The TOEFL Speaking Ultimate Guide to Pronunciation

hello everybody my name is jay i'm one of the expert toefl teachers here at e2 language and i'm joined today by amber from e2 school who is a pronunciation expert and she's going to help you with your toefl speaking scores and how are you going to do that amber well i'm going to teach you along with joe together we're going to teach you the different pronunciation rules so pronunciation is made up of a number of different rules covering various areas some of which are included in the toefl criteria so some of the main ones to consider are things like pronunciation of individual sounds how accurately you can do that also things to consider like intonation the way you make your voice go up and down and when we look at different aspects of pronunciation including fluency stress and rhythm along with intonation and accuracy all of these combine to ensure that you are intelligible now this simply means that you're clear and easy to understand yes yes yes that's what it's all about all right cool let's get started and dig into all of these ingredients of english pronunciation and fluency so in today's lesson we're going to look at sounds fluency intonation word stress and rhythm all the ingredients of english pronunciation let's first look at sounds so amber if i look at a piece of english writing like text on a piece of paper now the relationship between what is written and how we actually say it is really quite different right it's profoundly different because english is not a phonetic language which means that exactly as you said the way we write it is very different from how we say it that's frustrating yep but worry not we're here to tell you how to unpack and find out the difference okay take a look at this weird word here what do you think this word actually says well if i apply the most common rules i'm going to say goatee goatee no it's not goatee at all in fact let's take a closer look we could have fur as in cough right so the gh actually says what english spelling and pronunciation is crazy we can have e as in women and that's an o so that's weird and we have shi as in nation nation so this actually means fish cool all right so we can see that english spelling can be really really different from how we say it and it all comes down to the alphabet right so we've got well how many letters are there in the alphabet oh god i think there's 24. two more 26. i knew that magic yeah so from a to z the alphabet that we learn to write with all of us learn this but what is often not taught is the sound alphabet so we've got 26 written letters we've got five vowels a e e i o and u only five that's good to know but well i'm sorry to break the bad news we've got a whole lot more english in fact has 20 spoken vowels but why do they tell us in writing that there are only five vowels it's a lie but the good news is that with consonants there's less of a big difference okay so in the written alphabet we've got 21 consonants in the spoken or speech alphabet we've got 24. so just three more so there's so there's more sounds than there are letters precisely and that's the key point to take away from this okay so what are we looking at here amber well this is going to be your best friend in terms of pronunciation so we call this the phonemic chart and what you can see here is some words and then also some symbols as well now some of these symbols you might recognize they might look a little bit like the alphabet others look like a completely foreign language now don't worry you don't need to memorize any of these symbols but it is just helpful to understand what they are okay right so these symbols are the different sound symbols that we use so you can see in the top left corner we've got the symbol e as in the word sheep beautiful to the right we've got the short vowel e as in ship lovely and then we continue down let's look at the bottom right hand corner we've got this symbol now this is the sound ow ow right as in now how and so on so it's just helpful these symbols will be in any dictionary that you use so it's good to know what they represent and what they mean okay so with vowels we have three different varieties right ah indeed quite so so we've got short ones like e we've got long ones like e and then we've got those combined ones like ow exactly these just as you you said the combined vowels are two vowels that we join together so for example if we take e and uh they're two short vowels e as in as in teacher and we kind of join them together eat uh gotcha so when you're thinking about the difference between a vowel and a consonant it is as follows as far as i'm concerned please correct me if i'm wrong of course but a vowel is a sound that you make where you do not use your teeth your tongue your lips the roof of your mouth the throat or any other part of your anatomy or mouth so ah it's just coming straight from i don't know where it's coming from actually from our lungs from our lungs up throughout our mouth wonderful now a consonant conversely is where we make a sound however we are using out our teeth tongue lips mouth something like that right exactly exactly anything that blocks or interrupts the flow of air right so that's the difference between a vowel and a consonant you can tell all your friends now so everybody what we can see here it's very similar to the vowel chart we saw a second ago here we have the consonant symbols in the phonemic chart and under them we have the words they represent so the wonderful news for consonants is that most of the time they're exactly the same well they look exactly the same right so for example the p sound looks the same as the letter p uh same with d looks like the letter d but there are a couple of ones here that will look a bit different for example which is in the middle of the chart in the top row and it's pair j then in the second row we've also got and the as in think and they and these might be symbols that you haven't seen before but once again you don't need to learn these off by heart it's just helpful to understand the sound they represent if you see them in a dictionary or want to check i think it's also good to know that it's finite there are only a set number there aren't more it's not infinite right so you just have to learn the 44 sounds right the vowels and the consonants and we'll get to consonant clusters coming up where there are actually a lot more but it's good to know that it's finite exactly okay everyone if you want help with your pronunciation don't forget to click on the description below and download the ultimate english pronunciation guide it's free it includes everything that we're going to learn in this lesson and it will help you enormously to sound clearer okay so with these consonant sounds like p and b for example [Music] there's really very little difference that's exactly right and this is actually some more good news when it comes to pronunciation 16 of the sounds turn into eight pairs yes so these sounds that you're talking about per and for example everything in my mouth is doing the same thing it's staying the same the only difference is what's happening in our throats uh-huh is this is this what's called voiced and unvoiced you're onto it that's exactly right so there are two types of consonant sounds in english right unvoiced and voiced now unvoiced means that we are not vibrating our vocal chords but voiced we are so a little tip on how to tell the difference if we take per and take your hand put it over your throat and say these two sounds now with this first sound you shouldn't really feel anything under your fingertips but with the second you should feel some vibration okay so let's put it into a word so if i say pig versus big pig big pig so it feels like pig is at the front of my mouth and it feels like big is at the or almost in my throat exactly because that's the key difference between the two sounds we're turning on our voice sometimes it's helpful to think of your voice like a light switch you turn it on or you turn it off now this can take a little bit of practice if in your first language you don't commonly do this with unvoiced and voiced pairs but with a bit of practice and knowing this tip about using