As a French native speaker, thanks for the chez-t. And you are right, my jaws dropped when I realized what you said. I can hear the difference more clearly now.

@Jabberwockybird

6 ай бұрын

I love cheeze-its! Or should I say Fromag'ilz!

@2Cerealbox

6 ай бұрын

@@user-rb4dy4kh2u Obviously not.

@timewave02012

6 ай бұрын

💩

@RuthvenMurgatroyd

6 ай бұрын

Correction: jaw (you only have one). I'm sure it was just a typo but just in case I'll be that guy and correct you ☝️🤓

@xouxoful

6 ай бұрын

@@user-rb4dy4kh2uis there *any* thing obvious regarding English pronunciation vs spelling ?

I've done something similar with a French speaker who struggled with the Swedish "å, ä, ö" vowels. When I asked her to read "au, ai, eu" out loud, her Swedish boyfriend was amazed to hear the three Swedish vowels almost perfectly pronounced.

@prichitodiamantado

6 ай бұрын

I leave a comment to remember this in the future.

@MarkusAT

6 ай бұрын

I've used this style to teach American 50 year old to pronounce Finnish

@nom3nnescio

6 ай бұрын

Leur = löör

@nom3nnescio

6 ай бұрын

Monsieur = mösjöö. I'm native finnish speaker

@nom3nnescio

6 ай бұрын

Learn = lörn

I think we can all agree that the only issue with Dr. Lindsey's channel is that there aren't enough videos. But we are grateful for the videos that are there. So, in the end, it seems there's actually nothing wrong with Dr. Lindsey's channel.

@maxsonthonax1020

6 ай бұрын

Worked it right up there, eh.

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Thank you, I wish it were so!

was not prepared for that "chez t" montage

My mum grew up in France where she studied English at university. She had a teacher who used this method of using French vowels to create English sounds. She now has a perfect English accent and you would never know she lived in France until the age of 21.

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Wonderful story, thank you!

@vaughndavideastman6461

6 ай бұрын

I have used the exact same method to teach this concept to speakers of Portuguese.

@byt4fse2

5 ай бұрын

She did it wrong. She should've just ignored anything originating from her knowledge of French and learned English from scratch instead. At that I'm sure she still has an accent.

@aspuzling

5 ай бұрын

@@byt4fse2 is it really that hard to believe that out of the 189000 french people living in England, not one has learnt how to speak with an English accent? Maybe you could tell us what teaching method would be required?

@byt4fse2

5 ай бұрын

​@@aspuzling Sure. First of all languages aren't taught, so no teaching is required. Also, you don't need to have any preexisting knowledge of it or something adjacent to it. If you're going to learn a language the last thing you want to do is borrow anything from a language you already know. The best thing one can do is ignore the language you currently speak and only focus on absorbing the new language. Most of that should be spoken language, both media and real life interactions. If you're just starting out, you shouldn't expect to utter a single word before having been exposed to at least tens and hundreds of hours of your new language.

I did something similar, but for Korean to English. Back when I was first learning Korean over a decade ago, I made online penpals and I would learn Korean from them and teach them English in exchange. One of the girls I was talking to told me how much she struggled with the [l] at the beginning of words, like London. In Korean, there is actually an [l] sound, but it's only when two ㄹ meet or at the end of words - on its own, especially at the start of words, it sounds like tapped r (don't have IPA available right now!). So, I told her that when she wants to say [l], imagine there's a secret 을 (eul) in front of it (you can't have Korean letters on their own), so instead of 런던 (leondeon, but pronounced more like reondeon), it becomes (을)런던 ([eul]leondeon, can only be pronounced as [l] due to the extra ㄹ before it). She told me that was really clever and actually worked, so I'm proud of that. I wanted to teach English in Korea, but health problems got in the way of that. If I had, I hope more Korean students would know about this! How to get a good [l] at the beginning of words every time!

