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  • Hello I'm Emma from mmmEnglish!

  • I've got a pronunciation lesson for you today,

  • one that I think you'll find incredibly useful.

  • I'm going to give you some tips that will help you to pronounce thousands of English words.

  • Words that end in -tion.

  • Now I bet that you're already thinking of some examples of English words that end in -tion, aren't you?

  • There are so many!

  • This part of the word is a suffix,

  • a common ending in an English word.

  • Now words that end like this in English are almost always a noun.

  • And the pronunciation of this syllable is always unstressed.

  • It's always an unstressed syllable which means it's really quick.

  • Yeah, -tion is pronounced

  • If it was written like it's supposed to sound

  • it would be like this..

  • Well phonetically it's

  • ʃ

  • ə

  • n

  • These are the phonetic symbols, the sounds, not the letters.

  • ʃ - an unvoiced consonant sound.

  • ə - the unstressed vowel sound, the schwa.

  • And n - a voiced consonant sound.

  • Now bring all of those sounds together and you get

  • -tion.

  • It's really, really fast.

  • In fact, often the schwa sound is absorbed into the consonant sounds.

  • Because it's unstressed, we hardly hear it at all.

  • So if you see it in a dictionary written like this,

  • it means that the sound is absorbed into the consonant sounds around it.

  • Now these words are a special bonus for Spanish and Portuguese, Italian and French and German and Dutch native speakers

  • because there are patterns between words in your language and words in English

  • which means you instantly know the meaning of thousands of English words.

  • The pronunciation rules that you learn in this lesson will help you to correctly pronounce all of these words in English.

  • Okay let's build up with some extra syllables to practise using this suffix within some bigger words.

  • Okay? Practise out loud with me.

  • Caution.

  • Tradition.

  • Frustration.

  • Conversation.

  • Now there are a couple of exceptions to this pronunciation rule.

  • Just a couple, so don't worry!

  • When the consonant sound is the sound right before the -tion,

  • the pronunciation becomes /tʃən/ instead of

  • instead of

  • Question.

  • Exhaustion.

  • Digestion.

  • One of the wonderful patterns that exists in English is that you can attach -tion to the end of many verbs to create a noun.

  • It creates the noun that is the action of the verb.

  • I mean take a look at how many there are,

  • and these are just a few!

  • In an earlier lesson, I talked about the importance of word stress in spoken English.

  • Using the correct word stress will help you to sound much more natural when you speak English.

  • Like I said, the -tion suffix is always unstressed.

  • So which syllable should you stress?

  • It's actually simple, it's the syllable before -tion.

  • The stress pattern is consistent throughout English pronunciation.

  • The syllable before -tion is the stressed syllable.

  • Action.

  • Caution.

  • Tradition.

  • Frustration.

  • Connection.

  • Donation.

  • Repetition.

  • Inspiration.

  • Construction.

  • Invention.

  • Infection.

  • Description.

  • Collection.

  • Interruption.

  • Population.

  • Celebration.

  • Innovation.

  • Transformation.

  • It's consistent across all syllables.

  • -tion doesn't have to be the final suffix either, it can followed by -al or -ally.

  • Traditional. Traditionally.

  • International.

  • Internationally.

  • But the stress pattern is exactly the same - even now!

  • The stress syllable is the one before -tion

  • International.

  • Traditionally.

  • Well that's it for this lesson!

  • I hope that this little pronunciation tip

  • showed you just how easy it is to start practising the correct pronunciation of all of these words.

  • Remember that there are thousands of them in English.

  • Make sure you subscribe and check out some of my other pronunciation lessons right here.

  • Thanks for watching today and I'll see you next week.

  • Bye for now!

Hello I'm Emma from mmmEnglish!

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