your hand to check if your vocal cords are vibrating you'll be a natural in no time let's do it let's look at some examples so let's go through the phonemic chart and we're going to show you the different pairs so there are eight pairs so this means you only need to learn eight mouth positions rather than 16. great so the first two per and all right so what we can see here on screen is a diagram of the mouse and what the lips are doing for the pair sounds of per and b so jay can you do the honours can you read through the words with per in them i can i can say pie apple shepherd and pepper magic now what can you see that's different about the spelling of the sound well okay so i can see p for put that's cool that's what they teach me in primary school thanks teacher however i see shepard has a ph sound a ph spelling but a p sound exactly so sometimes the way it's spelt you won't say all the sounds that you see so in this case the sound per can be represented by the letters p and h but the h is silent i can also see double p there as well exactly that's another example so you don't say app pull or pep per it's just the one sound pepper pepper exactly got it what about the voiced sound here so now we want to turn on our throats and we're going to say b rabbit raspberry and bhutan so again we've got some tricky silent letters the p in raspberry is silent there's no p sound so you don't say rasp berry right it's just raspberry okay got it okay so that's voice b rabbit raspberry and bhutan cool so we've looked at per and ba in a little bit of detail just so you can help remember the different pairs let's go through them now on screen so we've got to oh can you stop here this is a really interesting one because we have lots of indian students and it seems to me that if you are a speaker of an indian language like telugu or kannada or malayalam or hindi there seems to be a difficulty with the t sound and that the d sound seems to be very common exactly and this is because for many indian languages we have a similar sound to the english and but we call it a retroflex sound which means that the top of the tongue is curled back over like whereas in english we don't curl the tongue we just want it tapping the top of the roof of the mouth it's so weird yeah and like tiny little differences make a huge impact with pronunciation that sounds like a real indian sound mindset doesn't it exactly but but in english we have a lot of t t sounds that's very true but i think the comforting thing is that your tongue can be trained to learn any sound in any language you take a baby you put it in a country and it will grow up learning to say those sounds nice you took that same baby put it in a different country what if the baby's 35 years old you can still learn it might take a little bit longer a little bit of practice but it is possible cool so let's take a look at the other pairs we've got ch for and finally [Music] i have to say some of those sounds are very similar like they're almost identical but for me as an english native speaker right i can hear a big difference if somebody makes a mistake or doesn't say it clearly most definitely so to a learner of english or student of english it can feel like the difference is tiny but you know when you grow up speaking english and learning english your ear becomes attuned to these differences and they sound really big to us i think a good analogy would be like somebody who plays guitar and somebody who's playing in tune right and you're like wow that sounds perfect that's amazing versus somebody who plays it and you're like oh it's not quite right there's something a little bit wrong there you hear that note out of tune and you notice it instantly nice doesn't mean the music can't still be enjoyable if you make a little pronunciation mistake here and there but you know for the purpose of practice it's good to fine-tune and try and be as accurate as possible yeah especially if you're taking an english test tests yes yeah very important for tests okay so let's play a little game these are the unvoiced sounds which are pe and we have voiced sounds here and what i want you to do is to match the unvoiced sound with the voiced sound to make a little pair you have 10 seconds all right let's go through the answers now so the pairs are put [Music] tiny little differences but they make a big difference in the end definitely jay what's wrong well i speak just imagine this i speak portuguese brazilian portuguese and this is very confusing because there's so many sounds and i don't know which sounds i have in my first language versus what sounds are in english what am i to do well worry not we've done the hard work for you yes so part of our pronunciation course involves creating a plan of which sounds will be especially helpful for you to practice as a learner of the english sounds so let's take that example you speak portuguese yes let me show you what your plan would look like cool now for this example we're going to focus specifically on brazilian portuguese as the portuguese spoken in portugal has slightly different rules right but if you're watching this at home and you speak another language just hold on because what we're going to talk about is relevant for you as well even though you may not speak brazilian portuguese but keep watching okay so if we compare english with portuguese you'll notice that we're looking at the vowels and the consonants so english on the left has actually got more vowels and more consonants so if you're a speaker of brazilian portuguese this means you're going to need to learn some new sounds right entirely new sounds this this means that they're going to have to learn a new way to move their mouth and to make an earth well maybe not quite like that but you're on the right track right so let's take a look at the phonemic chart again but designed for portuguese and english so these vowels that you see here these are the same in brazilian portuguese so the good news is you don't need to learn them you already know them and no matter what first language you speak there will be some overlapping sounds right okay so for example in the bottom right hand corner we've got the portuguese word mao which means bad but that's exactly the same vowel sound as in english identical sounds identical sounds cool that's easy now we're going to look at sounds that are not identical but they're similar okay so this means your tongue is already doing almost the right thing it just needs a few tiny little changes and do you think uh this is the reason why some people have accents yes exactly because you apply the pronunciation rules from your first language to your second third or fourth languages okay that's why we hear accents uh interesting now are accents a big problem let me just talk about tests for a minute here now accents are not an issue you are allowed to have your brazilian portuguese accent or your hindi accent or whatever accent you have everybody's got an accent okay the problem is when your accent is thick and it actually the sound you're making then is sort of incorrect you might be making a v what mistake or mistake exactly so i think by no means do we want to discourage anybody from embracing and celebrating your accent it's a sign of where you'll come from and yes your journey to learning english yes but being able to pronounce the correct sounds is really important to ensure that your language is clear yes and easy to understand nice oh my god so what are these red ones this doesn't look good amber well the good news is there are only four of these red ones but you're right these vowels you're gonna have to learn because portuguese doesn't have these four okay but over on e2 school with our pronunciation course we have a lesson for each of these sounds and lots of practice activities so how do i get to this e2 school website to take the pronunciation course which must be amazing oh well it's quite simple you just head on over to www.e2 and sign up for free perfect what you can see here is the table of consonants that are the same in portuguese right and then you can see here the similar ones okay and finally four that you will need to learn and practice so this means portuguese speakers will struggle to say