@jeff__w

6 ай бұрын

A friend of mine in Korea has no problem with the initial [l] in English but can’t really say it correctly as a final as in _level._ (His pronunciation for the final is something like that initial sound in 런던-it’s like an l/r mix). I’ll see if maybe having him say some combination like 런던 would work. He also is well aware of the 𝖪𝖨𝖳/𝖥𝖫𝖤𝖤𝖢𝖤 distinction in English but always exaggerates the [ij] sound in _beach_ to avoid saying the alternative-I tell him he doesn’t have to draw it out but he persists in doing so, anyway. And, incidentally, for native English speakers who are learning Korean, I point out that some double consonants actually have close equivalents in English-they’re just not what we think of as “legal” initial consonants: ㄸ is what Homer Simpson says when he exclaims “D’oh!” (he _doesn’t_ say “Dough!”) and ㅃ is what English speakers say when they imitate a trumpet: “빠 빠빠 빠”-they’re not asking a black sheep if it has any wool.

@stnhndg

5 ай бұрын

When Americans ask me how they can produce Russin 'R' sound I usually answer that they already can do it. That 'flapped T' sounds almost identical to short trilled 'R' in Russian.

@pxt5836

5 ай бұрын

Korean has only one liquid phoneme: /l/ which is realized as a flap intervocally, and as a lateral word-finally or when geminated. In the initial, /l/ is actually in free variation between a flap and a lateral, making "right" vs "light" challenging to typical Korean learners of English. A well-known trick for Koreans is inserting a quick /ɯl/ before an L (as you mentioned) and a quick /u/ before an R, so "light" and "right" would be /ɯl.lɑ.it/ (geminated /l/, thus [l]) and /u.lɑ.it/ (intervocalic /l/, thus [ɾ]) respectively. Also notice that different epenthetic vowels are added before L and R (/ɯ/ and /u/) to reflect the labialization of English R which is another phonetic cue used to discriminate it from L.

Strange how I can't sit still for a five minute tutorial, but Dr Lindsey always has me immersed in. The miracle in its full definition.

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

🙏🙏🙏

Interestingly, when teaching English to PORTUGUESE speakers, I have instinctively approximated the "i" in kit to Portuguese "ê", which is equivalent to French "é"! Incredible how you have arrived at the same conclusion. To arrive at the sound of "ee" in "feet", I make use of Portuguese's ability to precisely control syllable and vowel stress with "´" markers and form a "í + i | íi" in sequence to arrive at a sound similar to "ille" in French. The "íi" vs "ê" sound difference is much clearer to students. Many smile when they finally hear the difference for the first time in their lives. Necessary adjustments are exponentially easier afterwards.

@hieratics

6 ай бұрын

E ainda sim não são os mesmos sons. O nosso "ê" é o som deles em parte do "a" em "Kate" > Keit. E esse som é diferente do "i" em "Kit"

@myaobyclepiej

6 ай бұрын

I was teaching a Portuguese speaker Polish phonology the other day and to my surprise he remarked that the Polish "y" (pronounced more or less as [ɪ~ɘ]) sounded like Portuguese "ê" to him. Instinctively it made little sense to me but now in hindsight I shouldn't have been surprised. I guess I'm too used to thinking of "e sounds" and "i sounds" as two discrete categories.

@puellanivis

6 ай бұрын

@@hieratics O “e” som em “Kate” /kɛjt/ não es o mesmo de o som “ê” /e/. O som /ɛ/ é “é” não é “ê”. O som /e/ é mais perto de o /ɪ/ som em Inglês, é em Inglês não temos o som /e/, só /ɛ/. We’re not trying to teach _perfect_ native speech, we’re trying to get people to speak in a way _closer_ to native speech. And if we can use a sound that their language has, which is close, but not existing in the target language, then you can sound more native by just using /e/ (which listeners will just hear as /ɪ/ anyways, because it is in the allophonic range) rather than focusing on and demoralizing yourself by trying to keep saying /ɪ/, and just not getting it, or remembering it.

@enricobianchi4499

6 ай бұрын

@@myaobyclepiej I don't remember it exactly, but I'm pretty sure that Portugal Portuguese pronounces that letter with a quality pretty much identical to the slavic "y" hard vowel sound.

