How should my English sound - Lesson 4

Plane - Plan: Learning the /eɪ/ and the /æ/ sounds.

When we say the letters of the alphabet the letter A has the long vowel sound /eɪ/, we say this sound when we pronounce the word 'plane'. But A can also be pronounced as the short vowel /æ/, as in the word 'plan'.

Let's compare the sound /eɪ/ with other sounds and realise the differences:
meat - mate - met
come - came - calm
white - wait - wet

In spelling: We frequently have /eɪ/ with the following letter combinations:
1. a-consonant-e: mate
2. ey: grey
3. ai - wait
4. ea - great

Now let's compare the sound /æ/ with other sounds.
mud - mad - made
sing - sang - sung
pen - pan - pain

In spelling: We frequently have /æ/ with the following letter combinations:
1. a-consonant: cat (But if there is an 'R' after 'A' and this 'R' has no vowel sound after it, the sound of this 'A' will be /ɑː/)

Important observation: In most English accents, these words have the vowel /æ/: ask, dance, task, castle, bath, fast among others, but in South East England, speakers replace the sound /æ/ to /ɑː/.

Exercise:

1. These words all have the vowel sound /æ/. Change them to /eɪ/ using the same consonants.

1. at
2. mad
3. man
4. pan
5. tap
6. ran
7. hat
8. plan

2.  Listen and decide which vowel sound is different.

a. sad - mad- fade - jab
b. far - fat - fag - bag
c. watch - catch - patch - land
d. rain - said - maid- paid
e. case -name - care - fake
f. break - great - heat - weight

Bibliography: HANKOK, Mark. English Pronunciation in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

he answers to the questions may be sent to:
e-mail: eng.4.today@gmail.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/eng4today
Facebook: www.facebook.com/eng4today
All the answers will commented by the teacher and sent back by email.
Please comment and give suggestion about the lessons and the programme.
This blog is a non commercial, non profit educational website.

English for Today by Nimlot Logan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

How should my English sound? Lesson 3

How should my English sound? Lesson 3

Pardon me? Could you say that again? - Understanding conversation

Let's check this conversation:

A: I've just got this one bag.

B: Wow! Do you always travel so light?

A: Yeah. I can't stand the wait, you know at the airport...

B: Yeah. I know. My bag's really heavy. But it's got wheels, so I don't have to carry it.

A: No, I mean the waiting, you know, waiting for your cases to come out on the belt.

It seems we have a little misunderstanding here. What is the cause of it?

Though the speaker may pronounce the words clearly when they speak there can be a misunderstanding if in the context there are words with the same pronunciation.

Another good example is when you ask a Londoner the time and he answers: It's 'free' forty-four. In this case we can understand that 'free' actually is 'three' from the context.

Look at this video: Can you get all the misunderstandings in the video? Sometimes it's difficult to understand what people say due to their accent.

Exercise:

In each of the sentences below there is one word misspelt because it reproduces a different kind of accent. Guess from the context which word is wrong.

1. She is a very famous rider of romantic novels.
2. I read about it in the noos paper.
3. She went to the casualty because she suffered a art attack.
4. We watched the film and den we went to bed.
5. We want to tank you.
6. With a bit of look we can win the game.

Bibliography: HANKOK, Mark. English Pronunciation in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

he answers to the questions may be sent to:
e-mail: eng.4.today@gmail.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/eng4today
Facebook: www.facebook.com/eng4today
All the answers will commented by the teacher and sent back by email.
Please comment and give suggestion about the lessons and the prgramme.
This blog is a non commercial, non profit educational website.

English for Today by Nimlot Logan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

How should my English sound? Lesson 2

How my English should sound? Lesson 2

Eye, my, mine – Introducing syllables.

We can divide a word in one or more syllables. For example 'mum' has only one syllable, 'mother' has two syllables and 'grandmother' has three. A syllable is a group of one or more sounds. The essential part of a syllable is the vowel (V). Some syllables are just one vowel sounds as in eye /aɪ/ and owe /əʊ/.

Syllables can have consonant sounds (C) before the V (CV), after the V (VC) and before and after the V (CVC). Here are some examples. All the words has only one syllable.

CV – go /gəʊ/; my /maɪ/; know /nəʊ/; weigh /weɪ/.

VC – if /ɪf/; egg /eg/; ice /aɪs/; eight /eɪt/.