horse as in her as in horse right exactly exactly and this doesn't necessarily mean that the sound does not exist in portuguese it just means that it's very different for example the english r sound as in read is very different from the portuguese and now i am not as good as yes as you are the rolled or trilled are very interesting now let's say i speak hindi right so the same thing will apply here that some sounds will be exactly the same some sounds will be similar and some sounds i just won't have and conversely let's say i'm going to learn hindi from english the same thing will happen if i go from english to hindi in hindi they'll be the same sounds they'll be similar sounds and then i'm going to have to learn hindi sounds that i just do not have correct exactly that's it but the good news is that on speaking lab we design a study plan for you so we will give you a roadmap to the sounds that are the same similar and different great so i don't have to waste time studying sounds that i already know and the other thing that we're going to do if you're watching this on youtube you should click the subscribe button because we're going to release videos and all different first languages cool here very exciting okay so what are some other ways to practice all of these different sounds in english well there are actually some really fun ways to do it because learning pronunciation can be a lot of fun yeah so one of the best ways is actually through minimal pairs if you think about learning pronunciation like going to the gym this is your weightlifting okay activity i clearly go to the gym well your tongue will be going to the gym by the end of this activity so a minimal pair is when just one sound changes between a pair of words okay so what we have here is bus and buzz so the only difference is we've got two more examples here pence and pens so once again this tiny difference can make a huge difference in terms of meaning pants and pens i tell you what that's a really important one too because in english we have these things called plural nouns right yes so we have apple and apples actually do we say sir what do we say apples depends on the word apples yeah that's the voiced one there oh very interesting but right and you know if you are not saying this sound loud enough it could sound like the singular noun so good pronunciation will improve your grammar as well okay hang on let me get this right so let's say i'm taking an english test and i my pronunciation isn't very good it could affect my grammar score indeed because the examiner may hear you say a word and if you're not pronouncing all the different aspects of the word it sounds like you're not saying them crazy let's keep going all right and then we've got one more minimal pair we've got ice and eyes so this is a great way to practice to really improve your accuracy now another really fun way to practice is what's this called jay tongue twisters i agree these are fun i love these looks all right let me let me have a crack at this one she sell seashells on the seashore faster she sells seashells on the seashore you can do better than that she sells seashells on the seashore it's a marathon right yes but this is a great way once you've been slowly and accurately practicing these sounds to really ramp up and increase the speed because that's going to train you to make these sounds under pressure like in a conversation or like in an exam situation nice and the other thing about pronunciation which we should mention is you mentioned going to the gym before pronunciation is muscular isn't it indeed it builds you know the work builds on top of each other um you know it can be painful at times but it is worth it yeah so when you learn grammar you have to really it's a it's a cognitive mental psychological thing because you're thinking about some abstract conceptual rule but with pronunciation you're actually moving tongues and cheeks and literally a muscle you are building and training your tongue which is a muscle so these tongue twisters are good practice definitely i'm going to show you my favorite one oh wow okay you better do this one now i learnt this tongue twister when i was quite young and i tell you what everybody has a favorite tongue twister that they learn how to do i'm not good at all tongue twisters right but if i say so myself i'm quite good at this one okay let's try i'll do it slowly first of all so you can hear the word so it's betty bought a bit of butter so we're practicing the sound yep okay are you ready go betty put a bit about about the bird was better but i got another bit of butter and mixed it with a bit of butter to make a better banana let me try betty bought a bit of butter but the bitter butter betty bought was bitter so betty bought another bit of butter and mix it with a bitter bit of butter to make a better bit of butter bravo holy moly okay so we just looked at the sounds of english and we found out that there are 44 sounds and we found out that some of these sounds will be in your first language and they'll be exactly the same some will be slightly different and some you're not going to have at all what else did we find out about these sounds well we looked at the relationship between spelling and how the word sounds so the difference there knowing which sounds represent which letters and how you cannot trust english spelling because the relationship between the spelling and the sounds is crazy although you know there's a solution to this oh we have a spelling course on e2 school so this will be your new best friend in terms of spelling isn't that clever what else did we learn we learned about uh voiced and unvoiced that's exactly right so the two types of consonants we turn our voice off for unvoiced per and we turn it on for voiced and we learnt the hand trick so remember unvoiced no vibration voiced you will feel your throat move under your fingers sweet and we also learned that of the 44 sounds we have vowels and of the vowels we have short long and combined and we also have consonants which are sounds that you make that use a piece of your mouth exactly where it blocks or changes the flow of air in some way all right let's move on from sounds and move up to something not necessarily trickier but a little bit higher exactly this so first of all we looked at the pieces of the puzzle right now we're going to start putting them together how exciting so next let's look at consonant clusters what's wrong jay uh what's a consonant cluster now i know that the name sounds a little bit scary but it's actually really simple it just means two or three or sometimes four consonants that are next to each other so no vowels in between them okay all right this sounds cool let's take a look they're a lot of fun so consonant clusters are divided into two groups you have initial clusters which come at the start of a word so we can see here on the left we've got black so we've got the two consonants [Music] blur is a consonant cluster that's precisely correct and the trick with consonant clusters you have to be very careful not to put a vowel in between them so don't say ba you want to join them as close together as you can black uh once upon a time i lived in south korea and the koreans loved to put a vowel between the consonants they would say black indeed this is black this is something that uh japanese speakers of english will do too okay so we can also see here that there are initial consonant clusters that means they come at the start of the word and there's one there that has three consonants spring beautiful spring my favorite season exactly is it nice now when we look at initial clusters there are no four consonant initial clusters in english so that's a relief however there are for the final clusters so let's go through them with final clusters let's look at the two consonant cluster one first so remember these come at the end of a syllable or word mint so sorry exactly precisely now let's amp up the difficulty a little bit we've got benz bends lovely crazy bends this is another example of the difference between the sound and the spelling because the spelling is with the letter s but remember we pronounce this with the z voiced sound gotcha all right now you up for a real