The 3 Types of Intonation and the Hidden System | Feel English Intonation like a Native Lesson 0

[@javirodriguez5617]

You are not poor teacher,,you are a super star,,,thanks,,very much .

[@ea6427]

I really love how you teach.

[@javirodriguez5617]

Sounds like advanced English....excellent video.

[@deliohector]

Okay, gotta admit. My mind was blown right out the gate when you introduced the concept of gravity, and it kept on getting blown throught the video. That was fantastic stuff right there. I used to think this stuff was downright unteachable. Props, man! You rock!👌

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

It gets better. Just wait for the full lesson 🙃

[@deliohector]

@@NativeEnglishHacks Yes sir. 😊

[@mry9311]

Wow! I can't thank you enough for this valuable lesson. I've always struggled with emotional intonation and tones and it was hard for me to decide whether someone is being condescending or sarcastic or angry or happy depending on their voice tone without watching their facial expressions and the how high their voice is. Thank you for being here on KZbin helping us ❤️

[@mry9311]

Could you please make videos with these types of intonation especially with emotional one and give many example sentences depending on mode and tone

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

That will be in the full masterclass that's coming soon :)

[@mry9311]

@@NativeEnglishHacks Can't wait to watch it! ❤️I'll be checking the notifications every now and then 😁

[@laracroftvideos]

I love how even your “previews” are essentially nearly 20-minute long lessons 😅 And yaaasss for the Pikachu teaching aid!!! 🤣

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Well, it's a masterclass. And it's going to be long lol

[@GG-fy5hm]

Hey Congrats on 5k!! and btw I got a quick question. Many youtubers say Ts and Ds are very important to have an american accent. But one thing I noticed when going through a lot of people is that some local people in my country try to sound American by changing their Ts and Ds but I don't feel like American when listening to those people. But I found some people whose Ts and Ds are not the perfect but their voice feels a lot more American because they do have the American voice like a native(this is what called as placement i guess) . What do you think about my opinion?

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Thanks :) I'd have to listen to some examples. But the T/D are only one small part. If you don't have the right T/D, especially the flapped-D, any American will know you're not native (so it's a requirement for the accent), but you can have most other things right and sound quite American overall. I very much doubt it has anything to do with "placement". If anything, they probably have a closer mouth posture

[@stupiditydeliveryservice1599]

