Master American English Rhythm - Rhythm Example Sentences | Pronunciation/Ear Training Course

[@Maryana_B]

I'm so glad I found this channel. You have a talent for explaining complex things easily.

[@adrianperez-in7qe]

This is the best English pronunciation teacher on KZbin . The way he explains and the content of his videos are amazing. I feel like I should be paying for these lessons. Hope you get more subscribers 🙏🏻

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Thanks so much for the feedback and kind words ☺ Glad to help!

[@stupiditydeliveryservice1599]

Hi, Josh, it's me again. Actually, I have finished my looong accent journey, and I am commenting under this video because the rhythm was the last part that brought everything together for me. It's actually amazing how a human brain can focus on one distant part of the picture so hard that it completely rejects to see anything else no matter what. I was focused about intonation so hard that every time that I sounded wrong, I thought that the reason was the intonation. The real problem was the fact that I kept sliding into my first language rhythm all the time rather than its intonation without any understanding what was going on. In fact, rhythm and intonation are very closely tied together, because you actually make rhythm with your intonation. So for me it was like trying to use a two-handed tool with only one hand, I just thought about how to stress words without realising what to stress and how my sentence should sound as a whole. So when I actually started paying attention to the rhythm, I just immediately lost all signs of the intonation of my first language in my speech, and now I can finally sound pretty English on my own, not only when I try to repeat someone else's speech (and then try to figure out why I can't speak like this all the time on my own). Anyway, I have some thoughts on the English rhythm that might be useful to you, so here they are: 1. First of all, stressed syllables have different length depending on how many syllables there are after them. Back to CAR and CARPENTER. In the sentence 'I bought a blue car' the syllable "car" can be pretty long, but if you replace the word car with "carpenter", it's not the case. There are two syllables after the stressed syllable in "carpenter", so it's pronounced pretty fast anyway (though the pitch height on the stressed syllable remains the same). Same with any other words: AWE - the ɔ sound (if no merger) is stressed, and there are no syllables after it, hence it is pretty long AWFUL - you can lengthen the sound a little bit, but not as much AWFULLY - the sound is quite short An extremely important point here is that all of this works only if these words are logically stressed (if they bear the sentence stress, the nucleus), since I'm simply not very sure what happens if they are stressed with the usual stress rather than the sentence stress. 2. The rhythmic units in English are all of the same length as in Spanish or Hindi, but in Spanish or Hindi these units are devided by syllables themselves, while in English they are devided by one stressed syllable and the unstressed syllables after it until the next stressed syllable. What I mean is that the words AWE, AWFUL and AWFULLY are one rhythmic group each, and since every rhythmic group is pronounced in the same amount of time (say, one second), the stessed syllables (thus the vowels in them) get longer or shorter as I described in the first paragraph so it can be pronounced with all the unstressed syllables after it in one second. My problem was that in my first language the stressed syllables are always longer than the unstressed ones, but both types have the fixed amount of time in which you pronounce them, like, always no matter what. 3. Not every content words are stressed. Actually it depends on how we define stress, but what I mean here is that we don't highlight every stessed syllable with pitch in normal speech, and that goes for the content words as well. For example: *That was a *ve.ry *beau.ti.ful *!day All stressed syllables here are highlighted with pitch, pitch goes higher on every stressed syllable in each content word, and then we have the word day with the sentence stress on it. But... I *don't use *inter. net for *var.i.ous *!rea.sons In this sentence a very interesting thing is going on. The word USE is not highlighted with pitch, it goes down in pitch as if it was a function word, and the second syllable of the word INTERNET does exactly the same thing even though the word itself has a secondary stress there. Anoter example: I *want to *un.der.*!stand The first syllable of the word understand is higher in pitch because it's surrounded by unstressed syllables, but... I *don't un.der.*!stand this The same syllabe in the same word here is not higher in pitch anymore, but it goes down instead because it's placed next to a stressed syllable which is DON'T Two important points here are: Point one. Although stressed syllables of content words become unstressed, they still do not behave as unstressed syllables of function words. The latter tend to reduce their vowels to the schwa sound, blend with other function words into one foggy word and be pronounced very, very quickly. It is not the case with the stressed syllables of content words that become unstressed, because they do not blend into anything and their sounds don't get reduced to the schwa, they function normally except for the fact they are pronounced in lower pitch. Point two. This rule of unstressing syllables that are placed next to another stressed syllable does not work for syllables that bear the sentence stress. For example: because I *don't see *ve.ry *!well Everything works as explained, the word see is unstressed. be.cause I *don't *!see The word SEE now is stressed even though it is placed next to the stressed word DON'T. The word SEE holds the sentence stress now and by any means can't be unstressed (it doesn't go higher in pitch necessarily, but it is still the most prominent word out of the whole sentence anyway). And of course I'm not saying you can't stress every syllable and highlight it with pitch, I'm only saying this is not the the way people usually speak. *John *bought *too *much *fish *this *!time This sentence pronounced with higher pitch on every syllable sounds very weird and way too emphatic. As opposed to... *John bought *too much *fish this *!time And another curious point is how this system may affect words with more than one stressed syllables: He is *eigh*!teen He is *eigh.teen *years *!old He *told eigh*teen stor.ies *that *!night I believe that this flexibility of stress movement is the main reason why some people who have learned English for so long (me included) still have a bad ear for it. And back to the length, since usually the second stress in a row gets destressed (or maybe better to say deaccented), the length of the stressed syllables with no sentence stress on them is usually pretty small. What should happen with the length if we highlight two syllables in a row regardless, again, I'm not very sure. And answering my question that I asked you half a year ago. 'Men must be free to do what they believe'. How do we know that the word "men" is stressed and the word "must" is not if both of these words consist of vowels that are extremely often used in unstressed syllables (ɛ and ʌ)? It's very simple. We know that because our voice goes higher on the stressed syllables and lower on the unstressed ones (or again, maybe accented and deaccented is a much better term). So the word "men" is going to be inevitably higher in pitch, because it's the very first content word in a sentence, and the word must could or could not be stressed depending on the preferences of the speaker, the context, the intentions of the utterns etc. etc. *Men must be *free to *do what they be*!lieve. *Men *must be *free to *do what they be*!lieve. And if the word "must" is not stressed (as it usually should be), it's not only pronounced lower in pitch because, among other things the word must is a function word. So not only it's pronounced lower in pitch, but its vowel also gets reduced from more open ʌ to the more closed schwa-sound, which can be pronounced extremely quickly while the word itself may be blended into other function words of a sentence. Anyway, that's it for me. I don't think I've achieved 100% natural American sounding, but I finally got to the point where I sound natural enough to fully express myself without feeling like an impostor and being constantly reminded I'm a Russian speaker whenever I speak English. And reading in English now is just pure joy for me. Anyway I wanted to say thank you for all your work, you make absolutely amazing content and are always willing to share knowledge with fellow language-learners, you're the pure definition of teacher and, chances are, I wouldn't have done it without you. This was an extremely long path for me over the year, and I kept commenting about it under your videos because I hoped a non-native perspective might help you as well. Feel free to delete all those comments if you think they are misleading for others or just aren't suitable for your videos, because I believe I'm done with all these enormous essays under your stuff. I'm proud to have learned from you, you helped me become a little bit happier. Take care!