challenge oh honestly i speak english as a first language and i find this word hard to pronounce ready me too me too you go first all right six it started off well yeah so here we've got four consonants in a row we've got again six and to make this when you've got your tongue in that position you've got to push it forward for the thu and then back again for the s so this is ballet for the tongue it is this is where the gracefulness of your movements needs to happen sixth sixth crazy all right i like these consonant clusters these look fun what else have we got well there are many consonant cluster groups so we group them by the common sound within them all okay so here we're looking at the s cluster group for initial clusters at the start of a word so let's go through them i'll take you through the different examples so s and k combine to make sk or scary sleep smile sneeze sport star sweet you do the rest screen split spring street square once again here we've got another little difference between the sound and the spelling so s q is represented by s k in the phonetic alphabet ah okay all right cool so what i feel like is happening now ambo is we've gone from those initial single sounds like and now we're putting them together and i feel like we're becoming more and more what's the word clear we're getting clearer precisely it's like building the accuracy up you know you start with accuracy of the individual parts and then you add them together it's like maths you add the pieces together come up with the correct answer all right i have a question for you so there's 44 individual sounds how many consonant clusters are there in english well the figure is 146. but these are divided into different groups so we've got five initial consonant cluster groups and we've got ten of final consonant cluster groups okay and how can i practice these 146 consonant clusters where can i go to learn this head on over to www dot and you can sign up for the speaking lab advanced course this is where you will find our consonant clusters fantastic here is a screenshot of the speaking lab advanced course which will take you through all of the consonant clusters in english and help you to say them perfectly cool i like consonant clusters they're fun you're getting their cert and the pert together or even the spro is there spring springs spring got it there you go oh straw so they're kind of tricky and you probably need to practice them right definitely practice is the key to success when it comes to clusters because you can really have them in all sorts of different combinations plus it's a great way to practice your knowledge of individual consonant sounds too nice nice nice and it's next level but if we really want to go to the next next level we need to talk about fluency indeed now this is truly my favorite aspect of pronunciation because once you have learned these rules these magic keys to pronunciation you are going to see and hear these everywhere in songs on tv on the radio trust me you'll notice them all around you okay let's now talk about fluency all right so there are five ways to improve your fluency okay and we're going to go through them one by one in this next section wait wait wait wait wait what is fluency what does this mean well fluency is how we join sounds together when we speak okay in fact it's one of the key things to sounding natural when you talk nice this is important so the first way and one of the most common ways that we sound more fluent is by linking sounds we also add sounds we delete sounds we change them and we combine them so we're talking here about combining words so imagine this verbal word comes out and we say another word and it's the connection between the two right precisely that's exactly so but there are slight differences in how we do it depending on what sounds you have in this word or that word all right this sounds fun let's take a look let's jump in okay so we're going to start with linking sounds now you may have heard of this rule before when you have a word that ends in a consonant and the next word starts with a vowel sound you link them so for example let's look at these words here we've got three words like which ends in what consonant sound jay cur yes now the next word an starts with the schwa so that's a vowel sound and then its second letter is a consonant again so no and now our third word here starts with a vowel i as in ice so we need to link them here's what it looks like like and nice like a nice like an ice what's like an ice well it'll help more if we put it in a question would you like an ice cream okay so let me get this right we're not saying would you like an ice cream because that would sound like a robot it does sound like a robot when you separate all the words out so so sorry so a native english speaker if they're offering you an ice cream they wouldn't say would you like an ice cream they say would you like like a nice like an ice cream and there's a rule there that you just mentioned like an ice cream that's the rule so you take that first consonant and you push it over to the vowel so an ice becomes a nice a nice okay i scream you scream we scream for ice cream yes so here are some more examples using this first linking rule so my name is nay miss dave my name is dave my name is jay my name is amber another example we've got live in india but we don't want to say those as three separate words we want to link them live in india live in india so it's almost like india starts with india live in india wow and then final one is a question when is it when is it right okay so just quickly this is probably why people find it so difficult to listen and understand native speakers right because what we're doing is we're doing all this crazy stuff with the language and again the relationship between the written english and the spoken english is so different so you probably studied english for ages in high school and you know your vocabulary and your grammar and you go to america or australia and you think what i don't understand anybody it's because we're applying all of these rules exactly and for us the rules are automatic we learn to do them from a young age but you can learn to do them too although it does take a little bit of memory that little bit of awareness and practice at the start to go to hey i need to link here or i need to add a sound here but very soon you'll start to be a natural they'll feel like second nature nice i like that awareness and practice that's the key definitely truly okay so next we're going to look at how to add sounds this is probably my favorite rule it's also one of the most powerful fluency rules cool so let's take a closer look there are four sounds that we add so let's look at the first sound here's the rule when the first word ends in one of these three vowel sounds ooh ow and the next word starts with any vowel doesn't matter can be anything as long as it's a vowel we add the sound so let me give you an example take this adjective blue it ends in blue and the next word is eyes so i could say i have blue eyes but to make it sound far more natural i say blue wise you have blue eyes i have blue y's gotcha and that could be confusing again for listening because you're thinking why are you talking about blue y's right because wise is a noun oh so my goodness wise is an adjective that it is in english i am not very wise you are extremely wise that's why it can be so confusing listening because you think you're somebody's talking about being wise but they're talking about blue eyes because of this little rule exactly crazy stuff let's look at some examples so my cat has blue eyes or we can look at these three here so again she has blue eyes how are you that's one of the most common questions we learned right at the beginning how why you okay so right let me okay so i have been taught since i was five years old to say how are you but that is completely unnatural incorrect yeah the one lovely thing about this though is that often with this rule the words have clues in them if you take a look at the spelling how ends with the letter w even though when we say the word on its own it's just how how but the w reminds us to insert before another word how were you got it same with