Seattle Learning Academy - 06 The English r-controlled vowels | Текст песни

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• 06 The English r-controlled vowels

#6: American English pronunciation of the r-controlled vowels

Practice saying and hearing the difference between r-controlled vowels: schwa+r, ar sound, or sound, and air sound.
Transcript

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English Pronunciation Podcast. My name is Mandy, and this is podcast number 6. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, you should know that this is the third of three podcasts dealing with the l sound and r sound, and you may want to go back and start with podcast #4.

I hope you've all had a chance to visit www.pronuncian.com and see the other free practice activities we offer on that site as well as read the transcripts if they help you understand this information.

Did you are memorize last week's practice sentence "I would really like a little red wagon like Laura's"? How about the sentence before that "On Thursday, Thelma threw three red rocks"? Before that, we had the s sound, z sound practice in the sentence "Cats love boxes; dogs love beds." Today we will learn about r-controlled vowels and we will practice the sentence "Learning early in the morning can be fairly hard work."

So what are these r-controlled vowels I've been talking about for 2 weeks now? All of the sounds I've talked about so far have been consonant sounds. In the Latin alphabet, the alphabet English uses, we have 26 letters. 21 of those letters are consonants. For example, the letters t, d, s, z, l, and r, are consonants. The letters that aren't consonants, are vowels. We have five vowels: a, e, i, o, and u. These five vowels are used to represent 15 different sounds. How do we have so many sounds for so few letters? Well, think about the words "top" and "home". Already we can see the letter o representing two different sounds, the (short o) sound and the (long o) sound. If we add the word "dog", we find another sound represented by the o, the (aw sound) sound. Listen to those three words again: top, home, dog. When we begin talking about vowels, it is very important that we distinguish whether we are talking about a letter or a sound.

When I talk about r-controlled vowels, I am talking about four vowel sounds that are said differently because they are followed by the letter r. Or, to say it another way, the r sound changes the way we say the vowel sound before it.

Which sounds change when before an r sound? One of the easiest to hear is the (ar sound) sound. This is usually spelled as "a" plus "r" as in the word "car". C-a-r. Say the ar sound alone (ar sound). Now, if you learned a British pronunciation of English, you were probably taught not to say the r sound at the end of the word "car" unless the next word begins with a vowel sound. In the United States, we always say the r sound. Other words with the ar sound are farm, start, and smart. Say those words after me. Farm. Start. Smart.

The next r-controlled vowel is the "or" spelling, which sounds like (or sound). Word with the or sound (or sound) include the words four, tore, store, and explore. Repeat those words now. Four. Tore. Store. Explore.

Another r-controlled vowel is the a-i-r sound (air sound), like in the words air, stair, hair, and care. Say those words after me: air, stair, hair, care. Later, I will expand on how these vowels sound different from when they are not before an r, for now, I really just want you to know that they exist.

The r-controlled vowel that really seems to cause the most confusion is the schwa + r sound. First, what is the schwa sound? The schwa sound is an unstressed vowel sound in English. When schwa comes before an r, there becomes almost no vowel sound at all, and we say and hear only an r sound that takes a little longer than it would if it weren't after a vowel.

In the r-controlled vowels we looked at so far, we can hear two distinct sounds. In the a-r sound (ar