@myaobyclepiej

6 ай бұрын

@@enricobianchi4499 euro portuguese /ɨ/ sounds at least to me much more like the russian "y" than the polish one. it's more closed

As a French native speaker I had this realization on my own a few years back and I thought I was crazy or my hearing was bad because I had never heard any of my English teachers mention that /ɪ/ might actually be closer to /e/ than to /i/. I'm glad you're talking about it here because it makes pronunciation of these two sounds so much easier for French speakers!

@nicolasglemot6760

6 ай бұрын

Just being petty here, but it's not necessarily that English /ɪ/ (as in "pit") is closer to [i] than [e] in terms of articulation, actually it's right in between the two (or at least in theory, I don't know if the precise value of the average degree of aperture for English speakers actually sits right in the middle but whatever). It's rather that [e] is a better approximation than [i] because to an English speaker's ear [i] is easier to confuse with long /ɪj/ (as in "Pete"), which is pretty much just a version of /ɪ/ that closes more towards the end (that is to say it becomes more like [i]), than [e] is to confuse with the noticeably more open /ɛ/ (as in "pet").

For me, as a Polish speaker, it was very helpful when I was finally told that 'kit' vowels are closer to 'y' sound in Polish leaving 'i' sound for the 'fleece' ones. This finally made the difference between 'shit' and 'sheet' into something simple to hear and pronounce. Now if only I knew the way to explain difference between 'ćpa' and 'cipa' to foreigners...

@Pingijno

5 ай бұрын

Without IPA? i think an approximate way of explanation would be: ćpa - peaCH-PIE* (without the "-i" in "pai") cipa - CHEAP-PIE* (same thing here) The diphthong /aɪ/ in the standard English is the safest hint for the /a/ vowel in Polish. Obviously Polish /tɕ/ is quite unique but /tʃʲ/ is the closest to it in English. English doesn't allow affricates before a plosive on the onset syllable so another word before it is needed to simulate it. ⟨ć⟩ is a single consonant without a vowel, ⟨ci⟩ is one full open syllable

@AlephYobby

4 ай бұрын

@@Pingijno wow, that's great

This is genius! I had a French teacher at university who always struggled to pronounce ‘law’. He was convinced it wasn’t possible for him to create the sound, until I told him to think about the French word ‘l’or’ - not quite the same, but much closer than everything he’d attempted up until that point. This has blown my mind - I will definitely share this with my French nearest and dearest! Merci beaucoup (carefully pronounced so as not to sound like something else…!)

@hokkohono

6 ай бұрын

Thank you for sharing that tip! I had commented on an earlier video on how I just struggle to pronounce ‘prawn’ different than ‘prone’. I feel the comment section on this video is going to be a gold mine of good tips for French speakers x)

@lora4462

6 ай бұрын

Ah that’s a good example - hopefully the ‘l’or’ tip can help you here too! I will confess, I had a good giggle listening to my French other half trying to get Siri to ‘pause’ his music, when unfortunately Siri thought he was saying ‘pose’. Unlocking the similarities in sounds between the two languages is an absolute game changer!

@ori5315

6 ай бұрын

wouldn't "l'eau" be a closer approximation?

@lora4462

6 ай бұрын

For me, ‘l’eau’ would be closer to English ‘low’ whereas ‘law’ rhymes with ‘paw/poor/pore/pour’ and is therefore closer to French ‘l’or’. I’m no expert but that tip definitely help my teacher to pronounce ‘law’ correctly.

@andyv2209

6 ай бұрын

​@@lora4462law does not rhyme with poor/pore/pour. Lore is a different word. It does rhyme with paw though. Call, gone, dog all have the aw sound youre looking for.

I've actually told a French friend exactly about this thing after reading your "Seeing the Fleece vowel" blogpost. At first, the guy was like "How in the heck do you English speakers actually distinguish those two sounds" so I told him about the French "é vs ille" thing that I got from your blogpost. After I told him about that, immediately, he was like "wth, now the distinction is so much more obvious!"

I have to say, as a native English speaker, who learned French in childhood, but still struggles to pronounce the variety of vowels correctly, this is extremely helpful in reverse as well.

