Name: Learn to Pronounce the Short oo Sound /ʊ/ 🇺🇸 American English Pronunciation Challenge Master Class
Uploaded: 2025-10-08T18:59:44.000Z
Duration: 7 min 38 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...

Jennifer from Tarle Speech with your pronunciation masterclass this week.

Modal verbs - A2

It's the short oo sound that we hear in the words could, would, and should.

So here is our phonetic transcription for today.

This sound is not very common in English, but we use it in very common words.

So the good news for this lesson is if this is difficult for you, you're really just going to have to memorize the pronunciation in a handful of words because we use them all of the time or get close enough.

then you will be clearer and I'm sure more confident in your speaking as well.

Well, so how do we spell this short sound?

Let me make this bigger so you can see the spelling.

If you're listening to this on a podcast, join us over on YouTube at Tarle Speech and you can see my presentations.

So we do have the spelling OO in good, and it's usually with this D, O, O, D.

that's usually the long oo sound like we hear in boot.

The O, U, L, we see this in a lot of words.

I'm just going to say it, and I want you to try to repeat after me.

If you notice my lips are slightly rounded.

I'm not being completely relaxed and saying somewhere in the middle.

So let's look at how do we make this sound?

And I have this all written out again if you want to see it, it's on YouTube.

The middle of my tongue, or the tip of my tongue, rather, is in the middle of my mouth.

That's why I didn't really talk about it.

All I want you to do is just listen, and then you are going to repeat.

All right, now repeat after Me look good put would woman look good put wood woman.

Okay, I want to talk a little bit about when we have that W sound.

This is really difficult for so many of my students.

So for the W, your lips are very puckered.

You're going to have to move your mouth a lot.

That's just a something to keep in mind in general in English, American English, that we move our mouths a lot from sound to sound because we have a lot of vowel sounds.

So think about really moving your mouth more, and that should help.

So we are going to say would, would, would, and w. So again, would and woman.

How much wood could a woodchuck chunk if a woodchuck could chuck?

How much wood could a wood chuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Please join me tomorrow for word practice and then on Friday for sentence practice.

We only have one practice word list this week because this sound only happens in the middle of words.

And again, I think you'll be surprised how few words actually have this sound in it.

Drop some words that have this sound in it in the comments to help all of your fellow learners.

I will see you tomorrow and every day this year for a new lesson to celebrate 20 years.

If you feel like you've missed a lesson, don't worry.

I post all of them on my feed, on YouTube, all of the socials, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the things.

And you can also sign up for a name newsletter where I deliver to your inbox every lesson from the week before.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Learn to Pronounce the Short oo Sound /ʊ/ 🇺🇸 American English Pronunciation Challenge Master Class

pronunciation

awesome

tough

slightly