Today we are going to look again at some of your comments.
on pronunciation and phonetics.
Jap says: What's the difference in pronunciation between "or" and "of"?
According to phonetics it is written with different symbols
but the vowel sound is the same in both. I'm confused please help.
Manor says: Oh, I get it. It is simple, the letter /j/ represents "y" sound like Yet,
Yesterday and YouTube and the /ʤ/ represents the j sound like Jug and Gin. Am I right?
Darth Says: English Language Club.
Is /ə/ an English letter? because it isn't in the English alphabet.
Seoundu Kim says: But let me ask you, how am I supposed to know the /eə/ sound
when I try to pronounce go? Is there any hint of when to pronounce /əʊ/?
Ok, so. In all these comments people are getting confused between how words are spelled in
normal english writing and IPA phonetic transcription, which is how we can put pronunciation into writing.
Jap, yes both the words or and of have the letter o but the letter o,
as with all vowels, can be pronounced in several different ways,
that is one of the hardest things about English, it is not phonetic.
But, the phonetic alphabet is there to help with that, but don't get it confused with normal writing.
In the word 'or' the o with the r makes an /ɔː/ sound represented by this symbol in phonetics.
In the word 'of' the o makes the /ɒ/ sound represented by this symbol.
Does that make more sense?
Manoor, yes you are right!
It is even more confusing in this case because
a lot of the same letters are used in both normal writing and phonetic transcription.
Most of the time this is not a problem because the letters make more or less the sound that you would expect like
/t/, /d/, /e/ and many others. But the /j/ sound is particularly confusing
because it looks like the letter j, in fact we use the letter j.
But the letter j normally makes a /ʤ/ sound.
But remember in phonetics this is not the letter j it just looks like the letter j.
it is actually the /j/ phoneme or the /j/ sound.
Which in writing is often spelt with a y like in yet, yesterday or youtube.
So Darth in answer to your question is no, the /ə/ is not an English letter but
it is part of the International phonetic alphabet
and it represents a sound that is very common in English. Especially British English.
It's the sound /ə/
as in at the end of the words mother, father and brother.
Great question Seondu. Unfortunately I don't have good answer for you.
If we look at how English words are spelled it is hard to know how to pronounce them.
This is the hardest thing about learning English.
The phonetic symbols help us to break down words and analyse and practice the individual sounds
but it doesn't help us to know went use each sound.
For that you just need to keep practising until you remember.
So I hope this clarifies the difference between normal spelling as in normal writing
and phonetic transcription which is using the phonemes and why we use different symbols in phonetics.
As we have done in a lot of the videos that I have made in the past.
For more on this you should have a look at my video introduction to phonetics.
Because that should be helpful.
Well I hope this was helpful in knowing the difference between normal spelling and phonetic transcription
And I would like to add at this point,
You don't really need to know phonetics, to speak English.
It's really just to help when you have problems with pronunciation.
Then you can look up the little part of the subject of phonetics that you can use to help with that problem.
You never need to know the whole subject.
You never need to learn all the sounds or all the symbols.
It is best to just use the as reference if you are just learning English.
What words do you have difficulty pronouncing? Why don't you share with us in the comments below.
I hope you have found this useful, If you did you should check out some of my other videos
and subscribe to my youtube channel and mailing list via the website,
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Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time.