As a Peace Corps English teacher in Africa (1968), I had great fun showing fellow volunteers how to say the unvoiced Bantu language ng by showing them it's right there in English though never at the start of a word. In the middle of "going away" for instance It was great fun to say cow in Chinyanja: ngombe. Cows themselves say Ngoo. Cats say Ngeeyow. I eventually managed one of the clicks in Xhosa too but there were in fact over a dozen. Yikes.

@rosiefay7283

6 ай бұрын

How is an *unvoiced* ng in English? It's voiced by default, and putting a vowel each side of it, as in "going away", won't change that.

@markbennett8683

6 ай бұрын

​​@@rosiefay7283Perhaps the issue was that it was initial, rather anything to do with voicing.

Dr Geoff Lindsey upload, let's HECKIN GO

You have officially all my respect and admiration. I'm a French native speaker who's always been interested in pronunciation and more generally in differences between French and English. We're taught in school that words that end with -ed make the sound t as in "asked", the sound d as in "called" or the sound "eed", as in "wanted". I'd always been confused by this, I had never heard any native pronounce wanted as "wanteed". So one day I started thinking real hard, saying the sound ɪ aloud, and it hit me! It wasn't a kind of i/ee/iː at all, just the sound é I always knew!! Everyone could do it, but no-one realised how simple it actually was, no teacher ever told us that! I'm so happy and glad that the reference in linguistics approved of that idea, I'm not alone anymore, thank you, I'm gonna show this to everyone x'D

@lpsp442

6 ай бұрын

Excellent comment - I'm amazed that any french teacher of english would instruct students to pronounced "wanted" as "wanteed", that's just bizarrely wrong!

@iykury

6 ай бұрын

ouentéde

@Ca-kn5hw

6 ай бұрын

@@lpsp442 It's 100% true. And when I was a kid I tried to follow those recommendations, it was really hard to pronounce two sounds that didn't have a clear distinction, i and ɪ. One day I got an English English teacher, and I started getting really into the language. Only then did I listen to the real sounds and realise how wrong my teachers were! Again, they confounded the letters, thinking an "e" MUST be pronounced i. It sounds ridiculous, and it is

@afj810

5 ай бұрын

​@@lpsp442 italian mob boss saying "wanted" would sound like that ig but more like "WAHneed"

@Nico-fm9ue

5 ай бұрын

Pour une simple raison, les cours de phonétique n'étaient pas aussi présent à l'époque. Je suis prof d'anglais à 24 ans et je donne bien cet exemple ( I / i:)aujourd'hui. Ma promotion entière a reçu énormément de cours de phonétiques très poussés. Notre accent en 2023 (pour les jeunes prof) est bien meilleure que celui des plus vieux.@@Ca-kn5hw

in the quebec french dialect the /ɪ/ vowel actually replaces /ij/! so we have [vɪl] instead of [vil] and [fɪj] instead of [fij] (and the é is said slightly lower although the transcription remains e) funny how that works.

@LouisEmery

5 ай бұрын

C'est vrai ! Moi, j'interpole la prononciation de /ɪ/ et /ij/, il me semble.

Before I found you channel, I always more or less trusted IPA transcriptions to be fairly accurate. But you have continued to demonstrate how easy it is to trick yourself into hearing a different sound than the one that is there because of semantic or spelling associations. It fortunately never really stunted my language learning, since I am generally fairly good at mimicry, and the general approach of "don't think about it too much, just mimic" has been more effective for me than transcription. Especially for things like fine differences in the way phonemes are pronounced that don't result in IPA differences but do result in a noticeable accent (for me it was the fact that German consonants -- not even counting the whole fortis-lenis pairs thing -- are subtly different from "the same" consonants in English).

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

I couldn't agree more. It's heresy, but the phonetic method of pronunciation teaching is for most learners somewhere between difficult and futile. Of course it helps the dedicated *teacher* to know some phonetics. Except when the established phonetics is wrong... Eventually I'll have the courage to make a video on this.

