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hi everyone and merry christmas welcome to our little series on christmas words and
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how to pronounce them. our lesson today is how do i pronounce the words fruitcake: which is a
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cake made with dried fruits and nuts, gingerbread which is a cake or cookie flavored with ginger,
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and a sugar cookie which is a small sweet crisp or chewy treat covered in sugar
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and sometimes in icing. that's one of my favorite christmas treats. the lesson today is really going
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to revolve around word stress and how do you stress compound nouns so all of these words are
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compound nouns. and basically what that means is it's two words put together to mean a new thing.
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when you stress something you make it louder higher in pitch and you have longer vowels.
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that is opposed to unstressed which is the exact opposite softer lower and shorter. for most of
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my students because vowels are so difficult this longer vowel and shorter vowel is key. again a lot
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of students that i work with all of their vowels are similar in length so if you really work on
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making your vowels different lengths that's really going to help with these compound nouns and people
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will better understand you. again here are our words fruitcake gingerbread and sugar cookie.
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how do we go about doing this. what you're going to do is you are going to stress word number one
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in each of these cases word number two is going to have less stress
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another key point is we're going to link these words together with no pause in between them and
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make them one word. so i'm not going to say fruit cake. i'm going to link those words together with
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no pause make them one word and i'm going to make this word louder longer and higher. fruit cake
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fruit cake. same thing here i'm going to stress ginger link it to bread make that all one word.
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ginger is longer louder and higher bread is shorter softer and lower. gingerbread gingerbread.
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and then for a sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar cookie. so it sounds some of my
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students say as if i'm saying these second words very quickly. and it kind of am because of that
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shorter vowel. so let's give these all a try fruit cake fruit cake ginger bread gingerbread
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sugar cookie sugar cookie. i do want to make one last comment for sugar cookie. that has that
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dreaded short um ooh sound that we have in english it's not a very common sound but we do use it in
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very common words. it is here. a tip for that is do not pucker your lips too much. it's not ooh
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it's not sugar cookie. and don't relax them too much it's not sugar cookie. it is a nice in the
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middle slightly rounded lips that are relaxed for that uh vowel. so again it's not it's not uh it's
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sugar cookie sugar cookie. let's give those all a try again fruit cake fruit cake fruit cake
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gingerbread gingerbread gingerbread sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar cookie.
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my favorite christmas treat is a sugar cookie but i will also eat gingerbread and fruitcake.
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so let me know what your favorite christmas treat is in the comments section. and give
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it a try i know people are going to notice the difference. if you found this helpful
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please share us with your friends as a little christmas present to them. and if
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you need any extra help you can check out my site tarotspeech.com and my products at
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google play and itunes thanks everyone merry christmas see you for the next video.