My #1 Tip For Mastering Difficult Sounds

hey what's up Stefanie the English coach here from EnglishFullTime.com

in this video we are gonna talk about five sounds that you need to master if

you're studying American English now we all know that you have to master all the

sounds if you really want to sound natural and native like but in this

video I'm just gonna go over five because if not this would be a course

not a video and speaking of course I am working on a complete pronunciation

course for you guys it will be ready later this year if you want to be the

first to know about it go ahead and sign up on my website EnglishFullTime.com

now before I demonstrate these sounds for you I just want to give you one

quick pronunciation tip when you are studying a sound in a foreign language

don't worry about practicing that sound in multiple different words choose one

word where the sound occurs and work on that word until you have mastered the

sound it makes the learning process so much easier so much simpler this is

exactly what I do when I am mastering sounds in different languages or in

different accents I choose one word where the sound occurs and I work on

that word until I get the sound down perfectly and then it's really easy I

can use that sound in all the other places that it occurs because I've

already mastered it okay so with that said we have five sounds that we're

gonna go over in this video and I'm gonna demonstrate that sound using one

word that I have chosen I'm not gonna demonstrate it with a bunch of different

words because I just want you to practice this one word okay so the first

sound is the dark L the dark L now you may have heard of this before the dark L

and the light L I actually don't like these terms for it

I would rather call it the front L and the back L the front L or the light L is

the L in the word light light okay the tip of your tongue touches right behind

your top teeth l l l light light okay however with the

dark L there's no contact I don't touch the tip of my tongue to the roof of my

mouth or the back of my teeth at all okay

help help help this word has a dark L in it it's H E L P that L is a dark L okay

help now if I isolate just the e sound and the dark L it sounds like l l l do

you see how my tongue is staying down now granted some people make this sound

a little bit differently some people might say help with the tongue between

their teeth or help with the tongue behind their teeth okay at the end of

the day how you make the sound is not nearly as important as making the sound

accurately okay you want to make the sound accurately so if it's easier for

you to say help and put your tongue between your teeth then you can do that

by all means that is okay but again you want to make sure that the sound is

accurate okay now how do I classify this sound I actually classify the dark L as

an O like sound okay it's like the Spanish o o o that's the Spanish o

okay but the sound is a little bit further back in your throat and you say

o o o so it's very similar in my mind at least to the Spanish O o but

it's made further back in your throat o o okay so work on that word help help

l l l help the next sound that we have is the A as in cat cat okay now I'm going

to exaggerate this sound for you because I really want to get this sound stuck in

