Name: 👄 How to say the schwa sound /ə/ in words like ‘the’, ‘of’ & ‘butter’ - English Pronunciation Tips
Uploaded: 2025-11-21T17:11:44.000Z
Duration: 4 min 3 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...

To-infinitive

And to make this sound, you just relax your mouth.

In fact, this is a very common sound in English and in many grammar words, it's the only vowel sound such as the.

Now, you also get this sound in many words of more than one syllable.

You could say that the vowel is the most important vowel in English.

In fact, it's so important it has its own name.

Schwa, which is pretty strange when you think about it, because the word schwa doesn't have the schwa sound in it.

Well, it's a very natural sound for English speakers and it's actually the most frequent, frequent sound in English.

It appears in just about every word with more than two syllables.

And it's very important for getting the stress and rhythm of English.

Schwa is usually in unstressed syllables.

Now, as well as being a part of many words, schwa can also be the pronunciation for a whole word itself.

And to show you this, I'm going to need an assistant.

But listen to what happens when I say the words a and of naturally.

Now you try listen and repeat after A cup of tea.

Now, this is such a natural and common way to pronounce cup of that.

In British English, the word cuppa actually means a cup of tea.

And after all that, I'm really looking forward to my cuppa.

Actually, what I really fancy is a piece of cake.

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👄 How to say the schwa sound /ə/ in words like ‘the’, ‘of’ & ‘butter’ - English Pronunciation Tips

pronunciation

rhythm

practice

common