Name: FAST ENGLISH SKILLS: How to Speak English Fast with Linking
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T04:33:44.000Z
Duration: 20 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

One of the things that makes American English sound so natural and so fast is linking.

And today, we've invited Tom Kelley, who's a standout Rachel's English teacher, to teach you a lesson.

He's going to take a single sentence from the TV show, Madam Secretary. And he's going to do a full analysis.

He's going to analyze the rhythm for you, the intonation, and the linking.

Each link, how does each word flow into the next word? He's also going to do a sound analysis.

This entire lesson, one sentence, takes over 15 minutes. How does Tom do it? How does he go so much in-depth?

Well, when you're done with this, I promise you'll be able to say this sentence absolutely perfectly.

But also, on top of that, you'll have the tools that you need to be able to do a sentence analysis yourself,

to really change the way you hear English, so that you can start speaking English even more naturally.

Tom, thank you so much for this lesson. We're going to get to him in just a second, but first,

if you haven't subscribed please do with notifications. We make new videos every Tuesday

and we'd love to see you back here. Okay, Tom. Take it away.

Hi! I'm Tom Kelley, a Rachel's English teacher with Rachel's English Academy.

Today, we're going to analyze and practice with a single sentence

and get an enormous amount of information out of it.

I'm going to teach you a technique that you can use on your own

as you work on your American English pronunciation.

It covers the major concepts of pronunciation like music,

rhythm, reductions, linking, and how specific sounds in words are pronounced.

That's pretty much everything right? Right. So let's get started.

The sentence we'll be practicing is from the first episode of the television show "Madam Secretary".

What makes this sound like natural American English?

I'm moving smoothly from one sound to the next, keeping everything connected.

this connected quality combined with the intonation of the voice, creates the music of American English.

A great way to hear the music of a sentence is to listen to the sentence three or four times in a row.

What do you hear as the peak of the sentence? The syllable that is most stressed

by being highest in pitch, and using the most vocal energy?

I hear it as the third syllable of 'absolutely'.

When you're listening for the music, it can be helpful to listen for the peak, the most stressed syllable.

Another practice tool you can use is to practice just the music of a sentence using the UH as in butter vowel.

Do you hear that music? Let's slow it down.

Now try and say the sentence using that same music.

It might feel pretty difficult to do, but let's keep analyzing and see if it gets easier by the end.

The important thing right now is that you can hear it.

Now, let's move on to the rhythm of the sentence.

When you study the rhythm of American English, you want to think about using both stressed

Depending on your native language, you may have trouble creating contrast between your syllables.

English is a stress-timed language, so some syllables are longer than others.

If you come from a syllable-timed language, where all of the syllables are the same length,

Let's take a look at this sentence and determine which syllables are stressed and which are not.

Stressed syllables are longer, they often slide up in the voice and then down, uuhhh.

We call that the shape of stress, uuhhh, uuhhh, uuhhh.

And they use more vocal energy, making them a little easier to understand.

Knowing that, how many stressed syllables do you hear?

The first and third syllables of 'absolutely' and the three one-syllable words: 'did, right, and thing'.

All of those syllables are a little longer and clearer than the others.

If you look up the word 'absolutely' - you'll notice that the first syllable is actually a secondary stressed syllable.

You can hear that in the way the third syllable slides up a little higher in pitch,

making it the primary stressed syllable in the word, and as we discussed earlier,

it is actually the primary stressed syllable in the entire phrase.  The peak of the sentence musically.