Improve Your Spoken English With This Sentence | RP British English Lesson

hello everybody this is elliott from etj english and today we have a classic etj english lesson is a classic because we're talking about phrasal verbs expressions and we're combining those with pronunciation amazing so today we're looking at this sentence my friend gave me a lift yesterday he picked me up at the train station and dropped me off at the airport because i needed to catch a flight so why this sentence well number one it has a few phrasal verbs in it and phrasal verbs are an amazing way of sounding more like a native two because any sentence can actually help you with your intonation and we're going to talk a little bit about that today we're also going to learn about some connected speech how we can link our words together but most importantly this lesson like a previous lesson i've done before should teach you that you can take any sentence as long as it's a decent length and you can make it into a pronunciation learning experience just a simple sentence out of a book you can learn so much from just that one sentence i practice this with my students who've joined my course all the time and it's an extremely effective technique for both learning expressions and phrasal verbs and of course improving that pronunciation at the same time so firstly let's take a look at the the phrasal verbs in here we have gave or give me a lift now to lift something usually means to carry to pick something up and carry it somewhere right a lift can also be an elevator it's the british way of saying an elevator or something that we stand in that takes us up to another floor right but also someone can give you a lift now if someone gives you a lift that simply means they are carrying you in their vehicle or on their vehicle if it's a bike to a place that you need to go so they are transporting you so for example if i said to my friend can you give me a lift that would simply mean can you take me somewhere in your vehicle or on your vehicle when we more often say this than say for example can you take me here please can you give me a lift is a bit more friendly a bit more natural and it's really really common so if someone was giving me a lift they would first need to pick me up this is where we come to our next phrasal verb to be picked up of course again just like lifting something we can pick up something for example this pencil is on my table i'm going to pick it up okay but also someone could pick me up again they could lift me carry me like i just carried that pencil but also to pick someone up could mean to collect them so for example if i'm giving someone a lift i would first need to pick them up meaning drive to their place their location to get them in my car so i can then take them where they need to go which leads me on to the next one which is to drop someone off if i'm dropping someone off that would be when we arrive at their destination and they leave my vehicle okay so someone's going to give me a lift but to give me that lift they need to pick me up and then when we arrive at our location they are then going to drop me off outside or wherever and then finally to catch something now you can catch a cold meaning to get sick you can catch a ball uh when somebody throws it at you you can catch many things physically as well but if i'm going to catch a flight catch a train catch a bus that simply means to use or yeah use the transport okay so i'm going to catch a bus that means i'm going to get on i'm going to use the bus so let's start at the beginning of the sentence my friend gave me a lift yesterday so my friend gave me a lift yesterday me and uh me ends with a vowel uh is a schwa sound okay it begins or it is a vowel now if we have a word which finishes with an e which is a smiling vowel and a word which begins with a vowel we're going to use a consonant and the consonant we're going to use is a yeah sound to join them together so it becomes my friend gave me a lift a bit like the name mia mia mia my friend gave me a lift yesterday let's also talk about the pronunciation of yesterday i hear so many students pronounce the word yesterday wrong whether they're pronouncing the r and they're saying yesterday or there are many different ways yesterday yesterday yesterday my friend gave me a lift yesterday next part of the sentence he picked me up from the train station he picked me up it's happening again me yup so we're doing what we call intrusive sounds again the sound is appearing he picked me up from the train station listen to the word from from the train station it we're not saying from the train station we're actually saying from the train station so the word from is being pronounced as kind of like from from from the train station the reason why is because the word from is really not very important in this sentence and there are some of these words which we call function words they're words which can have a weak form because they're not very important in a sentence so in this case the word from is becoming from because we want to say it fast to keep the rhythm and to get the stressed words faster in other words this happens with a words like two becoming t four becoming it happens a lot and we use the schwa sound mostly to kind of reduce these words into a weaker form he picked me up from the train station train station great way to practice the a diphthong a train station and of course station finishes with a schwarz down sound station station okay so he picks me up from the train station from the train station if you're having difficulty getting to the the from the then there's a little tip i taught previously in one of my lessons when we're