Hey, Josh. I finally made it here through all my intonation studying, and I know you so much want to know my opinion. First of all, I always felt that the picture wasn't quite full because i never understood in which frames i should use the knowledge I have. After a while I found a book named English Intonation - An Introduction by J. C. Wells and it made everything so clear to me. The first incredibly important thing I learned was the fact that we always use intonation (a fall, a rise or a fall-rise) ONLY on the focus words. Again, maybe it is something everybody perfectly understands without further clarifications, but I had huge problems with my tone because I didn't realize it, and still, this is a small part of the picture. Thing is, we use intonation in our speech constantly. Every word has some pitch no matter what (if there's no pitch, it means there's no voice). So how do we make it to the focus word and what pitch do we use? It's quite hard to explain without pictures, so don't judge me: Let's say we have a pitch range from 0% (the lowest point of our normal speaking range) to 100% (the highest). Until any !stressed words in your sentence your pitch stays at 0%. You pronounce words very lowly. When you run into the first stressed syllable (usually the first content word in your sentence) you pronounce that syllable and the following !unstressed syllables after it at 90% of your pitch height until the next stressed syllable. On the second stress syllable in your sentence you go 10% (very approximately) lower in your pitch and you repeat this process of gradual descending until you get to a focus word, on which you use one of the three English intonations (or one of their several variations to be precise). After that your intonation is reset and you come back to 0% if the syllable is unstressed or to 90% on a stressed syllable. So it looks like this: I (0%) wanna (90%) go (80%) to (80%) the (80%) beach (focus). [pause] But (0%) there's (0%) no (90%) beach (80%) a(80%)round (70%) my (70%) place (focus). The unstressed syllables after the focus word work differently (the ones that belong in the same sentence with the focus word). If the focus word has a rise or a fall-rise intonation, they go gradually higher, and if it's a fall, they stay on 0% of the pitch. It's actually quite a difficult topic to explain in a comment, but it in fact lets you sound so much native. For instance in Russian you always go higher in pitch to 50% on every stressed syllable. That's why 1.) Even being able to perfecty produce every English sound I still sound half-Russian, 2.) Russians have such a poor ear for English. And since Russian works so very differently in intonation (what a surprise), I can rightly perform the whole English pattern only 1 time out of 80 maybe, but when I finally do that right, I sound like a completely different person. I sent some recordings to my British pal, and that was the first time in years when he said he wouldn't recognize I'm not a native. Also sent them to my Russian-speaking pals and they didn't even recognize that was me. Another important point is that intonation movements on focus words again work differently compared to other languages. When I first heard that we fall on statements in English, i thought okay, it's so easy and it works exactly the same in my first language. But it doesn't. As i said, in Russian we always go higher on all stressed syllables to point out they are stressed, but since we don't go as high as we go for questions, we still mentally perceive everything lower than 50% of pitch height as falling intonation and I didn't know that until recently. In fact there's no such thing as falling intonation in Russian, it sounds very foreign, but it is a mental factor that messes up a lot with both understanding English speech and doing English pronunciation. I never even realized I always percieved slightly rising English intonation as falling, because it raises to the same point as it does in Russian in statements. I'd think of tones in a language as of additional set of sounds. Even if they have practical equivalents in one's language, they are not exactly the same. So even the Russian slightly rising tone is not the same thing as the English slightly rising tone, even if both of them are in fact rising, they still raise from and to different points. Anyway I extremely recommend the book to you. The author did an immense amount of work putting everything together and all the difficult cases of intonation are precisely described there. If you can't find it yourself, I can share it and all the audios included, I have no doubt such a teacher will put it to good use. And I'm going back to my practice, this is for sure the hardest thing I've faced in my English-learning, but also the most rewarding. Now I have to completely change my most natural habits and reflexes and I know in the end it will be perfectly worth it

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Hmmmm, based on your description, I can't say I would 100% agree with everything (perhaps it's simply a matter of how it's explained), but if you're getting the results, that's all that matters. I'll check out the book at some point. Best case scenario it will help me teach better, worst case I can critique it. Btw, is that book for British English or American English? Because we don't use intonation quite the same (though many things are shared)

[@stupiditydeliveryservice1599]

@@NativeEnglishHacks it is mostly on RP with quick remarks about American English. Chapter 5 was the most valuable to me, so if you quickly want to get what i was writing about you could jump straight to it first

[@stupiditydeliveryservice1599]

@@NativeEnglishHacks UPDATED: My first comment is 100% correct, BUT it applies only for very emphatic speech where every stressed syllable is accented. So you'd say "I wanna go to the beach" with that pattern only if you're repeating yourself for a tenth time or maybe if you're a BBC announcer. It's also optional and you can perfectly emphasize every word with the same pitch-height on the stressed syllables and with unstressed syllables in low pitch, or you can do that sort of downstepping with low-in-pitch unstressed syllables as well (which is exactly how it works in Russian all of a sudden). The book I spoke about seems to be teaching you some weird sort of declaritive English (though I still highly recommend it), and I didn't catch it the first time I was reading it. Anyway the general spoken pattern looks like this: I (low) wa (high) nna (mid) go (mid) to (mid) the (mid) beach (focus, a falling intonation) 1. The unstressed syllables before the first stressed syllable are pronounced fast and low 2. The first stressed syllable is pronounced fast, high and relatively prominent 3. Both stressed and unstressed syllables after the first stressed syllable are pronounced in middle pitch 4. The focus word has an intonation change on it (a fall, a rise, a fall-rise or whatnot; hence the length of the word if it is one-syllable) 5. (?) The words after the focus word are pronounced in low pitch, often with creak in your voice (not 100% correct) if it is a statement, or they go continuously higher if it's a quesion There seems to be more than that to it, since it looks like the focus word is not the only word you apply an intonation change onto. There seems to be more intonation patterns for the words before and after the focus word (some of them are described in the book). There seems to be some change in pitch on unaccented syllables when we move from one chunk of a long sentence to another. I've learned a lot of stuff from the programme called PRAAT, it's a beautiful thing you can download from the official site and it shows you the whole pitch contour. There is also the labelling system called TOBI system I'm currently trying to learn as wel, which seems to have a lot of answers too. Most times I pronounce short sentences now I sound absolutely American, to my own ear at least, but I'm still unable to pronounce longer sentences because I don't always understand where my intonation should be at a certain point. I continue working on it anyway, I'll let you know when I find anything valuable. Have a good one!

