How English Works #3
How English Works 3
Weak Vowels
Intermediate
In this series, we learn about English grammar differently than usual. There are no charts, no memorization, no confusing rules with millions of exceptions. Instead, we look at interesting aspects of English and how you can understand them. Don't worry if you fully understand. Notice these while you're immersing in English, and it'll all make sense with time.
Hi. I'm Ben and welcome to How English Works, which are not your typical English grammar lessons. We do things a bit differently here. There are no drills, no charts, and certainly no memorization. Instead, I want to talk about cool things that happen in English and help you to understand them and thus this interesting language. So today we're going to be talking about vowel reduction. Vowel reduction. That might sound like a very fancy word, vowel reduction, but it's actually pretty simple. So a lot of people, when we learn about vowels, we think of the letters A, E, I, O, and U. These are the written vowels, sometimes Y, is what we say. But those are written vowels. We're talking today about spoken vowels. And these are any sounds that are kind of open. Sort of sung sounds, right? Not... Those are consonants, we're talking about these open sounds. A, E, A, O, I, U, and all of these different vowels that we have. And then to reduce something is to make it smaller. And this is something that's really, really common in English, but not as common in other languages, which is why it's so important. Let's look at a really good example, which is actually my name. And so if we look at this word, oops, we see that it's made up of three different sections. Ben, jam, in. Those are the three different sections of the word, three different syllables, right? You can count the, because there's three different vowel sounds, right? There's three different vowels and there's three different vowel sounds. Sometimes the letters don't match up with English, but that's something else. but we don't say Ben-jam-in. Those are all equal, right? Those sound the same. Ben-jam-in. Instead, we have one strong syllable, right? So Ben, and then it gets a lot smaller. It's reduced. Ben-ja-men. Ja-men. And that's vowel reduction. So we don't say jam-in. It's ja-men. Ben-ja-men. And that is the core of vowel reduction. We don't say the vowels as they are, as they exist, which is sort of weird because spoken language is more important. And this is why you might hear a lot of words get really small and swallowed. Another good example is just weak, like common words, right? Like to, or of, or even because, right? All these words can become, instead of to, it becomes to. Of becomes of. Because it becomes because, or even just cuz, right? That's what we end up saying, cuz. because we reduce a lot of these vowels. English ends up having this very different rhythm to it that a lot of other languages don't have, which makes it a little bit difficult to hear and speak for some learners. I saw a comment on one of my videos about the word gonna, or I am going to, because I am going to this whole phrase very often becomes right which sort of sounds like um right but that is just that's the natural way to say these things we don't say i am going to go we say i'm gonna go And our brains are used to hearing that and so we translate from that sound to the meaning. And then as English speakers, we know, oh, right, that the way to say that in like standard written down English would be I am going to. All languages do this in some way or some different thing. But it's definitely obvious in English because we write a lot more words than we often say, which can be sort of confusing. As you do more immersion and you listen to this and you listen to how people actually speak, it makes it a lot easier to hear. Whenever you hear, amena, you know that means I am going to. You can be certain of that. Contact is also very important. There's many languages that use the same word for many different things and it's fine, right? If you're a Spanish speaker, you know that the word que, can be used for tons of different things. There's tons of different meanings, but that's fine. You don't care because your brain just knows what to do. The same thing in English, right? Like were, this W-E-R-E and we're, or even W-H-E-R-E, right? Where. All of these can at some point become were, were, were, just like that, right? We're here. Where were you? Where were you? And then, or, where were you? Where were you? Right, those, I mean, changing the stress of the sentence can reduce the vowels in different ways, which can be confusing, but I promise that your brain will figure it out. Because you can never say where here, That doesn't make sense. It has to be, we're here. So you can just say, we're here. And our brains will interpret things. And that's why vowel reduction is okay and why it works just fine. So if you're feeling a little bit worried that you won't be able to know what words are said, you will, it's okay. Let's do a little bit of an exercise, and I do actually want you to try speaking along with me. Usually, speaking is not required to do any kind of learning for languages, but in this case, it can be quite helpful to hear yourself do this thing. So I want you to say, oops, along with me, um, un, uh, go, duh, the, I sort of spelled that weird. Right, so I'm gonna go to the store. I'm gonna go to the store. And that's a very natural way to say I'm gonna go to the store. It might feel like you're not saying enough words or there's not enough coming out of your mouth, but that will be totally understood by any native speaker. If you want, if you have a phone with voice to text or you can write with your voice, set it to English and try saying this out loud. I'm gonna go to the store. Start slow. I'm gonna go to the store. It might be difficult to get your tongue around the sounds, but that's okay for now. We're mostly