your head a a do you see how I'm really dropping my jaw I'm opening my

mouth a a a Cat Cat now you need to think of imitating the sound right say

it exactly as I say it you want to get the tone right you want to get the

quality of the sound right you want it to sound exactly like me cat

a a a a now after you practice the sound and you exaggerate it then you

want to work on toning it down and making it natural because if you ask

somebody hey did you see that cat and you really exaggerate and open your

mouth etc it's kind of awkward so just say cat cat cat where is the cat

did you see the cat so again we exaggerate sounds when we're practicing

them but then in order to make it sound natural we have to tone it down a lot

the next two sounds were gonna work on our are controlled vowels okay there are

several of these in English but we're gonna work on the AR sound as in star AR

okay so it starts as a a and it ends in r AR star now here's a trick when you do

this if you plug your nose like this you should not feel any vibration on the R

sound star star your nose should not be vibrating if it is vibrating then you're

making the sound incorrectly star star star now let's talk about the R sound

because this is really difficult for a lot of you okay so the tongue pulls back

in the mouth the sides of the tongue go against the top teeth okay and the tip

of the tongue curls up to the roof of your mouth but it does not touch the

roof of your mouth star so you should see that my tongue is really going up

this sound if you don't have it in your native language which most people don't

it's very difficult because it's gonna make your tongue tired in the beginning

when you're practicing it because you know you're really gonna have to move

that tongue up there but just keep practicing it will get a lot easier

whatever you do make sure that the tip of your tongue does not touch the roof

of your mouth okay because then you might roll your R and you might say star

okay and we do

want that that rolled R or trilled R is not found anywhere in the English

language at least in American English it's so foreign that many native English

speakers have trouble even making the rolled R sound and going my sister

didn't know how to do that for most of her life and she only figured it out a

few years ago okay so don't roll your R if you are doing that it's because the

tip of your tongue is touching the roof of your mouth make sure it doesn't touch

and you won't roll your R okay the next sound is OR as in more okay so o o or

more or or again do the nose test okay squeeze your nose make sure no air is

coming out of it and then see if it vibrates if it vibrates you're doing it

wrong if it doesn't vibrate you're probably doing it right or okay the must

sound definitely vibrates because the M is a nasal is a nasal consonant so it's

gonna vibrate so don't test it with that I did it and I just felt it vibrate say

ore and plug your nose or or you shouldn't feel any vibration if you say

more and you do that then you'll feel the vibration on the M but then it

should stop okay that's how you know you're making it right or one of the

ways you can know okay the next sound is the flap T now the flap T occurs a lot

in American English and it's commonly found between two vowels the word I want

you to practice with is bottle bottle now I made sure this word also has the

dark L so that you can practice the dark L also remember it's that all sound all

all bottle bottle bottle even if I slow this word down bottle the flap T is

still fast this is a very fast sound because it's like a flap it's like

imagined win down on my hand and then my hand flaps

back okay it flaps like that so that is what the flap T is it's just a really

quick sound the tip of your tongue is quickly touching the roof of your mouth

bottle bottle now some people think of the flap T as a very fast and light D if

that helps you then by all means you can think of it that way

another way to think of this if you speak Spanish is it's like the Spanish

are the light r not the rr okay but the one that's very quick and where your

tongue doesn't roll like in the word cara okay

which means face cara or expensive that also means expensive okay so these are

the five sounds that I wanted to demonstrate in this video go ahead and

give this video a thumbs up if you liked it let me know if this is helpful

because I can definitely make more videos like this explaining different

sounds getting deeper into them demonstrating them etc also if you

really want to improve your pronunciation reduce your accent and I

don't know maybe sound more like a native speaker from the USA or sound

more like me then I highly recommend you download the guide that I'm gonna link

in the description it is the official IPA guide for English Full:Time now I

created this guide it was so much work and the reason is because the

international phonetic alphabet actually for those of you who don't know the

international phonetic alphabet makes studying pronunciation a little bit

easier because it's an alphabet where one symbol represents one sound so it

makes it a lot easier to study pronunciation in English as you know one

sound can be spelled so many different ways so learning the international

phonetic alphabet can help you know how something should be pronounced with that

said the international phonetic alphabet is a tool that linguists and teachers

interpret differently around the world so there's no standardized phonetic

alphabet and this makes it difficult to use because if everybody is using

something a little bit differently how are you really gonna know how something

should be pronounced right so I have done all the research I watched so many

videos I studied so many websites and books just learning how people

interpret this alphabet differently and then I interpreted it for you guys based

on one American English and two specifically how I speak okay so this is

what I'm gonna be teaching everyone in my upcoming pronunciation course as well

how to speak the way I speak and master one specific dialect of American English

so you can speak clearly confidently and with accurate pronunciation so this

guide is free for you and it includes a 26 minute audio lesson where I

demonstrate each of the sounds and I give you more information about

improving your pronunciation and stuff like that

okay so again it's linked in the description I really hope you enjoyed

this video I hope you learned something and I will see you in the next one bye

hey what's up Stefanie the English coach here from English full ugh what

Where was I?

I have five words each word there's one word per sound hmm the tip of your tongue

touches right behind your back the the tip of your tongue touches right behind

your top teeth again you don't need to practice

multiple words in and each sound is related yeah it's like wind it's like

imagine something okay how do I explain this because it's an alphabet where each

sound sym because it's an alphabet where each symbol represents because

it's an alphabet where one symbol represents one sound