Hi! this is Gabe from Fluent-Forever.com
At this point, we’ve gone through all the sounds of American English. If you’re using
one of my pronunciation trainers, it’s going to take you through all of these sounds, train
your ears to hear them more accurately, and teach you the spellings that produce them.
Then it’ll push all of that data into your long term memory.
If you’re not, that’s fine too. I made these videos to give you a passing familiarity
with all the sounds of American English, so that when you study them in depth, they’re
going to feel more familiar. That’ll make them easier to learn.
In either case, I want to talk about English spelling rules before we finish. THis is a
challenging topic, as you might expect. Many of you who have already studied English may
have come to the conclusion that English spelling is
completely unpredictable. Because English words are borrowed from so many other languages,
the spelling can seem totally random.
But that’s not entirely true - if you put completely
fake words in front of English speakers,
like phightation gnomological or radicumolophony - you’ll tend to hear a lot of
agreement on how those words should sound. And since there’s a lot of agreement, it
means that there are natural rules to the spelling system, which native speakers have
internalized.
Many of those rules are just a matter of memorization - the combination PH, for instance is pronounced
“F”, and the combination IGH is typically pronounced “AI”, so if you knew those
two, you’d be comfortable with the beginning of Phightation.
If you were to learn all of the rules, then you’d be in a pretty good position - you
should be able to take a new word and accurately pronounce it around 80-90% of the time. And
in cases where you follow the rules and still mispronounce something, it’s generally going
to be
a small error - you may be using the wrong vowel, for instance, but it’s at least a
vowel that sounds similar to the correct one.
In this video, we’re going to cover a handful of important American English spelling rules
that require just a touch of explanation, rather than just straight memorization. For
the memorization part, I’d suggest using my English trainer - that should get all of
the rules into your head within 2-3 weeks. So let’s get started.
We’ll talk about three topics: How long and short vowels work in English
How C and G work And last,
Word Stress and its relationship to the unaccented “schwa” or “uh” vowel.
We’ll begin with so-called long and short vowels. Many vowels in American English have
one spelling that can produce two different possible sounds.
For instance the spelling A. For American English words, that produces [æ] as in rat
or [eɪ̯] as in rate.
Or the spelling E - that can produce [ɛ] as in pet or [i] as in Pete.
American English tends to classify its vowels into two categories.
There are the so-called short vowels, as in[æ][ɛ][ɪ][ɑ] and [ʌ]
and then there are the so-called long vowels, as in [eɪ̯] [i] [aɪ̯] [oʊ̯] [ʊ̯u]or
[jʊ̯u]
Let’s start by talking about short vowels and how to identify them.
So first off, short vowels are not actually pronounced any shorter.
Back in the year 1400, they were - Middle English spelling made a lot more sense, and
had short vowels, along with long vowels that were mostly just longer versions of those
same short vowels.
But that’s no longer the case, so we unfortunately have a lot more vowels to remember now.
Our next step is to figure out how to identify a short vowel.
There are two scenarios where you’ll encounter short vowels in English.
The first one is whenever you see one of English’s five vowel letters - A E I O or U - followed
by two consonants,
So that gives you RAFFLE HELL CRICKET ROTTEN HUMMINGBIRD. You’ll notice in these examples
that several of them have the same consonant doubled up in the spelling - but do note that
English doesn’t have double consonants - It’s not RAFFFFFLE, HELLLL, ROTTTTTTEN or HUMMMMMMINGBIRD,
but rather RAFFLE HELL ROTTEN HUMMINGBIRD - the only reason you’re seeing two consonants
in a row is to help you recognize that the vowel is going to be one of our five short
vowels.
Moving on to the other scenario in which you’ll encounter short vowels: that’s at the end
of a word, whenever the last letter in a word is a consonant, and the second to last letter
is one of our five vowels.
That shows up in examples like:
BAT WET KIT ROT CUP. And just as an aside, since we have a bunch of words ending in Ts
and Ps - two of our aspirated consonants from video 1 - I wanted to point out that those
aspirated consonants can become a lot less aspirated at the ends of words: While you
CAN say “batʰ” and “cupʰ”, with aspiration, it’s more common to stop that
final consonant before you let the air out, giving you bat and cup.
