English Pronunciation Lesson | -TION suffix

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!