Go from BORING to INTERESTING with English rhythm

Hi, everyone. I am Jade. Today we are talking about the rhythm of English. And that's not

my normal voice. I'm showing you that because rhythm is really important when you're speaking

a different language, and every language has its own rhythm. So, I thought today, I'll

tell you a little bit about the rhythm of English. What does English actually sound

like if we break it down?

It's really important to improve the rhythm of your English speech, because we try to

avoid what's called monotone. Monotone voices are... Well, it's a big subject, but one thing

about monotone voices is they don't go up or down, and they're not very expressive.

So we try to avoid that, and we can see that actually in English poetry. And I think in...

I think poetry in general is one way that you can develop your rhythm in English, because

poetry is written in a way that calls attention to rhythm of English.

So here's a little bit of a famous poem in English. Don't worry if you don't know what

the words mean, because it's quite an interesting poem in that the words are invented words

for this poem. Like it's... They're not real things, but when we hear it, we get a sense

of what it means. But in terms of rhythm, it's interesting because so much of English

poetry is written in what's called iambs, which is basically an unstressed followed

by a stressed syllable. So I'll write that down for you. Iamb, stressed followed by...

Ohp, wrong way around. Unstressed followed by a stressed syllable and repeated like that.

And you've heard of Shakespeare, right? You have heard of Shakespeare, that famous poet?

Well, he wrote in iambic pentameter, which means five of those repeated. So, one, two,

three, four, five. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter. Not continuously always through

everything he ever wrote, but if there was ever an important character in one of his

plays, that was in iambic pentameter.

This poem is not in iambic pentameter, because we don't have five. I'll show you. So, when

we read the poem... Well, when I read the poem, I want you just to listen to the rhythm,

and then I'll talk a little bit about it because it's one thing for me to tell you the rhythm

of English is iambs; unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed,

but what does that actually mean? So, here we go, I'll read it to you.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious bandersnatch!"

So, poetry is more rhythmic and elegant than just our normal speech, but our normal speech

likes this unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed rhythm, so there is similarity.

So let's find where the stresses are here, so that when I read it again, you can follow

it. So, because it's unstressed, stressed, here is the first stressed. And, did you notice

when I read it, it was "behware", not "be-ware"? It's "behware". Our connecting words are not

so important. You can see here, unstressed words: articles, "the", "a", they're not so

important so we don't stress them. We can stress them but that's a different point.

Names, usually stressed. We had an unstressed there, so we're going to stressed again. Unstressed,

secondary stress.

We have one... Oo, it's not... You cannot see what I'm doing here. I'm going to put

it down a little bit for you. Stressed, unstressed, secondary stress. There's always one main

stress in a word, but if there's an extra stress, it's not as... Not as much as the

first. Unstressed, "my" is a pronoun. Pronouns: "he", "she", "it", "my", "his", unstressed.

Noun, stress again. And this is going to repeat throughout the poem, so I'm just going to

go a little bit quickly this... A little bit more quickly this time. Unstressed, stressed,

unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed. Again, we've got "beware",

unstressed, stressed, unstressed, name. And the last line, again, unstress, stress, unstress,

and the word "bandersnatch" has two stresses, but the first... The main stress is on the

first syllable.

So, as I read it this time, try to follow... I dropped my pen lid. I don't need it. Try

to follow the notation of the stresses. So as I'm reading it, see if you can hear that

that sound, that syllable is harder, stronger. Some people see it as louder, some people

see it as stronger. For some people, it's like the stress is the hill, and the unstress

is the valley. So, yeah, just have a listen and see what it feels like to you.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch.

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious bandersnatch!"

And I had an invisible pause, there. We do that quite a lot in poetry. It's one sentence

or line, but quite often, we'll have invisible pauses there, and we'll say... Do that in

our normal speech as well. It's not always at the same rhythm. Did you notice, as well,

that unstressed words do not sound the same way as when we just read the word? That word

is "that", but when I read that line, it's quite different. "The jaws that bite, the

claws that catch." It becomes "thut" rather than "that". So an unstressed syllable loses

its full definition, you could say, and it's something that we pass over quickly and it

can often join the words next to it, because it's not so important. And similar with "and".

I'll read this again. "Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun". "Un", "un" or "und", not "and".

Could be "and", but saying "and" makes it sound more stressed.

So, what is rhythm? Rhythm is sentence stress, plus word stress and syllable stress. So we

look to word stress here on the individual words. Sentence stress is the... Some words

in the sentence overall are more important, so those are the ones with the biggest stress

or they're said the loudest, or is the clearest definition. For example, Jabberwock. "Beware

the Jabberwock, my son!" So this is where the stress most of all is there because language

flows. You can... Again, it's like hills and valleys, each line goes up to pitch.

