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Eat Sleep Dreamers welcome back to another lesson with me Tom. Today I've got a super
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quick bit-size lesson for you. We're looking at the most important sound in English, the
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schwa sound. So if you want to improve your British English accent, stay tuned.
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Today we are going to look at why the schwa sound is so important for you to learn and then
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we are going to look at lots of examples. So, why do we use the schwa? Well, English
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is a stress-timed language and therefore we use stress to indicate the most important
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information in a sentence. Within that sentence you are going to have unstressed words and
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syllables. Now this is where the schwa comes in because the schwa is the sound that we
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use for unstressed sounds. Commonly we'll find them in grammatical words like pronouns,
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articles, prepositions. Alright, but what is the schwa sound? The sound is 'uh'. To
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me it sounds like me as a teenager. You know, anyone would ask me a question and I'd be
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like 'uh'. 'Tom do you want a cup of tea?' 'uh' 'Tom do you want to go to the cinema?'
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'uh'. My teenage self basically. Were you like that as a teenager? Let me know! Now
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we know it's the most common vowel sound in English, let's look at how it changes depending
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on the stress. Take the word 'man'. The /a/ is fully pronounced 'man'. When 'man' is put
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in to another word where it's not the stressed sound then it changes. So 'policeman' the
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stress there has shifted to the 'ice' of police and then the 'man' has changed. There's no
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stress, so we're going to use the schwa sound. Policeman. Now I said that lots of grammatical
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words are unstressed like prepositions, pronouns and articles. Now this is when we use the
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schwa. We call this a weak form. Take the word 'for'. Now I could say 'for' when it's
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stressed. If it's in the middle of a sentence and it's not stressed then we are going to
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use the schwa sound. Here's an example. 'I got this for you.' Did you hear the sound
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there? It's not 'for you' f' f'you. So I'm using the schwa f'you. It's unstressed. it
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makes it easier for me to say the sentence if I use the schwa as the weak form. So 'I
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got this for you.' Say it after me 'I got this for you'. Alright, another example. Take
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the word 'of'. Now fully pronounced 'of' ok. But when it's unstressed and in the middle
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of a sentence, it's a weak form. 'Have you watched the Sound of Music?' So it's not 'Sound
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of Music' it's 'Sound of Music'. So again a weak form. Now I've done a video on weak
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forms, if you want to check it out, click just above. As I said before we use the schwa
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for vowel sounds. So let's go through the vowel sounds and give examples. So A 'again'.
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Not again, again. E, 'the'. It can be the when there is stress there but if it's not
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stressed the. I, 'family'. O, 'dinosaur' not dinosaur, dinosaur. U, 'octopus'. And finally
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for today, let's look at words that end in an 'r' because if a word ends in 'r' we are
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going to use the schwa. That rhymes! 'If the word ends in /r/ we're going to use a schwa.
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Alright, no rapping! I promise, no rapping! So take 'actor', 'doctor', 'water', 'daughter'.
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So as you see there it ends in the schwa sound. I hope you enjoyed that guys, I know how much
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you love pronunciation lessons. If you did enjoy it please let me know. Give me a big
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thumbs up. Let me know in the comments below. As always guys, make sure you are subscribing
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to my videos and of course hit that notification bell so that you don't miss a single lesson.
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I've got new videos every Tuesday and every Friday helping you take your English to the
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next level. Thank you as always guys, this was Tom, the Chief Dreamer, saying goodbye!