Introduction to Consonants

Hello! I’ve made a whole bunch of different videos about consonants, but before we get started with those videos, you need to watch this video so that you know what I’m talking about when I use some of the terminology when I go through those those other sounds. So, let’s take a look. First of all, what is a consonant? Well, a consonant is: not a vowel. Vowels are sounds that we make when our mouth is more or less completely open. With consonants on the other hand, your mouth is limiting the air that comes out. So if I make a an example vowel: AAA You can see my mouth is wide open and there’s lots of air and lots of sound coming out. With a consonant – I’ll just choose one randomly /b/ /b/ – my mouth at one point is completely closed stopping all the air from coming out. So vowels are sounds that that come out quite freely; there’s no restriction or very little restriction. Consonants have a lot more limit on the sound that is coming out, so that’s the difference. So before we talk too much about consonants and before you watch those other videos, there are three things that you need to know. First of all: what voicing is. There are two different… or there’s one way of dividing consonants into two different categories, and that’s whether they are voiced or devoiced, or we can also say voiceless. And that means quite simply whether or not I’m using my voice. If you are thinking: “Wait a minute when I’m speaking I’m always using my voice” I have some interesting news for you, so hold on. Many consonants appear in voiced and voiceless pairs. So, let’s take a look at this little table here. The top row, these sounds, these consonants are all voiceless. The bottom row, those are all voiced. Let’s take a look… a good way to explain it is with this pair, so I’m going to use those two. So, if I say, for example, this word or this word, those are almost exactly the same. They are what we call minimal pairs. Listen carefully as to how I… as to what those words sound like. So I’ll start with the top one: fan, fan. Now I’m going to say the bottom one: van, van. Now I want you… I’m going to say both those words again, but I want you to only look at my mouth. Okay I’m in fact – you know what? I’m gonna turn… when I edit, I’m going to turn the sound off so that you can’t hear what I’m saying. Just looking at my mouth, tell me: Am I saying the top one or am I saying the bottom one? Ready? Okay so which one did I say? There’s absolutely no way to know. My mouth makes exactly the same motion in both situations, so the only difference between those two words when I say them is whether or not I use my voice on the first sound. And with this one, I do not use my voice, so watch /f/ and down here, I’m going to put my mouth in exactly the same position but I am going to use my voice. /v/ Watch this: I’m gonna say the top one: /f/. I hit my throat and it makes no difference to the sound because I’m not using my voice. Now, watch what happens or listen what happens when I say the bottom one: /v/ There we do hear the difference because when I hit my my throat it’s interrupting the flow of air that’s coming out. Okay, so again the top one: fan, the bottom one: van. My mouth is exactly the same shape; I’m doing exactly the same thing. The only difference is whether or not I’m using my voice and as you can see from from this table here, there are lots of voiced/voiceless pairs. So that’s one idea that you need to understand; you need to know whether you’re using your voice or not to make a particular sound. There are other consonants as well. Now these, as I said, these are paired consonants one – some are voiced, some are voiceless – these are not all the consonants, but we’ll look at those other ones later. I’m going to talk just briefly about something else that’s related to voicing… kind of. It’s called aspiration, and that’s the sound, but the sound of the breath only. So if I say the word “hockey” for example, I say the word “hockey”. This is a good example in English. You hear all of those sounds, right? I don’t say “ocky” I don’t start, I don’t start here. I don’t say “ockey” there is definitely a sound that comes from this H but I’m not using my voice; it’s only the air that’s coming out. “Hockey, hockey” That’s true of a lot of words that start with H in English but not only there! If I say for example the name: “Peter, Peter” – now you might or might not notice but there’s actually a tiny little H sound there as well. Peter, Peter, and that’s the the sound of the aspiration. So aspiration, again, it’s the sound of the breath only. I’m not using my voice but the air is coming out fast enough that I can … the air is coming out fast enough that you can hear it. Okay, the next thing you need to know is the effects of voicing. So if a consonant is voiced or devoiced, of course that’s going to make a difference in how it sounds, but it also affects other things. It often changes the vowel before it. “Wait a minute! This is a video about consonants!” Yes it is, but the consonant and whether it’s voiced or voiceless also affects the vowels. This is important both when speaking and listening. Let’s take a look at an example here. So again we have another minimal pair here. These two words are identical there… there all the way to the last letter. So, /t/ which, is what I’m saying here and /d/ which is what I’m saying here, those two consonants are identical except for the fact that /t/ is voiceless and /d/ is voiced. So we know that, but don’t listen to that; listen to the vowel sound that comes before: goat, goat. All right, now listen to the second one: goat, goat. The vowel sound is the same but I stretch it out with the second one. I stretch it out here. Why? Because this is voiced. Now if you ask native speakers about this, they won’t, they won’t probably agree with you; they don’t get it, they don’t notice it, but if somebody, like you, who’s listening very closely to the sounds that people are making, you need to know that when the… when there’s a voiceless – sorry when there’s a voiced consonant, it often changes the sound of the vowel that comes before it. Let’s look at another example. Now if you look these up in the dictionary you will see that that the spelling is different but you will see that the sound that’s here and here are the same. But, listen when I say it It depends on what comes after as to how long I hold the vowel: root, root, rude, rude. So again, the sound of the vowel gets changed very often depending on the consonant that comes after it – if it’s voiced or voiceless. Here’s an example of why you want to be careful with this: I eat my food for dinner. Now, I’m going to leave this sound the same but I’m going to shorten the vowels here: I eat my foo(t) for dinner. It sounds like something that you don’t want to say, okay? So, when this is voiced, these vowels become longer. All right, the next thing you need to know is that location matters. So (a) letter’s plac… a letter’s placement in the word or sentence (which we call the environment) sometimes dictates the sound that the letter makes. So the /t/ sounds different depending on where it appears in the word. Okay so sorry, I’ll just go back here. So here we are, we’re looking at /t/ and /d/. Okay so /t/ sounds different depending where it appears in the word: /t/ take, take, take. It’s easy to hear. Look here though, when I put those sounds in the middle: latter, ladder. Which one am I saying? Well, it doesn’t matter because they sound exactly the same, okay? So, a /t/, /t/ and a /d/, /d/ in the middle, they can sound… they can sound the same in some dialects of English, including mine, which is a standard North American accent. So, I’ll say this one over here: latter. I’ll say this one: ladder. They sound exactly the same, so at the beginning of the word there was a difference in the sound. In the middle of the word, sometimes there isn’t and this is a good example of there not being a difference. Now, take a look at this one: listen carefully to this T: wet clothes, wet clothes. “Well you didn’t say the T!” No, I didn’t. Why? Well because it’s in the middle of this phrase. If I said inst… instead of saying “I had wet clothes” I said “My clothes were wet.” Now that wet comes at the end of the sentence; now it’s more likely that most speakers would say it, but when it’s in the middle, you may or may not hear it, okay? So again: He was wearing wet clothes. It’s quite common to not release that, so we don’t hear the aspiration that comes after that. Okay, so now that you know those three things – or maybe I should say three and a half because we learned about aspiration as well, now that you know these things, now you’re ready for the consonant videos, and you’ll understand what is being said, okay? Good luck!