And as a side note: "rhythm", possibly the hardest word to spell in English. This is

how I remember it: "Remember How You Told His Mum". That's two words, there. So that's

how I remember to spell that word, and now you can remember how to spell that word.

Okay, so you're probably thinking: "Okay, I see in these lines where the stress is,

but how do I apply that?" And maybe you want some rules or some guidance about that. So,

in general, the stress words are the important words that carry the actual meaning. The verbs,

the nouns, the adjectives, the adverbs, and the question words - these are where we like

you to find our stress. Whereas the grammar words, the words that sort of sew and link

these other words together, these are the unstressed words that will join the words

next to them; not be said with so much definition. There will be exceptions, but in general,

unstressed. When we come back, we'll look at how to apply sentence stress rules just

in... Sentence word stress rules just in our normal speech.

Let's have a look at how to apply sentence stress, word stress rules in our normal speech.

So I was thinking about greetings. "Greetings." And in English English, if you say to someone:

"Hi, how are you?" It feels impolite if the other person just says: "Fine." Something

is wrong about it. And I was thinking about that. It's not just in the word. It's not

really just the word "fine", it's in the rhythm, because we expect the reply to have an unstress

and a stress. So if you change "fine" to: "Fine thanks"... "Fine thanks", it sounds

fine. It sounds polite. Or if you... Most of our replies are two... Two syllables. -"Hi,

how are you?" -"I'm well.", "Good thanks."

-"How are you?" -"I'm well.", "Good thanks.",

"Fine thanks." Yeah, they're the main ones. But if you... The point to consider here is

just saying: "Fine." or: "Good." something feels a bit wrong about it, and I think that's

because of the rhythm, because we're expecting stressed, unstressed.

Moving on from that, talking about having a cup of tea. English people like to have

a cup of tea. "Cuppa" is a colloquial word for "cup of tea". So here we have a statement.

And you'll hear when I read this that it has a stilted harsh rhythm. "Stilted" means like

something not smooth, not flowing about it. So I'll read it: "You would like a cup of

tea." It sounds very strong, like a... Like a command. "You would like a cup of tea."

And I think the reason is the rhythm isn't off, because in our normal flowing speech,

we connect the words. So if we say: "You would", it's giving it a strong impact.

Whereas in normal connected, flowing speech, it would be like this: "You'd like a cup of

tea." We compress those words into one syllable. So I'll just show you where the syllables

are, where the stresses are. Here, what have we got? Stress. "You would like a cup of tea."

Something wrong about it, because we would actually prefer to stress "would" because

it's a question word here, but we can't because we can't have the two stresses together, so

something's a bit wrong about it. "You would like a cup of tea." You see, when I'm saying

it, I'm stressing it. So, anyway. Let's say that's why it's wrong, because it's half and

it doesn't meet... It doesn't fit what we want to hear; unstress, stress, unstress,

stress, blah, blah.

What about the next example? "You'd like a cup of tea." Stress there, let's say unstressed.

"You'd like a cup of tea." And these connecting words, they become schwas. "You'd like a cup

of tea." Because schwas are the sound in English which really connects between our stress and

unstress, so that's why we like them so much, because it gives us that rhythm. Dad, a, da,

dum, da dum, da dum. That's why we like them. Many, many schwas in the English language.

And then something else to mention is how we reverse the expected rhythm when we're

asking questions. And I think this is important because when we're just listening to someone,

maybe we're like paying half attention most of the time. But when a question comes, we

know that we need to pay attention because we're being asked something. One of the ways

we know that is because the rhythm changes. That's a really good way to get somebody's

attention, changing the rhythm of how you're speaking. So, how does it go then? "Would

you like"? "Would you like a cup of tea?" Would you like? Would you like? And I connect

it, and the sounds flow together: "Would you like a cup of tea?"

So, yeah, sentence stress and word stress, it... Together, is the music of the English

language. It'd be different in your native language, because we all have different rhythms

for our languages. One way to passively develop this is through reading English poetry. No,

not reading. Listening to English poetry, or also music, because music in hip-hop style

or something like that is in this rhythm, iambs; unstress, stress, unstress, stress.

So just pay attention to it, be aware of it. Don't feel that you need to say every word

correctly like a robot, because it's not... It's not musical. It doesn't sound nice to us.

So, yeah, what you can do now is go to the engVid website, do a quiz on this, and you

can subscribe here on my engVid channel and on my personal channel. I sometimes talk about

aspects of language like this, like not only what we do with language, but why we do it.

I look at some of those ideas, I share my thoughts with you. So, yeah, come and see

what I'm doing at my channel. And have I said everything now? Subscribe in two places, do

the quiz. Yes, I have. So I'm going to go now. I'm going to go now. See you later.