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This is Gabe from TowerofBabelfish.com
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This is the first of four/five videos on English pronunciation and the International phonetic
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alphabet (IPA)
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In these tutorials I have two smaller goals and one overarching goal:
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The first is to teach you how the IPA works, and
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two, maybe more important, how english works in your mouth -- what's going on in your
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mouth to make these sounds.
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Overall, we're looking to give you a tool for understanding pronunciation in your own
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language, so you can apply it to your target language.
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If you start with correct pronunciation in your target language, you get so much:
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-you'll retain vocab better -you'll have better listening comprehension
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-Later, you get native speakers who won't switch to english
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-In the end, you won't be training bad habits for years and have to unlearn them somehow.
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And so lets get started. We'll first talk about some basics - what is a consonant and
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what does IPA do?
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IPA is a sound alphabet - it gives you a symbol, like this one or this one, and it means one
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sound - always.
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In English, we have a bunch of letters, which correspond to vowels or consonants, and many
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of these have multiple sounds: The letter C as in Cat and C as in Nice are
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totally different - they have totally different sounds - and IPA has two symbols for those
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two sounds. Conversely, cymbal and symbol sound the same,
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even though they're spelled differently, and so IPA for both of these words is exactly
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the same. IPA only cares about the sound.
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Everytime I write in IPA, I'll surround it by two slashes, and every time I'm referring
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to the letters and words in english as they're spelled, I'll put quotes around them.
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so the letter "s" can make this sound /s/ in IPA - it has the same character - but it
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also can sound like /z/ (Rose) or /SS/ as in sure or /ZZ/ as in pleasure. IPA splits
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all of these sounds apart, and really tells you what you can expect to hear when you see
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a symbol.
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Ever the next few videos, you'll be learning all of these symbols, but for now we should
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talk about the three things that make one consonant. These are voicing, place and manner.
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We'll talk about them in that order.
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Voicing is perhaps the simplest. Put your hand on your throat and say "ffffffffffffff".
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Feel anything at your throat? You shouldn't.
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now compare that with "vvvvvvvvvvv". Your hand should feel buzzing in your throat. f
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and v are a pair of consonants that are identical except for that buzzing in your vocal cords.
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F is known as "unvoiced consonant", and V as a "voiced consonant." Most consonants in
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English come in voiced/unvoiced pairs, like T and D, or B and P.
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Place is a little more complicated. We'll need to look at a picture of your mouth. Here's
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a very detailed one from Wikipedia. To get oriented, 1 and 2 on the left are your lips.
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3 is your upper teeth, 4 is that ridge behind your teeth known as the alveolar ridge.
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Jumping around a bit, 13-18 is your tongue, from the root (13) to underneath the tip (18),
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which we don't use in English; we only use the tip.
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11 are your vocal cords
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9 is your uvula, 7 is your soft palate and 6 is your hard palate. All the remaining numbers
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are just in between spots, so 5 is in between 4 and 6 - between your alveolar ridge and
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your hard palate.
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To make any sound, you need to blow air out of your throat. If you don't get in the way,
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you make a vowel, like "ah" "eh".
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If you DO get in the way, you make a consonant. Usually you do this by putting two parts of
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your mouth together, like your your lower lips and your teeth. When you make the sound
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/f/ as in fun, you do just that - your lower lips (2) come up and touch your upper teeth
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(3) and you blow air through. Fun.
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The two things that touch are called articulators - one is passive and doesn't move, in this
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case it's your upper teeth, which hopefully won't move much at all, and one is active
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- here your lower lips move up to contact your teeth.
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When you learn the symbols for all the consonants, I'll remind you about all of these locations,
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but we'll learn them here for the first time.
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The important places have names. We'll start at the front of the mouth and move towards
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the back. There are 10 places we really care about.
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The first two use the bottom lips as the active articulator:
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Place #1: Bilabial - from bi - 2, and labial, meaning lips
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This is where your upper and lower lips come together, like in man, banana, pot
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Place #2: Labiodental. This is lips and teeth, and you might have guessed, we've encountered
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this already. This is F and V in English.
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Now we're switching to the tip of the tongue as our active articulator:
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Place #3 is Dental. The tip of your tongue is touching your teeth.
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We have two consonants in English, both spelled "th". One is "ttthis" and the other thhhhing.
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Place #4 ia Alveolar: This is the alveolar ridge we talked about, just behind your teeth
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and the tip of your tongue.
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You get 4 sounds in English: t, d, s, z. All of these are tongue against alveolar ridge.
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The next place is just a little bit behind that, maybe a quarter of an inch. If you move
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your tongue just a little bit back, instead of getting "s" you get "sh" as in show, or
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zh as in pleasure.
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The next places involve the middle or back part of the tongue as the active articulator.
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Place #6 is Palatal - this is the soft palate, right in the middle of your mouth. The only
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sound we have in English is /j/, but you'll get all sorts of sounds in other languages,
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like in Italian, you'll get agnus and aglio in Italian and /c/ in Korean. These happen
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at the same place.
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Place #7 is called Velar, which is up at the back of the soft palate - In English, we have
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the sounds /k/ and /g/ here.
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Place #8 is Uvular. We don't have any sounds like it in English. This is the back of your
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tongue against your uvula, the little hangy-downy thing in the back of your throat. You'll encounter
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it in German and French, in their /R/
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Place #9 is pharyngial - this is the root of tongue and back of throat, which apparently
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sounds like getting strangled, but I don't speak any languages with these sounds, so
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I can't demonstrate!
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Our last place, #10, is glottal - this is right at your vocal cords, and the only thing
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you can do to stop air from flowing is bring your vocal cords together. If you bring them
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together a little bit, you're going to get /h/ as in ham. The other sound is when you
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close them completely. You get this sound /?/, which is in English. This is called a
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glottal stop, and you get it in words like "uh oh!" and "nuh uh!" Right in between those
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syllables, you get a stop. /?/
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Those are all the places that you have to worry about. We'll cover them again when we
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discuss each consonant individually, and I'll be making an Anki deck to help you remember
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them as well. To recap, we've discussed voicing - this fan and van - the difference between
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those - and place - the difference between fun, sun and shun. In the next video, we'll
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discuss manner - how you make different sounds in one place - the difference between son
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and ton, which are both alveolar, for instance.
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That's it for this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed yourself and learned something, and be sure
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to check out towerofbabelfish.com for new videos and articles on language learning,
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everything. Until next time!