Seattle Learning Academy - 09 The English short vowel sounds | Текст песни

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#9: American English pronunciation of the five short vowel sounds

This is the beginning of the difficult to say and hear vowel sounds. Start to realize the importance of being able to hear different sounds.
Transcript

Hi everyone! Welcome to episode 9 of Seattle Learning Academy's American English Pronunciation Podcast. If you are a regular listener, you know we are in the middle of learning about vowel sounds. If this is your first time listening to this podcast, I'd like to say hello. My name is Mandy. As always, the transcript for this show is available at www.pronuncian.com. You will also find a link on Pronuncian for buying the book, "Pronunciation Pages: Sounds of American English" published by Seattle Learning Academy. The book is available as an ebook download, or as a physical copy to be shipped to you. Along with your book purchase, you get 6 months full access to the pronuncian website.

Let's get back to vowels. Last week we started talking about vowels and learned the five key words for our long vowels. Do you remember them? If not, they were: cake, keep, bike, home, cute. Long vowels are easy to remember because they sound like their name, a, e, i, o, and u. Today we will talk about short vowels, which are way more difficult to say and to hear. Like long vowels, I have key words for short vowels.

Since short vowels will take longer to get through, I'm going to jump right into them today. The short a sounds like (short a), (short a). The key word for short a is cat. To create the short a sound we need to lift the middle of the tongue and push it forward and into our bottom teeth a little bit. short a is a pretty forceful sound; we use a lot of muscle in our mouth to create it. Try saying the sound alone. (short a). Now say our key word, cat. (short a, cat)

The short e sounds like (short e). There is very little muscle involved to create this sound, just raise the middle of your tongue a tiny bit toward the roof of the mouth. The sides of your tongue may lightly touch your upper teeth. The key word for short e is bed. Do you hear the (short e) sound in bed? (b sound, short e, d sound). So, so far we've had short a and short e. (short a, short e). You want to be able to hear the difference between the sounds.

The short i sounds like (short i), (short i). It is the middle sound of the key word sit. The middle of your tongue is a little higher for the short i sound than it is for the short e sound. Listen to both sounds side by side. (short e, short i), (short e, short i), (bed, sit) Try saying those sounds: (short e, short i). Now say the key words: bed, sit.

To create the short o sound (short o), we need to open our mouth a lot. Our jaw actually needs to open to get this sound out nice and clear. At the same time as we open our mouth, our tongue bunches up some in the back of our mouth. (short o) The key word for short o is top. Top. (t sound, short o, p sound).

Do you remember the four key words so far? They were cat, bed, sit, and top.

Our last short vowel sound is the short u, and it sounds like (short u). The short u sound is created by pressing the back of our tongue down, and our mouth does not need to be open in the same way that it does for the short o. The short u key word is sun. Listen to the difference in the middle sound in the words top and sun. Top, sun. (short o, short u)

So we have the key words: cat, bed, sit, top, sun. You job is to memorize those words. We'll come back to them again after practicing some short word lists, like we did last week for the long vowels.

short a (short a): add, after, bath, plan, crash
short e (short e): end, enter, bend, yes, dress
short i (short i): it, ill, gift, since, drip
short o (short o): odd, on, box, lot, rock
short u (short u): up, us, jump, luck, fun

Now let's practice with some listening for a bit. I'm going to say a word, and I want you to decide which short vowel sound is in the word. I am intentionally goin