[@pankaweeumonsri688]

Regarding the central gravity( the schwa position), Does this mean that everytime that I don't raise my voice it will be pulled back down to the Schawa position? Especially at the end of the sentence I notice my voice will sound a little bit lower and deeper if implemented this guidence.

[@stupiditydeliveryservice1599]

Very good! I've been waiting for something like this for quite a while now. I also remember you said we raise intonation before commas in English, though you didn't mention it in this video, so I hope there's more to come. The idea of gravity is also good, a very natural explonation. In my first language it's all just the same except for a couple of small details, which turn the whole system upside-down for me. It would also be just perfect if you explain all those small details within the context of English stress in the next video. I still can't find that key to making perfect English stress because I don't know how all the words are working together. For example: 'I bought a blue car' - it is very clear here that I don't want to stress the word blue even though it's a content word (unless I have a reason to), but why don't I want to do that and how does it apply for other sentences? And how do I not stress the word blue? I difinitely don't want to reduce it to schwa or any other sound, so maybe that's about the intonation? I'll be waiting for more info in the upcoming videos, keep it up, you're nailing it

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Yes, there's a lot more to come, including commas. Don't worry, it'll all make sense. But it seems maybe you were taught wrong or have a wrong idea. In your example, "I bought a blue car," of course "blue" is stressed. What makes you say it's not?

[@stupiditydeliveryservice1599]

@@NativeEnglishHacks I might be a bit confused about the vocabulary because I haven't dived into this part of phonetics yet. Maybe I mixed up stress with intonation, but I'm absolutely sure in the sentence "I bought a blue car" - the last word, "car" is more stressed and has more power in it overall. As well as in "I wanna go to the beach" - the word beach seems to be more stressed than the other content words. Is the difference only in intonation? I think when we speak (at least when we speak relaxed) we want our sentences to be more or less equal in terms of the stress, we want a more even pattern. So if I say "i BOUght a blueCAR", it is much more smooth and relaxed than to say "i BOUght a BLUECAR." But still, how do I pronounce the first option without reducing the word "blue"? It leads me to the conclusion there's an additional level of stress/intonation which would allow me to do that. Am I anyhow right? And, on the contrary, if I say "NO, NOT RED, i BOUght a BLUEcar", how do I make the word blue more stressed than the word car even though both of them are stressed already? Anyway, that's what I would be really excited to watch a video about

[@iiAbdullah635]

I dunno nothing blew my mind. To me, it was another way of explaining the same thing. Maybe, the super significant mind-blowing part is not published yet, and it's gonna be in the main lesson. Overall, I don't wanna jump to conclusions. I'm waiting for the main lesson.

[@NativeEnglishHacks]

Well, there is a bit more. That's the core of it, but some of the most interesting things are in the details of how the system can be manipulated. I could be wrong, but I don't think this is just another way explaining it, like, "Hey, you can think of it this way if it helps." It's an actual description of what's happening under the surface and doesn't just describe how the intonation works, but how it *feels*