This is also a decent moment to mention that all aspirated consonants - P, T and K - lose
their aspiration after the consonant “S”, so star, spoon and school all don’t have
any aspiration. Anyway, back to vowels.
At this point, let’s move on to long vowels and how to recognize THEM.
First, just to help you remember which ones are which, with the exception of the [i] vowel,
all of the so-called “long” vowels in English are actually just diphthongs of some
sort. EY, AY, OU and UU or YUU.
Long vowels show up in english when you have one of our five vowel letters followed by
a SINGLE consonant and then another vowel.
So here’s GATOR CENTIPEDE BITE NOTE MUTATION
This happens to be a huge source of silent E’s in English - they help indicate when
you’re looking at a long vowel.
Before we finish this long vowel discussion, I wanted to talk a bit about long U, since
it can sound like UU or YUU. The rule here is that most of the time, it’s
going to sound like “YOU”:
Here’s MUTATION USER cUTE PUKE
But - if the consonant that comes beforehand is made at your alveolar ridge - that ridge
right behind your upper teeth - then long U is just pronounced “UU”. Those alveolar
consonants are ([t], [d], [s], [z], [n], [ɹ], [ɫ]), and they can give you words like
DUDE LUTE NUDE RUDE SUPER
We only have a couple of topics left, and the next one is pretty straightforward: How
to pronounce Hard and Soft C and G. These two consonants have a so called “hard”
pronunciation and a “soft” one, which is an obnoxious concept that we stole from
Latin and French. The Hard pronunciations of C and G are [k]
as in Cow, and [g] as in Gopher
The soft versions of C and G are [s] as in Cell and [dʒ] as in Gel. So how do you figure
out which one to use?
THe spelling rule here is not so difficult.
You’ll use the hard pronunciation [k] or [g], when the next vowel letter is A, O, or
U, giving you words like game, good, cad, cod, and cut
Whereas you’ll use the soft pronunciation [s] or [dʒ], if the next vowel is E, I or
Y giving you words like
Gee, city, gym, age and ice.As with everything in English, there are exceptions to these
rules, but still, these are pretty useful ones to know.
And with that, we’re on to our last topic - Word Stress.In English, word stress is extremely
important - a stressed syllable can entirely change
the meaning of a word; we have, for instance, incense and incense.
The problem is that word stress is also extremely unpredictable in English. There are very few
rules to help you predict word stress patterns, they don’t apply to that many words, and
they generally have exceptions. I’ll give those rules to you, but practically,
for most of the words you encounter, you’re going to have to look stress up.
The main reason I wanted to discuss word stress is to help you know how to pronounce a word
properly once you DO know where the stress goes.
So first let’s chat about what makes a syllable sound stressed in English:
Let’s take a long word like pronunciation . The stressed syllable is
that [eɪ̯] sound towards the end - that’s indicated in the IPA with that little quote-mark
thing before the stressed syllable, eɪ̯.
I’m making that syllable sound stressed by doing several things at once:
First, I’m taking a longer time on that syllable: it’s pronunciation (budumbaduummmdum)
and not pronunciation (badabadaba!)
Second, I’m going up in both pitch and volume. It’s pronunciAtion (budmbaDUMdum), and not
(monotone)pronunciation.
Third, that stressed vowel is going to be very clearly articulated. It’s everything
you’d want out of an [eɪ̯] diphthong.
Last, you may notice that every OTHER, unstressed vowel in the word is a lot less clear. There’s
an [i], for instance, right before that stressed vowel, but it’s not pronuncEEEAYTION - that
/i/ vowel is a lot shorter and less distinct: pronunciation. Same thing with the [ʌ] - it’s
not ProNUUNciation. It’s just pronunciation.
And all the rest of the vowels have all been replaced by English’s standard unstressed
schwa vowel - that uh sound in “about” and “a tree”. When a vowel is completely
unstressed, it will often turn into that short, indistinct “uh” sound, which you get twice
in this word - it’s not Pro-nun-see-ay-shawn, but rather pronunciation.