The hardwork I had to do to make my mother pronounced beach not like bitch is really memorable. The simplicity in which you explain it makes my heart soar! The whole world needs to know about you right this second! I think your point that the teacher must know about the student's language in order to teach well is what is stumping me in my third languages studies. I always study a third language via English, not my first language. I'm fluent in English but it doesn't help for something as pointed as phonetics. For example, Korean has three "k" and "p" sounds and the approximation I see are all English approximations that doesn't make any sense to me as a French speaker.

Thank you. I spent several years teaching (American) English to Chinese business people. The final vowel (especially a final L) was always a difficult leap for them. I would tell them to think of it as 了(le). Getting them to say "nor meh le" rather than "nor mah" for "normal" helped them to understand. And it led to far fewer misunderstandings. That being said: One of the biggest things I love about English (both American and British) is that we have so many immigrants that we've become used to a wide array of accents, and can understand almost anyone. In my small town, and at work, I hear Accents that are Mexican, Persian, Bulgarian, Russian, Swedish, French, Hmong, and others I don't know. And we all understand each other.

@BlinkyLass

6 ай бұрын

I've also noticed learner errors are perpetuated by tradition in pedagogy and translation, even though the contrast exists in Mandarin (for example). The R/L confusion is one that is surprisingly common for some reason despite Mandarin having a comparable distinction. One example is the song *The Internationale*, where the word 'internationale' is left untranslated and instead nativized in the Mandarin version. Assuming English as the source, every syllable of /ɪntəɹˌnæʃəˈnæl(ə)/ has a reasonable approximation in Mandarin. However, the nativization is, for some reason, /iŋ.tʰɤ.na.ɕjʊŋ.nai.ɚ/. Something like eeng-tuh-nah-shyung-nigh-er. Somehow /nælə/ becomes /nai.ɚ/ despite /na.lə/ being perfectly fine syllables. A lot of these weird correspondences might've started as people imported conventions from a different variety of Chinese. The /ɚ/ sound in Mandarin historically came from Middle Chinese /ȵiᴇ/, which became in other varieties of Chinese /ni/, /li/, /ji/, /ɦəl/, etc, so perhaps it made better sense in a different language/dialect.

@RuthvenMurgatroyd

6 ай бұрын

​@@BlinkyLass No need to assume. Wikipedia says that Qu Qiubai translated the song from out of the original French.

@comradewindowsill4253

6 ай бұрын

@@BlinkyLass here is the transcription given by Wiktionary for the french 'Internationale': /ɛ̃.tɛʁ.na.sjɔ.nal/ make of that what you will

Canadian (Nova Scotian) here: My 6-year-old is learning to read and write in a French immersion school. At home, I read her stories in French. She also writes stories in English using French phonemes to make English-sounding words. I don't correct her for her teacher told me that is what she should be doing. It surprises me to see how some English words look when spelled out phonetically.

@tinfoilhomer909

Ай бұрын

I work with a bilingual 8 year old and he is going through a "bad grammar" period at the moment. I think that's totally normal too so expect it.

Incredible, as a French speaker, I thought I had a good grasp of the difference between ɪ and iː after years of practice, but I never realized that I did'nt really! A really great way to explain clearly to my fellow french speaker how to master the difference. Now the sentence "chez toi" will never feel the same again, thanks to you... 😅 Thanks for the great work!

The influence of spelling is huge. I’ve had many coworkers for whom English is a second language. With a few of them who share my interest in languages, I’ve used Google Translate much like this. It shows how their accent sounds a bit like transliterating English to the spelling of their native language, and also how other such spellings can help them improve their English pronunciation. With one guy whose native language is Polish, our example was “it would be funny”-it became /it wud bi fani/ as if it were written “it łud bi fani”, even though something like “yt łot byj fony” comes closer. Also, if you want to imitate a foreign accent without knowing the target language, try cramming English pronunciation into the spelling of that language and listening to what Google Translate says! What it lacks in authenticity it makes up for in being very funny, especially alongside a native speaker of that language.

@Ellestra

6 ай бұрын

I think "yt łud bij fanij" is closer to 'fony' is 'phony' (although, really, it just as if someone pluralised 'phone' but Polish way not English) than 'funny'

@MarekWoi

6 ай бұрын

Indeed, I'm happy to see your comment, because I just wanted to write that a similar analogy to the French one, would be the "i" and "y" distinction in Polish (approximating the "feet" and "fit" vowels respectively).