the example over here throw wet to me throw it to me got it another good one would be something like go away when you join them go away got it go while way very strange so that's rule number one let's look at rule number two for adding sounds so when you have a word that ends in air or or and the next word starts with a vowel we add so let's look at this example we have the continent asia ends in the schwa and the next word could be and when we put them together in a sentence we say asia rand europe our continents asia rand not asia and europe right asia and europe huh there you go asia rand that's it ready for rule number three please jump on in so this time if the first word ends in e e a i or oy and the next word starts again with any vowel this time we add the y sound like in the word you [Music] here's an example word on the left says hi i is the vowel i the next word starts with the vowel a altitude i could say high altitude but it would sound far better for me to say high altitudes so we added sound between them it's a soft sound yeah it's quite subtle but it makes a huge difference yeah so some more examples i'm flying at a high altitude and now let's look at examples for all of the vowel sounds that were listed so e as in she she is she is she is happy we've seen the high altitude one already but in a sentence it would be he's at a high altitude oi as in boy a boy yand a girl boy and a girl a as in today today is the 20th and then finally we've got the short vowel e as in taxi the taxi is here so it's a powerful rule and it's a very common rule because these vows are frequently used okay i have a question so it's hard for me to memorize these rules so what should i do because i can't be thinking of these rules while i'm also saying a sentence in a conversation what to do well my tip is to recognize which words this rules applies to because these rules are quite common for example she the subject pronoun she and then the be verb is right you're going to be using that combo of subject pronoun and verb all the time so even though it does take that tiny bit of practice at the start to remember okay she is she is when you learn that rule you memorize it and then you use it often it's going to become automatic nice nice nice and like you said earlier awareness is the first step and then practice so start by listening to songs that have lyrics you know where she is or um a boy and something like that and you almost need to forget the written english right yes and just close your eyes and listen to this listen to what is actually said not what you see is a written form because that's well the relationship's not there exactly yeah so let's finish up with rule number four this one is when you the first word ends in the z sound and the next word starts with yeah so this one's a little bit different this time we add the je sound here's an example where's and the second word you're so separately it's where's your but here we're adding this where's joe oh where's your where does your home work it's jour it sounds french it does jour but indeed in english we've got this inclusion of this sound and it will make a big difference if you use it where's your where's your homework sounds so natural ah nice okay next we're looking at deleting sounds so i do this quite often now in english we tend to delete these three sounds the most right and the tip to remember is that we delete them when they are at the end of a word don't delete them when they're at the start um for and but with her we do want to delete that at the start so just a little difference there but we'll look at some more examples okay so can i try these three yeah go for it so it must be if i say where's your homework and i say well it must be at home it must must be it must be so i don't say it must be and i don't hit the t t sound i say it must be at home miss exactly i suppose a good point to mention is that you certainly can say these sounds if you want to this this fluency rule is a bit more optional fluency rule number one for linking fluency rule number two for adding sounds it's really important that you do those two rules right but this one it can depend on your mood it also depends on your accent um you know for us as native speakers i may do this less with a british accent than an australian speaker might got it and also with social context because if i'm hanging out with my friends versus speaking to the queen which i do all the time naturally yes so hello what about this second one here so you and me you and me you and me you and me sounds a bit weird it does you and me bit odd hey so you'll hear a lot of english speakers doing this often dropping the d in and we also have this with fish and chips instead of fish and chips rock and roll exactly good one now the final one i saw him we could say i saw him but a lot of native speakers will drop the ha and just go i saw him right yep makes sense that sounds natural to me it does so let's look at a couple other examples for each sound have a go at this if you want to pause the video try these out yourself so for two we've got these ones have a go jay ready so uh it must be true it must be true i'll take the first one first one not first one and of course i didn't do it i didn't do it i didn't do it i didn't do it exactly and often with this sometimes you'll almost make half a sound like you wouldn't say i didn't do it like that yeah you're sort of you'll bring your top touch tongue up hug you didn't do it like that instead of it so have a practice see what you enjoy doing but this rule is optional for whatever you feel comfortable with and and again i think the key here is to just listen to what is actually said in english not what is written or probably not what you've been taught did i say unless you study at e2 school indeed one other little tip is that when it comes to deleting sounds as you mentioned earlier when you're talking with friends in an informal context that can be fine but possibly in an exam or if you're talking to the queen you might want to include these sounds more just for accuracy and precision nice so that the examiner knows that you can do them yeah all right let's look at the ones for d so we've got you and me i used to have a car fish and chips and so once again you know how we use sounds in english this is so common that you will see signs spelled like this with just the fish and like that fish and chips nice okay here are the examples for her i saw him i shouldn't have i haven't seen her you'll notice that i've also put the t in a gray color here to show you that you could or choose not to include it so with it included i shouldn't i shouldn't have i haven't seen her but then i can also delete it i shouldn't have i haven't seen her like that got it ready to look at some magic all right i like magic let's do it well i'm not going to pull a rabbit out of a hat but i am going to change some sounds for you cool so here is our first rule when the first word ends in the t sound and the next word starts with a yeah sound for example what and you we change it to what you uh-huh what you're gonna do what you're doing this is a super common rule and one of the most helpful that you're here today here's an example in a restaurant have you decided what you want ah so she doesn't say have you decided what you want she says have you decided what chew what you what you want what she wants what's your what's your what you want beastie boys yes good one all right next rule when the first word ends in d the second again starts with yeah like did you this time we change it to j which we can see here in green this is the j sound like in the word jam so combined it becomes did you did you did you know there's a sale on ah right okay okay let's hit this again so he doesn't say did you because that would be honestly it's just hard to say that it's hard to say deed and you as two separate things they just naturally want to create magic there say did you did you did you exactly and the really cool thing is that these rules evolved from convenience because we were being lazy we didn't want to say did you so the rule came into being because we wanted something easier to say nice did you nothing wrong with being lazy exactly at times at