how to pronounce them. our lesson today is how  do i pronounce the words fruitcake: which is a  

cake made with dried fruits and nuts, gingerbread  which is a cake or cookie flavored with ginger,  

and a sugar cookie which is a small sweet  crisp or chewy treat covered in sugar  

and sometimes in icing. that's one of my favorite  christmas treats. the lesson today is really going  

to revolve around word stress and how do you  stress compound nouns so all of these words are  

compound nouns. and basically what that means is  it's two words put together to mean a new thing.  

when you stress something you make it louder  higher in pitch and you have longer vowels.  

that is opposed to unstressed which is the exact  opposite softer lower and shorter. for most of  

my students because vowels are so difficult this  longer vowel and shorter vowel is key. again a lot  

of students that i work with all of their vowels  are similar in length so if you really work on  

making your vowels different lengths that's really  going to help with these compound nouns and people  

will better understand you. again here are our  words fruitcake gingerbread and sugar cookie.  

how do we go about doing this. what you're going  to do is you are going to stress word number one  

in each of these cases word number  two is going to have less stress  

another key point is we're going to link these  words together with no pause in between them and  

make them one word. so i'm not going to say fruit  cake. i'm going to link those words together with  

no pause make them one word and i'm going to make  this word louder longer and higher. fruit cake  

fruit cake. same thing here i'm going to stress  ginger link it to bread make that all one word.  

ginger is longer louder and higher bread is  shorter softer and lower. gingerbread gingerbread.  

and then for a sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar  cookie sugar cookie. so it sounds some of my  

students say as if i'm saying these second words  very quickly. and it kind of am because of that  

shorter vowel. so let's give these all a try  fruit cake fruit cake ginger bread gingerbread  

sugar cookie sugar cookie. i do want to make  one last comment for sugar cookie. that has that  

dreaded short um ooh sound that we have in english  it's not a very common sound but we do use it in  

very common words. it is here. a tip for that is  do not pucker your lips too much. it's not ooh  

it's not sugar cookie. and don't relax them too  much it's not sugar cookie. it is a nice in the  

middle slightly rounded lips that are relaxed for  that uh vowel. so again it's not it's not uh it's

sugar cookie sugar cookie. let's give those all  a try again fruit cake fruit cake fruit cake  

gingerbread gingerbread gingerbread  sugar cookie sugar cookie sugar cookie.  

my favorite christmas treat is a sugar cookie  but i will also eat gingerbread and fruitcake.  

so let me know what your favorite christmas  treat is in the comments section. and give  

it a try i know people are going to notice  the difference. if you found this helpful  

please share us with your friends as a  little christmas present to them. and if  

you need any extra help you can check out  my site tarotspeech.com and my products at  

google play and itunes thanks everyone  merry christmas see you for the next video.