/ə/ is the most relaxed vowel. Your tongue should be at the bottom of your mouth, relaxed. Relax your lips as well. Your jaw should be in the middle position. /ə/ is often substituted for other vowel sounds when those vowels come in unstressed syllables.
/ə/, which is called a schwa, is the most relaxed vowel that we use in English. Open your mouth, relax your tongue, and just let the sound come out. /ə/ One of the things that is hard for people who are learning English is that we often use the /ə/ sound in unstressed syllables, regardless of what the actual letter is. We’ll see lots of examples of that here. Just to be clear which sound we’re looking at, I have underlined where the schwa sound is. Let’s take a look at some examples. We’ll start before a voiceless consonant: Timothy except biggest atomic gallop afraid achieve And we’ll look before a voiced consonant: around anything tomorrow award again alarm ago And again, if you want to, move the video back and just go through those lists again, go through those words again, and you’ll notice that the schwa sound – the part I had underlined – was always in the unstressed syllable. Let’s look at some sentences: Jen can do anything Belinda can do. And let’s just take a look at this for a minute here because we’ve got this word, it appears twice and in both cases, it’s a reduced form. Jen can Jen can do. So if this was a strong version of this word, it would sound like can, but because it’s reduced here, we say can. Tomorrow Timothy will accept the biggest award. If you like some more practice, look below.