times okay the next changing rule when the first word ends in the s sound and once again the second word starts with a yeah sound for example pass and you're we need to change it to a sh sound so this sound this is the sound you make when you want somebody to be quiet right shh it's kind of a universal sound you've probably heard a teacher do this at some point in the past so this is an easy sound to make passion partial sure so if we look at this in a context hey check the scores did you pass your exam pass sure what's partial it passed and you're but joined together partial partial nice that sounds natural to me me too all right well we're on to the final fluency rule uh-huh how are you feeling not too much information well it is there's a lot here but it's all good i just want to keep learning this stuff and just maintaining my awareness of it because i know that at some point i'll have to practice but so be it let's keep going exactly and i find if you pause this video and you really practice and revise each rule take in a little bit at a time a little bit more knowledge every day it will help feel more manageable cool okay so here's the combination rule this is a lovely easy rule to remember very simple so when a word ends in a consonant and the next word starts with the same consonant the same sound we combine them so for example i love drinking tea so we could have hot and tea but we don't want to say two sounds we want to make it into one so hot tea right hot tea nice and this is definitely another convenience rule here we're being a little bit lazy aren't we absolutely yeah so we could say here's some hot tea hot tea hot tea hot tea hot tea love it now here's the next combining rule when you have a word ending in either da and the next word starts with any one of those same four sounds for example hot dog what we do is we delete the first sound so the sound that is at the end of the first word and then we join them perfect hot dog hot dogs hot dogs yeah so for example you might be at a barbecue one hot dog for you okay but not a hot dog because that would be weird and not a hot og either so let's put all of these rules together that we've been learning now we've got a text up here and it's amazing to see this because you can see how frequently they're used and how all these rules help each other to make you sound more fluent so i'm going to read through this text now for you listen carefully to where i'm using these different rules they're color-coded so check as you listen along doctors are giving new advice for people with coughs they are advising people not to visit a doctor to get treatment instead if you have a cough what you need to do is drink or eat honey or get medicine from a pharmacy did you know that honey has antibacterial properties the doctors say that in most cases honey and over-the-counter medicines will work and people don't need antibiotics they say antibiotics do little to make a cough go away the doctors added that most of the time a cough will improve on its own within two to three weeks even if you take nothing self-care and rest are also important for healing okay oh my god that's amazing all right so in that text there what we're seeing is a written paragraph of text and we're seeing actually how it transforms into spoken english and all of the different fluency rules that are applied there right exactly and they all work together to help anybody speaking sound more natural more fluent more like an english native speaker it's incredible all right so what are the fluency rules again we've got linking yes adding deleting changing and combining perfect and let me show you a quick little review cool so we'll go over it one more time good here are the five ways to improve your fluency with examples you link words together so an egg becomes an egg an egg an egg fine you add extra sounds so for example true or false should be true war false got it true or false number three we often delete sounds used to for example we create new sounds so don't you becomes don't shoot pussycat doll song and then number five you can combine the same sounds so for example social life ends with le starts with love becomes social life i don't know what to say honestly it's incredible it is magic this is pronunciation that's that's it that's what it's all about indeed whoa all right fluency is really cool i like that a lot they are seriously some magical rules that'll help you sound much more natural now don't forget in the description below we have the downloadable free ultimate guide to pronunciation so make sure you get that now amber i have a question for you okay uh do you like sounds consonant clusters or fluency the best first of all that's an impossible question i love them all but do you know what you just did jay what did i do you used some intonation beautifully to ask me actually a list question oh intonation is this another magical rule indeed ready to find out let's do it let's go for it okay so in this section you're going to learn what intonation is so jay tell me do you play a musical instrument uh i play the didgeridoo which probably doesn't count here no it most certainly does it has it goes up and down in its pictures nice yup so if you play a musical instrument you'll recognize this information on screen but even if you don't play one you will have listened to music and you'll know that music has different pictures from low to high so we've got here do re mi fa goes from low up up up up like that and english is exactly the same it has different pictures too okay but we call this intonation right so it's how we move our voice from going from a low pitch to a medium pitch to a high pitch and back down right cool so we use different patterns for different things in english have very specific patterns so let's jump into those first great okay so today we're going to begin with the five different types of question intonation now you know mostly people say oh it's easy when you ask a question you make your voice go up well that is true but not all the time so let's find out when to do it and when not to do that so we're going to start with wh questions so jay what are wh words uh who what when where why in for some reason how i know it's like the imposter isn't it well when you have a question that starts with one of these wh words we use this pattern now notice where the blue dot is in the pattern and then check the questions you'll see part of the sentence or the question in blue so that part corresponds with the dot so it'll make sense when you hear it i i've completely forgotten what's your name jay and there we have the question what's your name so the is the highest part of how i'm lifting my voice what's your name and then i bring it back down what's the departure time what's the departure time beautiful when's dinner right i remember that mom when's dinner i'm hungry and then we've got who is that so sometimes you can make the difference subtle who is that or you can make it even more extreme who is that got it so that is the pattern for wh questions this is another type of question so we call this type repetition or clarification questions basically it's when you ask somebody to say something again or for a second time right so i could be feeling really forgetful today you've told me your name but i missed it so i'll say what was your name again jay got it won't forget this time so with this pattern we start with our voice at a medium level then we bring it down what was what was what was your name again what was that departure time when did you say dinner was nice that's all good who is that again so this is pattern amazing all right now this is the type that you'll probably know the pattern of because it's one of the most common question types it's yes or no questions so what is a yes or no question jay uh it's it's a question that in the answer requires a yes or no answer exactly so let me ask you a question are you hungry yes always am i correct yes and did you get the bus today no so you can see that this patent applies even if the question is short am i correct or if it's a longer question did you get the bus today and you can see here with the green and the blue parts that's where you raise your voice so in the