Name: Vowels! (Part Two)┃Learn American English Pronunciation On the Go
Uploaded: 2025-08-03T17:55:28.000Z
Duration: 31 min 17 s
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You're listening to the Rachel's English Podcast.

Adverbs of degree

If you haven't listened to part one, you might want to do that.

If you'd like a transcript for this podcast, it's absolutely free to download.

Please visit rachelsenglish.com slash podcast and look for this episode.

We're discussing the vowels of American English.

Last week, we did the first five vowels in my list.

We did the AH as in father, AW as in law, AH as in bat, EE as in she, and IH as in sit.

American English has 11 vowels so we've got six more to get through today.

So in the last episode, I asked if you could come up with all of the different vowel sounds in English, which you couldn't, not surprising.

But one of the ones that you did come up with was the EH vowel, like in bed.

And I forget what word you came up with for it.

But I think that it was spelled with an E.

Now, you know, after working through that first podcast, that the sounds in American English do not correspond with the letters in a meaningful way.

So this EH sound can actually be spelled eight different ways.

We can spell it with just That one I think is really interesting.

You say, S-A-Y, pronounced with the AY diphthong.

But then when you say he says, when you add the Y, then we change the, sorry, when you add the S, says, we somehow end up changing the vowel to the EH sound.

And actually, that's a pretty common mistake.

People will say say, and then they'll say says.

They'll mispronounce this word, but it's actually says.

So that's another spelling for this sound.

EA, like in the word head, spelled this way, or pronounced this way.

So, EO is not a very common combination, but in the first episode, we learned that it makes the E sound like in people, and here we're learning it can also make the EH sound like in leopard.

Now, this is a little bit different because it's followed by an R consonant, which does color the vowel a little bit.

That sounds precariously close to a diphthong.

I actually say that it's more like the A diphthong, like in say.

But it's also not a hundred percent that.

But if you were going to look up the word share in the International Phonetic Alphabet in a dictionary that tells the phonetic spelling, it would say this vowel.

Another case where it's followed by the R, so it's not quite pure.

But if you were going to look this up in a dictionary, it would say EH.

And a regional thing too is that a lot of people say bury.

I know people in the region that I grew up with might say that.

Well, it might even be considered a secondary pronunciation.

And I agree these example words with an R, like I only included them because I couldn't find an example word without an R.

And guys, if you're curious about that, I do have a pretty awesome YouTube video that goes over how the R can change the vowels.

I will link to that in the show notes for this episode on my website.

Okay, two more words because I like to have a total of ten with the EH sound are bed.

So, this is different from British English.

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Vowels! (Part Two)┃Learn American English Pronunciation On the Go

weird

episode

pronunciation

extremely