Seattle Learning Academy - 03 The English s sound and z sound | Текст песни

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#3: American English pronunciation of the s sound and z sound

Learn how to create the s sound and z sound in English, and the rules for the -s ending.
Transcript

Hello again, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English Pronunciation podcast. This is podcast #3. If you've forgotten, or are listening for the first time, my name is Mandy.

Remember, Pronuncian.com is where you can find transcripts and show notes to all our podcasts, as well as each practice sentence or word set. Today's practice will be the sentence: "Cats love boxes; dogs love beds." We'll come back to that later.

I hope you still remember our practice sentence from podcast number one, "Think about this thing, that thing, and those things." I hope you also practiced our d sound/t sound minimal pairs from podcast number two: "dime, time; dense, tense; code, coat; tide, tight; spend, spent."

When I say that this is an American English Pronunciation podcast, I am referring to what is known as the General American Accent, the accent considered to be the most "neutral" accent for the United States. Canadian accents are quite similar to an American accent, or at least are more similar to an American accent than say, a British accent or an Australian accent. Certainly, there are variances in English spoken around the world, as well as within English speaking countries. I grew up in the United States and, since I teach in the United Sates and most of my students are long-time residents of the United States, I know far more about American accents than any other accent of spoken English.

Wikipedia has a map of where the "General American Accent" is most prevalent. I've linked to that site from Pronuncian.com. I'm from Wisconsin, just north of the area shown on this map. However, since I am actually from northern Wisconsin, I had a strong accent from that area when I moved to Seattle, Washington, five years ago. Since I've been teaching pronunciation for three years, I've lost most of that northern Wisconsin accent and picked up the more neutral "General American Accent." When I travel back to Wisconsin, however, my friends and family hear my new speech habits as an "accent." That just proves that an accent is only when you speak differently than those around you, and that is impossible to be accent-less.

Let's got to today's topic. I'm going to stay with the theme of voiced and unvoiced consonant sounds, and we're going to talk about another set of fricatives. The th sounds were the first fricatives we studied. In case you've forgotten, fricative is a continuous sound that is created by allowing only a small amount of air to leave the mouth, which causes friction, and sound.

Today's sounds are the s sound (s sound) and the z sound (z sound). Say those sounds to yourself and see if you can tell which is the voiced sound, and which is unvoiced. (s sound, z sound). Remember, voiced sounds use our vocal cords, and we can feel the vibration if we put a finger against the front of our throat. I hope you said that the z sound is voiced, and the s sound is unvoiced.

The z sound and s sound are articulated in the same area at the front of our mouth as the t sound and d sound, at the tooth ridge. The tooth ridge is that area right behind our upper front teeth. To create the z sound and s sound, we make a little groove with our tongue and push air out through the center of the tip of the tongue and along that bony ridge behind our front teeth. The sound happens as the air is pushed into and around our front teeth.

The biggest problem I usually hear in the creation of this sound is that the tip of the tongue is too far back and the sound is created behind that ridge. I often hear Koreans say the s sound and z sound this way. An American English speaker will hear that sound as an sh sound instead of an s sound or z sound. Make sure the tip of the tongue is way forw

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