final two syllables uh-huh okay wait so this word hungry has two syllables right exactly hung and gree okay so it goes hung on the first syllable and then greece so it goes up from the first to the second syllable exactly hungry hungry so if i ask you a question but i don't use this intonation pattern i say jay are you hungry what right and you don't know that it's a question that i'm asking yeah it doesn't sound like a question no because our brain hears the pitch as much as it hears the words are you hungry am i correct did you get the bus today i also sound really bored too it sounds boring yeah yeah so make sure you use this pattern for this question type all right so the next question type is either or questions so an either or question is when you give someone two options for example you might be at a restaurant and the waiter says do you want soup or salad would you like tea or coffee your teacher might say do you agree or disagree do you work or are you a student so what happens here is the first part of the sentence we rise we take up would you like to and then the second little bit we bring down or coffee okay so wait let me try let me try would you like tea or coffee magic yeah you've got it cool and now lucky last the final type of question intonation is lists so this is the question you asked me at the start of the section so let's try it again do you want water juice lemonade or cordial all of them all of them and just like the question j asked earlier what was it do you prefer sounds consonant clusters or fluency that's it beautiful intonation pattern again you lift everything and you can do this as long as you want you can have 10 things in the list that's fine you lift lift lift lift lift but the last one you bring down that's the rule got it so amber do you prefer paris london or berlin paris definitely fair enough okay so now we're going to test your memory of the rules that you just learned fantastic you're going to see an activity with patterns on the left and questions on the right your task is to match these patterns with the correct question type we'll give you how long 10 seconds 10 seconds to do it think fast and here are the answers so we begin with the either or pattern for a b is the repetition or clarification c wh question d yes or no question and finally e was our list question now okay know that's a lot of information yes but there is still a bit more to go through come on let's do it next we're going to look at sentence intonation patterns okay so jay do you remember the wh question pattern of course like what's your name beautiful well here it is for reference the good news is that simple sentences follow exactly the same person so let's take a look at some examples i'm from england i have two kids i've just sent you an email my favorite film is titanic oh well oh no hold on hold on so these are not questions these are sentences exactly affirmative sentences correct short simple one clause sentences but they still have intonation like there's still a part of the sentence that rises and then falls exactly that we lift just to give that bit of interest a common mistake that a lot of students make is to make their intonation totally flat right when they're not asking a question but that can be a problem because it can make you sound bored and it can also make you harder to understand because our ears are listening for that little lift or rise and what sorry what is this little lift does it mean i make my sound a little bit louder is it what is it definitely so as you raise the pitch of your voice you go higher you go up but you can also push that sound out a little bit more on the highest note so it's just a smidge louder okay so i'm raising my pitch and maybe making it turning up the volume just a little bit turn that notch up i'm from england nice very subtle you don't want to say i'm from england right or i'm from england but you just want to emphasize it a touch more got it all right now next question jay do you remember the list pattern yes do you like water cheese or cheesecake oh definitely cheesecake well once again here it is for your reference some more excellent news it's the same pattern when we list things in sentences so instead of do you prefer paris london blah blah blah you could say i went to paris london prague and berlin last year berlin last year exactly this one's a bit longer than last year we've added last year another example you want to do the honors yes we've got white wheat sourdough and rye toast lovely so remember the trick is up up up up up and then the final part of your list you pull it down gently okay finally last little bit come on we're going to look at complex sentences cool so this is really handy if you're doing a read aloud task and it's a paragraph for example and the sentences may be complex with clauses in them so if the sentence has two clauses this is the pattern you follow have a listen when you get home give me a call to speak to someone press number four as of the 23rd of june your plan will be active i live at unit 806 at 56 smith street so on all of those little syllables that were blue they were the highest part of my voice right okay these are the rules for the three clause sentences by the way this is really handy for phone numbers too it follows the same pattern so for a three clause sentence when you get home if you have time give me a call for our phone number my number is 0428 345 621 and then last one ready yep i was born on a tuesday 8th of may 1991. lovely although the last one try lifting up that 90 bit higher 1991. magic you've got it now this is to say that often as native speakers we play around with these rules we don't follow them super strictly like just as jaded then and kept the last bit flat that's perfectly fine and you'll hear a lot of native speakers do that too these rules however if you're doing an exam yeah it's good to show that you know them and almost exaggerate them a little bit but in everyday life just a little bit of exaggeration exactly but you know outside of an exam feel free to use them or not as you choose with sentences with questions always use them but with sentences you can be a bit more relaxed yep okay so did you learn something new there hopefully you learned how to use intonation really nicely because intonation's fun isn't it it's a lot of fun it's almost like singing yeah pronunciation singing yeah it adds a lot of meaning to the things that you say which is very helpful but what we're going to talk about now is going to be really really relevant for some people and still of interest to other people and the thing is we're talking about is word stress exactly right the reason why i say it's going to be particularly relevant for some people is because you simply will not have it in your first language correct right but other languages will that's that's very true and english is one of them so let's find out cool so let's talk about word stress well first of all what is word stress well every word in english consists of one or more syllables so for example medication has four syllables now what is a syllable well a syllable is like a beat it's a part of a word so medication we can break it up into four beats here they are separated medication now this is a word with four syllables and the rule is that in words with two or more syllables one syllable in the word is stressed so by stressed we make it stronger or louder or more emphasized exactly so with this word medication it's on the third syllable medication now like jay was saying before it can be quite different in your first language with stress patterns to english so for example if we take a look at tamil in tamil the rule is that you stress the first syllable in a word always so we've got some tamil words here and we're going to listen to a recording of these words all right so could you hear how the speaker was stressing the first syllable well in english we stress different syllables in different words so here are some example stress patterns product so the stresses on the first syllable construct beautiful amazing so these are all different patterns that we use okay so wait let me get this right so we don't just say uh mei zing like equal syllable on sorry equal