technical linguistic aspects a phonemic category is kind of like this broad umbrella but it doesn't guarantee that every single type of variant of that sound will be said in the exactly same way so sometimes how you see a word transcribed in a dictionary is actually not reflective of the specific sound that's produced so let me give you guys a quick example cloud clout cloud clout in a dictionary those would be transcribed the exact same way but you can clearly hear that they are not phonetically the exact same sound so for me that's a really important distinction when I'm teaching someone the American English accent because I want you to know exactly and very clearly what your target is the other small difference between some transcriptions that you might see online and ones I like to use is how I transcribe my semivowels so this sounds and I like to transcribe them using the letters W and Y there's a few reasons for this but the most important reason is that my clients find this more intuitive and easier to follow so without further ado guys I'm gonna read you all of the tense vowels that we have in English along with a sample word so we have E as in beat a as in bate Oh as in boat ooh in boo-ah is in bad ow as in loud Oh as in ow ah as in bought AI as in abide I as in right oi as in boy and her as in her now of course a is a whole other thing of its own so herb can actually combine with five other vowel sounds to create even more interesting complex or sounds so those five are are like the name of the letter R air like hair ear like your ears or like the number four and or I personally don't use or very often it's more so common in certain dialects but for example you might hear someone say sure whereas I I think I personally more so say sure so those are the tense vowels guys next up we have the lacks vowels and there are only four of them and lacks think of the word to relax so your muscles are relaxed and because of that your vowels are shorter at baseline than were the tense vowels so our lacks vowels are as follows we have it as in bit at as in bed buh as in cook and AH as in cut next up we have the famous the very popular schwa vowel and that is a reduced foul so a schwa is gonna be shorter than a tense fowl shorter than a lack cell it's a really really short up sound that you hear in alone apply so that was number one you guys so the first variable that determined vowel length was whether a vowel is tense lacks or schwa the second variable that allows the vowel to change length is this idea of primary word stress so if a syllable wins the word so if it's the primary stress that vowel is gonna be a little bit longer than it would be otherwise so I'm gonna tell you guys a couple of examples here so what did I write mm-hmm okay listen to these two words and tell me where you hear a longer ah obligation honest I'll read it again obligation honest can you guys tell that the often honest is a little bit longer that is because honest has the primary stress on that vowel ah let's look at another example here okay so we have tell me about the O sound in motor motivation can you tell motor motivation the oh is longer in motor because again that is the primary stressed syllable in that word the third variable that causes our vowels to increase a bit in length is this idea of sentence stress that I referred to earlier in this video so if a word winds your whole sentence we're making a bit more interesting right so we have to give it a little bit more loudness pitch and length but to be honest it's primarily length and pitch that I want you to pay attention to the loudness can be extremely subtle or sometimes not at all so I'm gonna read you two small sentences and I want you to pay attention to the word ball so here we go Tim caught the ball the ball was old Tim caught the ball the ball was old it's subtle but can you guys tell which ball is a bit longer it's the one in the first sentence where it's acting as the winner the primary content word so like I mentioned I'm gonna be making lots more videos about that topic but that's the general idea of it here's one more example for you guys how stephen doing how stephen doing and the answer might be Stephens doing great so listen to them side-by-side how Stephen doing Stephens doing great so you can easily tell in this one I think that the first time we said Stephen how Stephen doing where he was the winner of the sentence we lengthened we changed our pitch we made a more interesting in the response Stephens doing great great is the winner not Stephen so the length increase is apparent in those so number four guys the fourth variable that can change the length of your vowel in American English is a little bit more tricky so if you have any old vowels it can be tense it can be wax and if within the same syllable it's followed by a voiced consonant you're gonna give that vowel a little bit more length than it had before so we already said right that tense vowels are longer than lacks vowels so if it's a tense foul it's gonna get a bit longer than it was if it's a lacks vowel it's also going to get a bit longer than it was so if you're wondering what a voiced final consonant is it's very simply a consonant that has voicing that means your vocal folds are physically moving they're vibrating right here in your throat and it's really easy to feel them vibrating so you can just put your hand on your throat and say so try that with me can you feel the vibration there you should if you don't contrast that to how it feels when you say so you should feel no movement here hmm you should so let's look at a few more together try to figure out if the sound I'm making is voiced or voiceless so let's try is there any voicing there mm-hmm nope is a voice less voiceless so it does not have vocal fold vibration how about mmm does that one have vibration it does indeed mmm is a voiced sound let's try one more is there any vibration at the level of your vocal cords no has absolutely no voicing so the reason we care about that so let's go back to the point of this exercise is that your vowel will lengthen if it's followed by a voiced consonant in the same syllable so let's look at doc dog doc dog doc has a tense off it's followed by up and has no voice so doc is this long but when we change the to a voiced good guess what that vowel is gonna get a little bit longer doc dog doc dog coat code code code there are actually endless examples of this phenomenon but for now I'm gonna do a tiny little exercise to help you guys get a feel for this so I'm gonna read you a sentence and I want you to tell me whether I'm saying the baseline version or the longer version of a vowel so what do we have here okay am I saying baseline or longer when I say she made the bed she made the bed so my question really is am i finishing the word with a duh even though I'm clearly unreleased the sound to make the exercise tricky so in that one I was saying a bed like she made her bed after she woke up in the morning so be e D let's try one more guys the movies called 8:00 the movies called 8:00 so am I saying 80 E or a I D I was saying the first the movies called 880 E or it could be a I G H cheap because this is English so I hope you guys found this video helpful in realizing that the American English vowel system is super super complex nuanced tricky and difficult to master it is something that takes a lot of work and patience but honestly awareness of these variables that we just talked about are a huge step and being able to catch those tiny tiny differences that I want you and I need you to become aware of if you want to really master and perfect your accent so if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and as I said I'm gonna be making lots more videos in the coming weeks and months so please subscribe if you want YouTube to tell you when that happens so again thanks so much for watching guys I'll see you next time bye

Channel: American Accent Mastery

Views: 16,061

Keywords: tense vs lax vowels, tricks to improving pronunciation, american english pronunciation, how to sound american, american accent training, american english vowels, how to speak english fluently, how to sound like a native speaker, ipa, international phonetic alphabet, how to understand native English speakers, how to reduce your accent, schwa, american schwa, how to pronounce schwa, how to pronounce american english, how to pronounce in english

Id: Wlb07bB7DjA

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 04 2018