pronouncing the th sound really fast sometimes we can just quickly tap the back of the teeth so from the train station from the train station i'm actually very quickly tapping the back of my teeth i'm not completely pushing my tongue between my teeth for that th sound and that is something which natives do sometimes next part of the sentence and dropped me off at the airport and drops me off again me off at or if you want to sound more native at where we drop the t v at the and the reason we're saying v and not the is because airport begins with a vowel sound or a diphthong sound which is still a vowel and that means we're going to be again pronouncing the as the because that's what we do when the next word begins with a vowel we pronounce the as the so it's the airport now we're linking again the the airport we're producing a sound airport begins with the air diphthong er er now try it all together the airport the airport is quite a difficult one again the word and at the beginning of this sentence i could say and dropped me off and dropped me off instead of saying and dropped me off the reason why is because and again not very important in this sentence we could class it as a function word so we can drop most of the word and pronounce it as a kind of un sound and dropped me off instead of and dropped me off because there's too much going on there final part of the sentence because i needed to catch a flight because i needed to catch a flight now because i so now we have a different situation this is called linking what we were previously doing with miya was intrusive sounds where we create an intrusive sound but here we're doing what we call linking and this is when we have a word which finishes with a consonant sound and the next word begins with a vowel sound so we have because which ends with a z and i which begins with a vowel so we're actually going to use the z at the end of because to join to the i because i because i needed to catch a flight again two is a function word so we're pronouncing it as t to catch a flight to capture flight again catcher catcher so the word catch is joining with uh because it ends with a consonant and it be the next word is a vowel capture flight now finally let's join the whole sentence together and i want you to mimic my intonation listen to my intonation and copy me pause it if you need to okay i'm going to read it off my screen because it's like i have a really bad memory okay my friend gave me a lift yesterday he picked me up from the train station and dropped me off at the airport because i needed to catch a flight so my intonation let's just briefly go over intonation it's a very complex topic and again you can learn real details about this in my course but just to give you a vague idea when we finish speaking we take the tone down that's the most important thing to know it's how our listener knows that we've finished speaking so at the very end of this sentence because i needed to catch a flight catch a flight we're going down at the end because we want to show that listener that we've finished speaking remember that the stressed words so the words which you think sound important in this sentence we're going to raise the tone now when we stress this is something you really need to understand tone is more important in stress than saying the word louder or saying it more aggressively or making it longer the most important part of stress is just raising the tone slightly on the stressed syllable of the stressed word just giving it a bit more of an emphasis really important to do that so for example my friend gave me a lift my friend gave me a lift i'm not really saying friend and lift louder or anything i'm actually just raising my tone and i'm making the words just just a bit stronger really that's all i'm doing there's no need to say it aggressively just to make the stress hurt okay and the thing which makes the stress and the tone all come together is those function words making words weak when they're not important saying them nice and fast so that we can get to the stressed words faster as i said i could give you a massive intonation lesson on all of this but intonation is a very very complicated topic and everybody has a different tone i'd have to work with you directly if you need help with intonation this is why i offer a whatsapp or wechat service when people join my course it comes with the course people are able to send me voice messages whenever they want and i give them feedback on how they're doing in the course their pronunciation the vowels the consonants everything and also tell them what's going right and wrong with their intonation and how they can improve it so as well as it being an online course it's also constant contact with me a professional teacher and accent coach so if you do want to join you can just press the link below and see more information about the course i'd love to help you i really hope this lesson helped you today it really does show you how one sentence or one kind of big little piece of speech big slash little piece of speech big little that doesn't really make sense um it's amazing how this can help you with seeing how much is in the language connected speech weak forms so i really hope this lesson helped you today and i look forward to reading your comments below please give me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video and i will see you next time cheers guys bye [Music] you

Channel: ETJ English

Views: 553,108

Keywords: british english, british pronunciation, british accent, etj english, etj, improve accent, intonation, connected speech, diphthongs

Id: WY_y4Ysc8Zo

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2019