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  • This is Gabe from TowerofBabelfish.com

  • This is the first of four/five videos on English pronunciation and the International phonetic

  • alphabet (IPA)

  • In these tutorials I have two smaller goals and one overarching goal:

  • The first is to teach you how the IPA works, and

  • two, maybe more important, how english works in your mouth -- what's going on in your

  • mouth to make these sounds.

  • Overall, we're looking to give you a tool for understanding pronunciation in your own

  • language, so you can apply it to your target language.

  • If you start with correct pronunciation in your target language, you get so much:

  • -you'll retain vocab better -you'll have better listening comprehension

  • -Later, you get native speakers who won't switch to english

  • -In the end, you won't be training bad habits for years and have to unlearn them somehow.

  • And so lets get started. We'll first talk about some basics - what is a consonant and

  • what does IPA do?

  • IPA is a sound alphabet - it gives you a symbol, like this one or this one, and it means one

  • sound - always.

  • In English, we have a bunch of letters, which correspond to vowels or consonants, and many

  • of these have multiple sounds: The letter C as in Cat and C as in Nice are

  • totally different - they have totally different sounds - and IPA has two symbols for those

  • two sounds. Conversely, cymbal and symbol sound the same,

  • even though they're spelled differently, and so IPA for both of these words is exactly

  • the same. IPA only cares about the sound.

  • Everytime I write in IPA, I'll surround it by two slashes, and every time I'm referring

  • to the letters and words in english as they're spelled, I'll put quotes around them.

  • so the letter "s" can make this sound /s/ in IPA - it has the same character - but it

  • also can sound like /z/ (Rose) or /SS/ as in sure or /ZZ/ as in pleasure. IPA splits

  • all of these sounds apart, and really tells you what you can expect to hear when you see

  • a symbol.

  • Ever the next few videos, you'll be learning all of these symbols, but for now we should

  • talk about the three things that make one consonant. These are voicing, place and manner.

  • We'll talk about them in that order.

  • Voicing is perhaps the simplest. Put your hand on your throat and say "ffffffffffffff".

  • Feel anything at your throat? You shouldn't.

  • now compare that with "vvvvvvvvvvv". Your hand should feel buzzing in your throat. f

  • and v are a pair of consonants that are identical except for that buzzing in your vocal cords.

  • F is known as "unvoiced consonant", and V as a "voiced consonant." Most consonants in

  • English come in voiced/unvoiced pairs, like T and D, or B and P.

  • Place is a little more complicated. We'll need to look at a picture of your mouth. Here's

  • a very detailed one from Wikipedia. To get oriented, 1 and 2 on the left are your lips.

  • 3 is your upper teeth, 4 is that ridge behind your teeth known as the alveolar ridge.

  • Jumping around a bit, 13-18 is your tongue, from the root (13) to underneath the tip (18),

  • which we don't use in English; we only use the tip.

  • 11 are your vocal cords

  • 9 is your uvula, 7 is your soft palate and 6 is your hard palate. All the remaining numbers

  • are just in between spots, so 5 is in between 4 and 6 - between your alveolar ridge and

  • your hard palate.

  • To make any sound, you need to blow air out of your throat. If you don't get in the way,

  • you make a vowel, like "ah" "eh".

  • If you DO get in the way, you make a consonant. Usually you do this by putting two parts of

  • your mouth together, like your your lower lips and your teeth. When you make the sound

  • /f/ as in fun, you do just that - your lower lips (2) come up and touch your upper teeth

  • (3) and you blow air through. Fun.

  • The two things that touch are called articulators - one is passive and doesn't move, in this

  • case it's your upper teeth, which hopefully won't move much at all, and one is active

  • - here your lower lips move up to contact your teeth.

  • When you learn the symbols for all the consonants, I'll remind you about all of these locations,

  • but we'll learn them here for the first time.

  • The important places have names. We'll start at the front of the mouth and move towards

  • the back. There are 10 places we really care about.

  • The first two use the bottom lips as the active articulator:

  • Place #1: Bilabial - from bi - 2, and labial, meaning lips

  • This is where your upper and lower lips come together, like in man, banana, pot

  • Place #2: Labiodental. This is lips and teeth, and you might have guessed, we've encountered

  • this already. This is F and V in English.

  • Now we're switching to the tip of the tongue as our active articulator:

  • Place #3 is Dental. The tip of your tongue is touching your teeth.

  • We have two consonants in English, both spelled "th". One is "ttthis" and the other thhhhing.

  • Place #4 ia Alveolar: This is the alveolar ridge we talked about, just behind your teeth

  • and the tip of your tongue.

  • You get 4 sounds in English: t, d, s, z. All of these are tongue against alveolar ridge.

  • The next place is just a little bit behind that, maybe a quarter of an inch. If you move

  • your tongue just a little bit back, instead of getting "s" you get "sh" as in show, or

  • zh as in pleasure.

  • The next places involve the middle or back part of the tongue as the active articulator.

  • Place #6 is Palatal - this is the soft palate, right in the middle of your mouth. The only

  • sound we have in English is /j/, but you'll get all sorts of sounds in other languages,

  • like in Italian, you'll get agnus and aglio in Italian and /c/ in Korean. These happen

  • at the same place.

  • Place #7 is called Velar, which is up at the back of the soft palate - In English, we have

  • the sounds /k/ and /g/ here.

  • Place #8 is Uvular. We don't have any sounds like it in English. This is the back of your

  • tongue against your uvula, the little hangy-downy thing in the back of your throat. You'll encounter

  • it in German and French, in their /R/

  • Place #9 is pharyngial - this is the root of tongue and back of throat, which apparently

  • sounds like getting strangled, but I don't speak any languages with these sounds, so

  • I can't demonstrate!

  • Our last place, #10, is glottal - this is right at your vocal cords, and the only thing

  • you can do to stop air from flowing is bring your vocal cords together. If you bring them

  • together a little bit, you're going to get /h/ as in ham. The other sound is when you

  • close them completely. You get this sound /?/, which is in English. This is called a

  • glottal stop, and you get it in words like "uh oh!" and "nuh uh!" Right in between those

  • syllables, you get a stop. /?/

  • Those are all the places that you have to worry about. We'll cover them again when we

  • discuss each consonant individually, and I'll be making an Anki deck to help you remember

  • them as well. To recap, we've discussed voicing - this fan and van - the difference between

  • those - and place - the difference between fun, sun and shun. In the next video, we'll

  • discuss manner - how you make different sounds in one place - the difference between son

  • and ton, which are both alveolar, for instance.

  • That's it for this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed yourself and learned something, and be sure

  • to check out towerofbabelfish.com for new videos and articles on language learning,

  • everything. Until next time!

This is Gabe from TowerofBabelfish.com

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