talking about the reduced vowels, which is uh, uh, uh, oh, uh, uh, or, uh, uh, uh, oh, uh, uh, or, right? It doesn't feel like you're saying anything, but it does end up having meaning, which is really interesting. So, reduced vowels can happen pretty much everywhere. You can have any of these letters can become reduced, which is why it's also a little bit difficult. You have to just know what words get reduced. You can usually figure out if you know the stressing of a word, and so if you know what is the strong part of the word. So for example, computer, that's a common word. Computer. Right, there's three parts to it. We can clap it out, syllables, computer. Da, da, da. And then we know that the strong one is pew, because it is, computer. And so we actually, in this case, we can just reduce the other vowels. Computer, computer, right? And that's just how we end up saying it. It doesn't matter what the spelling is. It doesn't matter anything else. It's just the fact that it's in a weak position. And like we saw in this example, it also applies to sentences, right? If these words are weak, they can end up getting unstressed or reduced like that. Not always, you don't have to, and you'll learn the more complicated rules of how we stress things to change the meaning and how we reduce vowels to add more clarity in a lot of cases. And that's the last thing that I wanna talk about, I think. Reducing vowels does not make you less clear. It's actually a good thing and it makes you clearer. Because we expect it when we're speaking English. English has reduced vowels. That is just a fact of English. If you want to sound natural and you want people to easily understand you, you have to reduce vowels. Because we expect it and that that i think that that's the main thing there the way to be better understood is to do things that people expect in the language so if you say something that's technically correct or sounds okay that's probably fine but it's easier to understand things that are more familiar and so saying i'm going to go to the store is going to be really natural and easy to understand but i am going to go to the store it's like what is going it's just weird it sounds like a robot it doesn't it's actually harder to understand in many cases and so as you're listening to me speak in english and listening to anything in english listen to the reduction of the vowels You'll notice that when I speak, especially in videos meant for more beginners or lower level English learners, you'll notice that I still unstress things, but I put more stress on other things in order to show where the real stress is and help people to become familiar, familiar, familiar with the stressing patterns of English because I understand that it's natural to unstress things and natural to have reduced vowels. If you worry about being able to read and pronounce things well, turn on subtitles. I have subtitles on all my videos so that you can see the spelling of things and hear the sound. This is very helpful for learning the correct patterns of pronunciation and spellings that were rather readings of words. because you can see, right? When you see the word computer, it's helpful to know that, oh, right, it's pronounced computer, but that spelling is there. So when I see it later, I'll be more certain of the pronunciation. And the last thing I'll say, just to sort of make sure that you feel okay, a lot of native speakers struggle with spelling in English because of reduction. right, a word that I am very bad at spelling is separate, separate. Because this vowel right here, this one right here is this uh. It said uh, which could be spelled O, A, E. It can be spelled in so many different ways. I'm pretty sure it's with an A, separate. We don't say separate, we say separate. By the way, this A, A sounds and diphthongs in general, so A, I, O, O, are much harder to reduce since they are two parts. So they often stay the same, right? It's not separate, it's separate. There are some accents that will say things like separate, and actually that's become separate, right? You sort of see that sort of thing, but yeah. And so a lot of spelling can be really difficult because of this, right? If you don't know what the actual vowel is written as, because you just know how to say the word, it can be a lot harder to spell. And that actually does remind me of one more thing I want to go to. Which is another thing of I thought of it as separate is that a lot of English learners struggle this if they see words like Let's say something No, I don't that's not a good example separate Desperate there, but that's a good one des Because it's like separate, right? Because they see des-bar-ate, right? And if you look in the dictionary, it's often written as three syllables. Des-bar-ate or cho-co-late. But very, very often we reduce an entire syllable just to non-existence. Desperate. Two syllables. Desperate. Chocolate. Right? We often reduce vowels so much that we just get rid of them in many words. You can't always do this. It's not like there are rules to it, right? Some words you can, some words you can't, right? You can't say umputer or pewter. Actually, that's a slang word for computer. It can just be pewter or pooter, but it's not common. But the example here of desperate is totally fine, right? Something, I was thinking of can be something, something like something. There's lots of different ways to reduce these vowels. So keep your ears open and listen to the reduced vowels of English and it will get a lot easier. I promise. That's all that I have for this episode of How English Works. I hope that you enjoyed. If you have any comments or questions, be sure to leave them in the video below and maybe send this video to a friend of yours who's also learning English. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great rest of your day and I'll see you in the next video. Bye.
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