In terms of rules for word stress, here are the ones I think are useful:
Most 2 syllable words are stressed on the first syllable, giving you words like
RAINY, CARTON, CHINA, INCENSE
Most exceptions to this rule are 2-syllable verbs and prepositions, which are usually
stressed on the last syllable:
RELAX, RECEIVE, BETWEEN, INCENSE
When you have a single spelling that can be either a verb - like inCENSE - or a different
part of speech - for instance, a noun like INcense, then you can be pretty confident
that the VERB form of that word will be stressed on its last syllable, and the other form will
be stressed on its first syllable.
Rules for words with 3 or more syllables start getting really complex - potentially more
complex than just looking up the stress whenever you learn a new, long word.
The only thing I want to make you aware of is that there are a lot of suffixes, or word
endings, that have a predictable pattern - the syllable before any of these suffixes is usually stressed.
The suffix “cian” is one of these, so that gives you musician, physician, clinician.
Same thing with “ible” - giving you Terrible, resistible, impossible. You stress the syllable
right before the suffix. You don’t need to memorize them all, but just keep an eye
out and an ear out for them, and you’ll start to notice those patterns.And with that,
we’ve covered all of the complex rules of English.Everything else is just a matter of
memorizing letter combinations and takes a lot less explanation.
Let’s quickly review and get out of here.
In this video, we discussed 3 groups of spelling rules that required explanation, rather than
just memorization: Long and short vowels, hard and soft C and G, and word stress.
With the long and short vowels, we had 5 vowel letters that could produce 10 or 11 sounds,
so we needed some rules to help us figure out which sounds to use when.
The short vowels were [æ] [ɛ] [ɪ] [ɑ] [ʌ],
and they showed up in two contexts. One, whenever you had one vowel followed by two consonants,
as in RAFFLE HELL CRICKET ROTTEN and HUMMINGBIRD.
And two, whenever you were at the end of a word, and you had one vowel, followed by one
consonant, as in BAT WET KIT ROT and CUP. This was also where we mentioned that the
aspirated consonants P and T usually become a lot less aspirated at the ends of words.
So most speakers say “bat”, rather than “batʰ”
We also took a moment here to mention that all aspirated consonants lose their aspiration
after the consonant S, giving you star, spoon and school, rather than stʰar, spʰoon and
schʰool.
We then discussed the long vowels, [eɪ̯] [i] [aɪ̯] [oʊ̯] [ʊ̯u]/[jʊ̯u]
Which typically showed up when you had a vowel, followed by a single consonant and then another
vowel, as in GATOR CENTIPEDE BITE NOTE and MUTATION
We also briefly discussed the long vowel [jʊ̯u] or [ʊ̯u], which is usually pronounced [jʊ̯u]
- with that [j] sound.as in mutation or user
But, when it comes after a consonant made at the alveolar ridge - that ridge behind
your upper teeth, then it’s pronounced [ʊ̯u], as in dude, lute, nude, rude and super.
We then talked about C and G, which are pronounced hard - [k] or [g] - when the next vowel is
A, O or U, as in game, cod or cut
And they’re pronounced soft - [s] or [dʒ], if the next vowel is E, I or Y giving you
words like
Gee, city, or gym. Finally, we talked about word stress, which
had 4 important components You made the stressed syllable longer, and
you went up in both pitch and volume, giving you pronunciation, and not pronunciation (monotone).
And you made the stressed vowel clear, while the other vowels became less clear, giving
you “pronunciation”, rather than “PRO-NUN-CEE-A-TIUN”. Finally, we covered a few rules that might
be useful if you want to predict where the word stress is going to be in a new word.
To begin, most two-syllable words are stressed on the first syllable, giving you rainy, carton
and incense. And most exceptions to this rule are verbs
and prepositions, which tend to stress the last syllable, as in relax, between and incense.
And if you’re looking at longer words, the only rule I’d pay attention to is the idea
that suffixes, or word endings, can have some predictable patterns. For many words, the
syllable before certain common suffixes is stressed, giving you words like musician,
physician and clinician. Or terrible, resistible, and impossible.
And with that, we’ve finished our series on American English pronunciation.
If you need a hand in memorizing all of this and training your ears to hear it, then grab
an American English trainer from my website, linked below. You’ll have all of this memorized
within a couple of weeks. See you next time