How to pronounce English | Canguro English

okay so we are we are nearly at the end of a typical English class and as you can see in Spain in Spain people like to eat and drink when they're learning English so where can you explain the food that we have yeah then we have chorizo and cheese okay retention cheese bread good tortilla de patatas okay you're like hey wine red wine another uh-huh empanadas like a Spanish like a Spanish pie - pie yeah Freddie's Spanish pie but all wrong no we we but they do potato yeah right potato I ain't gonna man the bush hello and welcome to kangaroo English I'm Christian and today I am going to teach you perfect English pronunciation by teaching you the English alphabet so you know and I know that English pronunciation can be really difficult and one of the reasons is because English is not phonetic so the way that the words are written doesn't always correspond to the pronunciation so now I'm going to ask you a question how many letters are in the English alphabet 26 right well what if I told you that there weren't 26 letters in the English alphabet that in fact there are some letters missing and other extra letters that you don't know about and that these letters are the secret - perfect English pronunciation the English language wasn't always written with the Latin alphabet the modern alphabet that we have today ABCDE English was written in runes okay so this is actually the Old English alphabet and this is called fourth ork because of the pronunciation of the first letters of the runic alphabet if you th are C okay for for you you'll probably notice that some of the letters look look familiar like this is similar to an F and this is very similar to an R here we have a be down here you can see the letter T and then due to historical reasons the anglo-saxons adopted the Latin alphabet that we have today but some of the Latin letters didn't correspond very well to to the runes that the the Old English we were using and understanding this difference is the key to understanding modern English pronunciation so in 1714 after the anglo-saxons had adopted the Latin alphabet John Fortescue wrote this this is to translate the anglo-saxon alphabet into the modern English alphabet and if we start to read the alphabet we will notice some very interesting things like for example there's no J um there's no Q mmm there's no W and there's no V so first let's talk about the Mis single enters in the anglo-saxon alphabet the first letter missing from the anglo-saxon alphabet is J okay and this represents the sound Jo okay but when anglo-saxons wanted to write the sound J they would use CG or DG okay so let me give you two examples so this word okay this word from Old English in modern English is hinge okay and um a word which is the same in Old English and modern English would be edge and this explains why sometimes when you see a G in a word the sound is not good like girl or go the sound is June so where did the J come from well it was introduced by the French so sometimes the French would substitute the D G or the CG for an eye so for example a name like Joshua would be written Yahshua and the pronunciation would be something similar to Yahshua Yahshua and with time this I transformed into the J that we have today in English so the next letter missing from the anglo-saxon alphabet is Q and this represents the quote sound when the anglo-saxons wanted to write the quote sound they would write C W or sometimes see you like this so for example we have the old English word here which is qui the modern English queen and also another old English word will be this one do you know what this is this is of course quick so again this was introduced by the French so now you know when you see a cue in English that the sound should be quote now something really interesting also missing from the alphabet is the letter V so this V represents the sound so when anglo-saxons wanted to write the sound mmm what letter did they use they used an F and the reason is that the V and the F have exactly the same mouth position in reality they are the same consonant the only difference is this is without voice voiceless and this is with voice okay so the F is only air but the V you have to activate the voice so anglo-saxons knew the difference in pronunciation depending on the position of the F in the word for example this word hasn't changed in modern English this is full so this is unvoiced full this word has changed this is in modern English even and we can see here that because of the position of the F that this is voiced even and this is also the reason why singular and plural with F and V are pronounced differently for example wolf wolf final consonant unvoiced and the plural wool this is here because this consonant is before a vowel it is voiced wolves and it is exactly the same story for the letters s and z the letter Z didn't exist in the Old English alphabet they would use s and depending on the position it was unvoiced or voiced Z for example this word is su su this word here with voice zu zu the anglo-saxons knew which pronunciation depending on the position of the letter in the word so I have talked about some letters missing from the anglo-saxon alphabet now I want to talk about a letter that is modified from Old English to new English and that is this letter C so um in the past this letter had two pronunciations one was like the modern Cho and the other one was like the modern cur for example we had this word which is now in modern English child and then we have this word which is the modern English back over time the see with a church sound was substituted for ch and the see with a curt sound was substituted for CK or only for K but but then to make things a little bit more complicated when English people borrowed words from other languages they kept the original pronunciation so this word here is from Greek so this is chemistry but this word here is from French so we say machine so now the really exciting part I'm going to show you two letters that existed in Old English that have disappeared in modern English but I think they will really help you understand the pronunciation of certain words okay so the first letters are an F and thorn okay and they are basically the same and they represent the third sound when you stick out your tongue okay now in modern English when we want to represent the sound we write T H now what's really interesting is that sometimes these letters weren't available for printing when they made books so sometimes they would stop stitute these for a why and that's why you can see signs like this now most English people look at the sign and it says ye oldie collectible shop but we know that this is actually F or thorne and it says the old collectible shop so what it means is that when you see a th in English like for example this or think you can imagine this Old English letter a special letter where you have to stick out your tongue so the final letter I want to talk to you about is this which is win and this represents the all sound okay and in modern English we write this as W now this is an interesting um letter because it's a consonant okay but actually the pronunciation is a vowel and if we think about the name it's called double u W because in the past you could write win or you could write you you you you a w and then again the French decided to join the two used together to make a W and what's interesting for you is that when you think about the pronunciation of this don't think about a consonant think about a vowel okay so you bring your lips forward like a kiss and you go oh I think for me the the final interesting thing about the difference between Old English pronunciation and modern English pronunciation is that in Old English there was no silent consonants and I know it's very frustrating when you see a word like this and the K is silent and the G is silent and the H is silent or if you see a word like this and the B is silent or if you see a word like this and in British English they don't pronounce the R well in Old English they did the pronunciation of this would have been connected and the pronunciation of this would have been dumped and the pronunciation of this would be car so in reality the American pronunciation of this word is more English than the English pronunciation I can I can totally understand that it's really frustrating when you see a word like this and you don't pronounce the consonants but unfortunately people were writing down English just when English was changing the most and that's why we have all of these problems well I really hope that this class helped you to understand why sometimes the pronunciation doesn't correspond to to the writing and I hope that this class has helped you to to understand how to pronounce words better by thinking about the origin of the spelling of these words in in Old English if you would like to see any more videos about the English language grammar vocabulary pronunciation etc then don't forget to subscribe I'm Christian this is kangaroo English I'll see you in class [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 44,277

Keywords: canguro, learning english, learn english, english grammar, grammar, english pronunciation, improve pronunciation

Id: PDkL0PGhlFY

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 13 2017