[@Norbizzle]

Very helpful still and keep them videos coming, really useful contents!

[@shyambaranwal727]

Josh you are simply superb...I never had so much clarity about English and the nuances of American English before... thank you so much for all your explanation.👌👌👍🙏🙏

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Glad you're liking the channel and thanks for all the great comments! I appreciate the feedback 🙂 More to come!

[@maryreem835]

Thank you. Your videos really helpful.

[@Qprovessional]

Great explanation. I love your lessions!

[@JnWayn]

Something I wanna ask you about, based on a sentence used in this lesson and another that not listed but that first brought this awareness to my mind. In the sentence, 'I can only imagine', it sounds to me like in fast speech, the 'can' sounds more like 'gn', but you didn't recognize this slur in the video, so I am wondering if I am hearing speech incorrectly, whenever it sounds this way to me. Another similar example is the assertion, 'Look at it', now the 'k' in 'Look' has 'g' sound - Loog ut it. Do you hear this one too?

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

What's likely happening is you're having trouble hearing the difference between the weak K and the G. It's an ear training problem. This lesson is a good start: kzbin.info/www/bejne/d3nToaZ5d9uUrKc If that's easy for you, then it might just be in the flow of speech that you have trouble, which is common.

[@mdaleem7053]

This video's very helpful for thank you so much ❤️❤️. Please make more videos on intonation, Rhythm, and sentence stress in details

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Already planned ☺

[@bantorio6525]

... !!! ... bravo ... !!!

[@houstontexas3838]

How can I take your course?

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

There's a link to my italki in the description of any recent video. However, I only teach pronunciation through mouth posture right now and the course is still in development.

[@IELTS7]

Make Videos according to common use of vocabulary.

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean to make videos about commonly used words?

[@douglasmarinho3653]

To me it's easier to speak faster if I don't pronounce the R at the words non stressed

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Well, you can’t always do that. There are times when we can maybe reduce an R to a schwa or make it a lazier R, but if you want to sound American, the R sound must be pronounced most of the time. Don't worry. The mouth posture lessons will help you do things more easily 🙂

[@alexandermartirosyan3406]

The funniest thing about all this rhythm talks is that those "teachers' don't talk themselves the way they preach. What they produce while trying to illustrate that "stress timed" bullshit, sounds absolutely unnatural. No one talks like that. Somehow all those TESOL teachers manage not to hear how weird all that sounds even to my non-native speaker ear. And never question the dogma which, actually, is 80 years old and is based on nothing. Linguists even don't bother to refute it as "it has never been based on anything solid".

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/fnq5h6CIfd-Jias