CVC – ten /ten/; nose/nəʊz/; mouse /maʊs/; knife /naɪf/.

Remember! Letters are not the same as sounds. For example the consonant letters 'w' and 'y' are not consonant sounds if the come after the vowel in words like 'law' /lɔː/ and 'pay' /peɪ/. They are part of the vowel sound, that is, 'aw' = /ɔː/ and 'ay' = /eɪ/. It can also happen in some southern English accents with the letter 'r', for example: car /kɑː/, hair /heə/ and poor /pɔː/.

It is common to call syllable the number of parts in a written word. In phonetics, syllable is the number of times we need to emit a sound to pronounce a word. For example we can divide the word chocolate as cho-co-late, but when we say it, we only pronounce two syllables /ˈtʃɒk.lət/. The dot shows the syllabic division. Here are some other examples. Some words may be pronounced with fewer syllables than in writing: different /dɪf.ər.ənt ; comfortable /kʌm .fə.tə.bl/; interesting /ɪn.trəs.tɪŋ/; *secretary /ˈsek.rə.tri/. (* In American English this word is pronounced /ˈsek.rə.ter.i/).

The first syllable in these words has the same sounds, but in the opposite order: chicken /ˈtʃɪk.ɪn/; kitchen /ˈkɪtʃ.ən/. When we build a sentence with similar words like these, it may be difficult to say. It is called 'tongue-twisters' like in: Richard checked the chicken in the kitchen.

Now it's time to exercise:

1. Organise the words according to the groups below:
   
   aunt, cook, dad, doctor, grandfather, officer, passenger, sister, teacher, uncle
   
   1 syllable:
   2 syllables:
   3 syllables:
   
   
2. The spelling changes if you change the order of sounds in these one-syllable words from CV to VC.
   a) /lɔː/ /ɔːl/
   b) /deɪ/ /eɪd/
   c) /nəʊ/ /əʊn/
   d) /peɪ/ /eɪp/
   e) /tiː/ /iːt/
   f) /meɪ/ /eɪm/

Bibliography: HANKOK, Mark. English Pronunciation in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

The answers to the questions may be sent to:
e-mail: eng.4.today@gmail.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/eng4today
Facebook: www.facebook.com/eng4today
All the answers will commented by the teacher and sent back by email.
Please comment and give suggestion about the lessons and the prgramme.
This blog is a non commercial, non profit educational website.

English for Today by Nimlot Logan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

How should my English sound? Lesson 1

How my English should sound? Lesson 1

Part 1: Introduction to letters and sounds.

In writing words are made of letters. In speaking words are made of sounds. But letters are not always the same as sounds. For example the words 'car' and 'key' begin with the same sound /k/, but they are spelt different. If we see them in using phonemic symbols, that are a kind of special alphabet for writing sounds, they would be /kɑː/ and /kiː/.

The following group of words have use different letters (spelling) but they have the same sound.

Buy – Bye
Week – Weak
Two – To – Too
Sun – Son
Weigh – Way
Write – Write

The modern English alphabet consists of 26 letters. In this alphabet we can find vowels (a,e,i,o and u) and consonants (b,c,d,f,g,h,j,k,l,m,n,p,q,r,s,t,v,w,x,y and z) and we use all of them to write any word in English. If we consider speaking, we also have vowel sounds and consonant sounds. The number of spelling consonants and vowels are not always the same number of phonetic consonants and vowels. A good example is the word 'calf': It is composed of 4 consonant and 1 vowel in spelling, but it has only 3 sounds – a consonant, a vowel and a consonant (CVC). If we compare the spelling with the sound we'll have: calf – /kɑːf/.

Let's practise a little bit:
1 – How many sounds are there in each word? Remember that in English the number of letter is not always the number of sounds.
1. dog
2. rabbit
3. frog
4. gorilla
5. snake
6. bee

2 – Now let's analyse the sounds according to the rhymes. Do they have the same first sounds? Do they rhyme? A rhyme happens when we group two or more words together and they have similar sounds. It is widely used to create, for example, cartoon names.

1. Phil the fox
2. Mary the canary
3. Ida the spider
4. Claire the bear
5. Polly the parrot
6. Deborah the zebra
7. Myrtle the turtle
8. Kitty the cat

Bibliography: HANKOK, Mark. English Pronunciation in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

This blog is a non commercial, non profit educational website.


English for Today by Nimlot Logan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.