stress on each syllable we actually take one of the syllables amazing and we make them amazing much more emphasized right exactly right louder and stronger and it changes it could be at the beginning could be in the middle or it could be at the end very true so we're going to look at some examples actually of different placements now terrific so just to have a slightly different topic let's look at some healthcare vocab so here we've got different columns on the left we've got one syllable words so here because it's just one syllable the stress is even it's pill nurse blood but when there are two or more syllables we follow different patterns so let's look at column two we've got doctor pressure patient column three we're reversing the pattern now to the second syllable acute prescribe disease fourth column three syllables allergy hospital ambulance and then fifth column the stress is in the middle allergic reaction discomfort okay can i play a little game here most definitely all right so please have a look at number four here the column number four and what i'm going to do is i'm going to put the wrong emphasis on the i'm going to put emphasis on the wrong syllable so instead of allergy which is correct i could say allergy oh and i say what what are you saying exactly it's almost as if i can't understand allergy what does allergy mean yeah because i've just changed the word stress there slightly right allergy allergy very different sound to my ears exactly i would argue that word stress is perhaps the single biggest barrier to being understood by others yes if you use the wrong stress it's very very difficult yeah that's right uh i was speaking to an indian the other day and he was saying something about something generic right but but he didn't say generic with the j emphasis he said generic generic and for a second i just went what is that what's generic exactly because our brain is so used to hearing the words with the correct stress patterns that anything different feels like whoa what's that yeah exactly so here we've got a quick activity for you to practice have a go at saying this sentence will give you a model to listen to i had an allergic reaction so an ambulance took me to hospital the doctors gave me a pill pause the video have a go so jay you might be wondering or students watching this video how do we learn what stress pattern to use that is the million dollar question really well i will happily take that million dollars because it's got a super easy answer you just use the dictionary they are all in there so here's a little screenshot from an online dictionary and i've done it for the word construct now you can see that there's a tiny little apostrophe here on screen it comes in between the two syllables con struct now the apostrophe always goes before the stressed syllable so if you see an apostrophe before something you need to stress the syllable after it got it okay wait wait wait wait wait so this is construct but and and that's a verb but what about what about a construct indeed and by changing the stress you've just told me a noun a construct so again sometimes the stress can even change the meaning of the word whoa pretty cool now another little tip to know is that american and british varieties of english can have different stress patterns for the same word this doesn't happen very often but it's just handy to know about so for example an american speaker would talk about going to the ballet but me as a british speaker i talk about going to the ballet my very dodgy american accent see if you can do a better job ballet ballet ballet this is ballet ballet yeah there you go so there are a couple of words that this um happens with ceylon and salon another example [Music] now it's not just the stress that we put on individual words it's also how we use it with the sentence so you can see here we've got the word we saw earlier amazing but we can also apply this to a sentence i saw you we found them with four syllables we've got the word education but we can have the sentence mary saw you jay is a teacher wow okay um so to figure out what to put where if the word has two syllables then we place it on the stressed syllable two or more so that's why it's teacher but with the second sentence here i saw you and mary saw you here we're actually stressing the key part of the sentence the meaning the most important meaning word in the sentence yup got it all right so word stress i think is absolutely fantastic sure is but it must be extremely challenging for those people who have a first language that doesn't have word stress uh-huh that's right but you know the good news is that all the rules are in the dictionary to learn and by practice and you know learning the word stress patterns of words that you use often yeah it'll be fine yeah awareness and practice is key plus e2 school indeed all right so we're on to the very last part of our pronunciation lesson today which is rhythm so there are two types of languages in the world we have stress-timed languages and syllable-timed languages right now the easiest way to compare these two is to use a picture or an analogy so stress-time languages think of it like morse code you have long sections and shorter sections i'm guessing that english is going to be like that most definitely in contrast you have other languages syllable time languages which are much more even like a sewing machine or like a train i guess all the parts are evenly spaced in terms of speed got it so you're right english is a stress-timed language this means we say stressed syllables of words at regular intervals like a beat right we're going to practice this in a second cool and we put all of the unstressed syllables we make them shorter we put them in between the beads right this is one of my favorite activities to do all right let's jump into it i'll do the first one you do the second okay great okay so i'm gonna start with this one we're gonna have a beat like this dogs annoy cats the dogs have annoyed the cats the dogs will annoy the cats the dogs have been annoying the cats the dogs could have been annoying the cats so you see what i did there i kept the beets on dogs annoy and cats and i fit in words like the or could have been or the in between the beats i love this this is amazing wait wait wait wait wait have a look at these words that are stressed here so dogs noun annoy verb cat noun yep exactly or subject verb object stress these parts or meaning words yes nouns and verbs which have meaning like dogs annoy these these have pictures in your mind whereas the have the will have been these are meaningless words they're kind of like the glue that stick it together exactly the grammar glue yes but not the contents all right you ready to try one yeah yeah let's do it give you a beat or do you want to do the beat yourself i'll do it okay cats drink milk the cats have drunk the milk the cats will be what the cats will drink the milk you just three feet cats drink milk the cats have drunk the milk the cats will drink the milk the cats have been drinking the milk the cats could have been drinking the milk could have been beautiful it sounds so fluent too amazing emma that was amazing really really amazing okay so i think what we've done in this video is we've got every single rule of english pronunciation and we've probably put everybody to sleep at home hopefully not but truly that is every rule you need to know everything's in there you've just seen everything awesome so as a student if i were you what i would do is download that pdf below which will give you all of these rules and what i would also do is go to www.e2school.com and i would check out our two speaking lab courses which will take you through the sounds and the consonant clusters so you're going to become more confident when speaking english and more accurate clearer greed agreed there's one more thing that i recommend you do that's hit the subscribe button as well we'll be adding plenty more pronunciation videos to our channel in the future emma thank you so much thanks jay [Music] you

Channel: E2 TOEFL

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Id: IF1CGkUcU18

Length: 84min 6sec (5046 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021