Understanding English Pronunciation: Basic Concepts and Vocabulary

[Music] hi I'm Joshua English learning guide and welcome back to english hacks this is

the first video in the English hacks pronunciation course and today we're going to be talking about a lot of the

basic concepts and terms or vocabulary that you need to know in order to understand a lot of what we are going to

be talking about now as you can see on the board there's quite a lot of stuff but it's okay it's not as bad as it

looks and we're going to be going through this step-by-step now the main three areas of

learning pronunciation and training your ear are rhythm and intonation the basic sounds and connections or linking

between words and sometimes inside of a word okay so how we're gonna go through this is we're gonna start here because

everything here is interconnected and these are some core important terms that we need to talk about before we get to

these other areas but this has some of the most important core information that we need to start with so basic sounds

the basic sounds refer to the individual sound units not words but just a basic sound such as oh okay so we have the

sound oh oh which is also the name of the letter it's the letter O okay that works out nicely now in English as we'll

talk about in a second this letter could represent different sounds depending on the word we'll come back to that in a

second but that is an example of a basic sound another example would be to or

or Shh notice in English we tend to spell this sound Sh

with two letters but it's just one sound this is how we usually represent that sound in writing so we have two types of

basic sounds in languages generally we have vowels and we have consonants and this is definitely true in English so in

English we have a e i o and you these are the vowels that we have in writing and the names of the letters the actual

names are a II I owe you now English is not phonetic so English is not a phonetic phonetic well all languages are

phonetic if we're going to be very accurate because some of you out there might already know this detail this

spelling system the writing system of English is not phonetic but to keep it simple I'm just going to say English is

not phonetic even though that's not technically accurate so a phonetic means that what you see written so the written

words and letters match the sounds that are produced and it may not always be one letter for one sound it might be a

group of letters always represents one sound so if we look at Spanish for example so this letter in English is

called a but it could be a number of different vowel sounds it depends on the word

in Spanish this sound can only be pronounced ah that's what it is it's ah okay so we always have the same

representation of the letter to the sound now an example of where you might have a group so in Spanish qu I always

always pronounced key so the UWE silent and it's it's like key and it's supposed to be a K it's not

written very well so we have key and so this would actually be this isn't a sound a basic sound this is actually

could an e but the point here is that the its phonetic still because this is always this combination qu i is always

pronounced the key so that's what phonetic means the writing and the spoken sounds match they go together

English is probably one of the least phonetic languages in the world which is as you probably know a very common and

big problem for people who want to learn English so we have our five vowels which by the way sometimes we also have the

letter Y yeah sometimes we have six valves that's how complicated English is it's not that bad the rule there half B

if you see a Y at the end of a word like this it's always pronounced or it should always be pronounced like e like the e

sound which in your language might be written with an i' and that's a very common in other languages but that's why

we say sometimes why so the point here is that it's very important not to rely on the the symbols that you see they get

the letters in a word because very often they won't help you that's why we're going to learn a lot of all this stuff

so that you can figure out exactly what's what so a vowel is sort of open there's some sort of opening even if the

mouth is kind of closed II there's not much air restriction right II ah ah oh there's some sort of openness in the

mouth where a consonant are things like to say or woo okay so you have some sort of either actual touching of the

tongue to part of the mouth or maybe your lips closed like an M we let the sound go through the nose mmm it's a

nasal sound nasal means related to the nose and you're in some way restricting or manipulating changing the airflow in

the case of Shh we're not actually touching or same thing we're not actually touching but we're restricting

the air in a way that it creates this particular sound okay so that's a vowel and a consonant vows are more open

consonants tend to be more restricting of the airflow and English is not phonetic so we want to focus on a sound

not spelling very important more on that as we go through the course and a little bit in this video however there are some

common spelling patterns that represent certain sounds and vowels are the biggest problem consonants are generally

pretty consistent usually if you see an R it's going to be a with the consonants usually what you see is what you get

there are some that don't quite work that way like the T especially in American English this is probably the

most problematic consonant in English in general because sometimes it could be a 2 sometimes it could be it sometimes it

might be 2 so we'll talk about all that as we go through this course it's not as bad as it seems it's actually pretty

simple you just have to understand what's going on so there are common spelling patterns

for the vowel sounds so for example a w usually this W will be silent and that reprehensible l oo

for example we have the word on which is o and n so in this case it's represented by an O and that's a common spelling pie

we have con on etc with oo we have like aa which is a word we have awkward lawn or law okay and we'll talk about all

those details later as we go through each vowel sound and the consonant sounds when necessary I will give you

these common spelling patterns which will help you a lot but there's always exceptions well almost always exceptions

in English and sometimes it doesn't quite work but they do help a lot for a non-native speaker okay next up now

we've talked about this basic sound stuff let's talk about these important words that we need to know in order to

get here here and tie it all together [Music] you

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