Introduction to Vowels

Hello, I’ve made a series of videos about English vowels, but before you watch those videos you should watch this one because I’m going to explain some ideas here that you’ll need to understand to understand what I’m talking about in those other videos. So let’s get started. So first of all, why do we need to study English vowels? Well hearing a sound is the first step to being able to say a sound, So if you are learning a new language, you are learning not just new words, but new sounds as well, and this is one of the most difficult things. I remember when I was trying – not very hard, I have to admit – and I was trying to learn Chinese and people would say no, no, don’t say it like that, say it like this. And it would sound exactly the same to me because I wasn’t hearing the different sounds that they were making. So if you want to learn to speak English you’re going to have to learn to hear those sounds even if they are different from your language. The idea here is that once you can hear the sound you’re trying to make it gets much easier to say the sound, which makes you much easier to understand. So let’s start at the very beginning here. What is a vowel? We know that there are vowels and we know that there are consonants. A vowel is a type of sound that we make when our mouth is more or less open. So with consonants, we will very often slow down or completely block the air that’s coming out of our mouth. With a vowel, our mouths are more or less open and the air is coming out more or less freely. One of the most basic questions that we should be able to answer is, “How many vowel sounds are there in English?” Well, it would be nice if we could answer that simply, but we can’t. It depends which English or Englishes you are looking at. It also depends on which linguist you’re talking to. The estimates that I remember reading about when I was doing my Master’s degree was anywhere from kind of the low 20s to kind of the mid 20s, so kind of 20 21 22 up to 26, I think was the highest number that I ever read. That doesn’t matter. You are not becoming a linguist What we’re trying to do here is is to teach you how to speak English. Here’s what you need to remember. There are probably more vowel sounds in English than there are in your language. Now, it’s not a contest but this is just the way it is. And it’s one of the things that can make learning English difficult. Let’s take a look… in England, of course they have many people who come to to learn English there, and people from Spain in particular, they say, “I come to England on a sheep.” Well, they don’t probably say that this is actually an old joke, but just just just follow along. “Really? You came to English on a sheep, did you? Well when I went to England, I went to England on a ship. So… the point of this is that in Spanish the /i/ and the /I/ are interchangeable. There isn’t what we call a contrast of difference, and in English, that’s not the case. In English the /i/ and the /I/ are different sounds and they make different words as you can see here. By the way, I apolog… apologize for that terrible Spanish accent. I promise I won’t do that again. Something else we have to understand is voicing. What is voicing? Let’s just take a look here. So here are two sounds that or two letters, rather. Well they’re sounds because they’ve got the slash but a lot of people when you first look at them, you think well they’re really quite different. One’s at the beginning of the alphabet, the other one’s at the end. They don’t look anything alike. Actually, these are almost identical. So the one on the left here, so I’m over here. Here’s how I make this sound. /f/ Now, to go from there to there and make this sound, the only difference is I’m going to turn my voice on so I’m going to make the /f/ sound first: /f/. Now you hear there’s no difference there? Now I’m going to make the other sound, the V sound. /v/ And you can hear the difference in quality of the sound because when I’m making the /v/ sound when I hit my throat, it disrupts the air so the point is /f/ and /v/ are exactly the same except for voicing. Okay. So there are a lot of pairs and if you look at the consonants, the consonant videos that I made, I explain this and they ,we, I go through all of the different pairs. You need to understand this because the sound that comes after the vowel will very often affect the vowel. So let’s take a look at an example here. So life and live Life and live. Now because we were just talking about it, you probably noticed the /f/ sound here and the /v/ sound here. But I want you to listen to what comes before that. I want you to listen to The I sounds: life, life. Live, live. The one… this word over here, the vowel is a lot longer, okay? So it’s not really – it’s the same sound, but it’s it’s quite a bit longer, which gives it a different quality. So once again on the left: life. On the right: live. Now take a look here. I got this from an online dictionary and take a look at the way they… So in the in the UK and in the US, all of those are the same. So the dictionary will tell you that they sound exactly the same even though we just heard that they don’t. So, as we go through, I have different lists of words. I have the vowels that come before a voiced consonant and vowels that come before a devoiced, or a voiceless consonant. Okay, and just in case you’re wondering I got that from the online dictionary: dictionary. Cambridge.org, so if you don’t believe me if you think I’m playing games with you, you can go and check that. But if you don’t believe me, why are you still listening to me? The next thing that we need to look at is this: The International Phonetic Alphabet. Now, it’s kind of interesting that we call it “The International Phonetic Alphabet” because really, over the years, there have been many different versions of it and unfortunately many different books, many different language teaching books use partly their own system, partly the… the system that the author liked. Some of them use the kind of the most current official version. The point here is that unfortunately we talk about “The” International Phonetic Alphabet; the truth is, for people like you and me learning English, there’s really no such thing because there are so many different versions of that, which means that when you use a new book, you might have to learn some new symbols or some new ways of talking about those sounds. And, just in case I talked about this later, IPA is just short for International Phonetic Alphabet. If you search I P A, you will probably get some kind of beer, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The symbols that I’m going to use I’ve chosen them for a specific reason, and that is so that you can go from this to a website that I think is really great: English Accent Coach.com I’ll make a separate video about that because it would take too long now, but the symbols that I’m using here are…I chose them because you will be able to transfer, and you’ll be able to use those at EnglishAccentCoach.com. So that’s all for the introduction and enjoy the videos! It’s not the kind of thing you can do all in one day, so maybe do a few and then come back in a day or two and continue. All right. Thank you!