@jakub777henderson

6 ай бұрын

@@beesixteen7596 wow, that's make it even more convoluted. I always thought like MarekWoi that "i" or "ii" can be used for "feet". It looks then that the phonetic transcription of /iː/ is misleading...

A friend of mine, who is an English teacher in Poland, needed an example to compare these two sounds for her students. This is what she came up with (and I think this is brilliant): „Sheet is what you sleep on and shit is what you slip on.“ 😁

@notwithouttext

5 ай бұрын

more like sleep under, but clever!

@tookitogo

3 ай бұрын

@@notwithouttextYou don’t use a bottom sheet?! Don’t forget that in Europe, it’s common to use duvets, in which case you have only a bottom sheet and no top sheet.

@notwithouttext

3 ай бұрын

@@tookitogo i was dumb i forgot about that

I am French and a few years ago, I realized that this ee/i thing is not so much about length, but about vowel quality. It made my pronunciation significantly better! I am very happy to hear you talk about this, and I hope some day a similar approach will be used by our high school English teachers.

Often times I couldn’t understand the difference between é & e (schwa sound) in French. I used to think it happens bc the é is more centralized towards reaching “e” but I couldn’t explain how. Now I have a better reference point for this sound; I really have never thought of it as a kit vowel, thank U for the clarifying analysis, Dr Geoffrey 🙏🏻

@enricobianchi4499

6 ай бұрын

the normal e in french is a schwa lol

@notwithouttext

6 ай бұрын

@@enricobianchi4499 i'm pretty sure they're referring to the e as in "mer", "bel", "chef", "elle", etc. and also, the "schwa" you're referring to is specifically a ROUNDED schwa, which would be close to [ɵ]. the vowel in "veux" also sounds more or less like [ɵ].

@watersnake1462

6 ай бұрын

​@@notwithouttextthere's actually 2 sounds that could be called shwa in french if you want, you're just describing one of them, and the person you've responded to, described the other one. "De" and "deux" don't have the same vowel. Kinda like the closed and open "o" in french too

@Matthy63

6 ай бұрын

​​@@watersnake1462de/deux are homophones in plenty of french accents, not universally admittedly. Eg "deux fois" vs "de foie" feels like more of a stress difference than really a different sound.

@Matthy63

6 ай бұрын

Open/closed O also depends, in my accent "gauche" and "moche" don't rhyme, but in the southwest of FR it's pretty common to pronounce words like gauche, rose, etc. with the "porte" vowel and I'm sure the opposite merger exists in other areas.

Anybody who likes the idea of making English words out of French sounds should track down the book "Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames" by Luis D'Antin van Rooten. This is a collection of English nursery rhymes spelt as if they were French. Here's the first one, which you can try pasting into Google Translate and getting the French voice to read: Un p'tit d'un p'tit s'étonne aux halles. Un p'tit d'un p'tit ah degrés te fallent. Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se mène Qu'importe un p'tit d'un p'tit Tout Gai de Reguennes. I've changed "petit" to "p'tit" and modified the punctuation a bit to make it flow better.

@notwithouttext

6 ай бұрын

i wonder if it would go better if the "a" sound as in "sat" was, well, "a", while "king" had the french "é"

@citolero

6 ай бұрын

@@notwithouttextMaybe, but what would the French words then be? The magic of these versions is that the French actually means something (albeit on a surreal level).

@notwithouttext

6 ай бұрын

@@citolero Un p'tit d'un p'tit s'attend aux halles. can't find anything to replace "qui ne" though

I have a french roommate, who is deaf. He is trying to learn german and I had a similar idea to make an app / website where you could put in a word in german and it would give you a list of french words that use the same kind of sounds to make up the german word. So amazing to see a similar idea being released here :D

French dialects here in Canada have a broader range of vowel and diphtong sounds than those in Europe. In general, our "é" is closer to the English pronunciation of the "long a" than it is to its "kit" pronunciation of the "short i". It's our "è" sound that's closer to "kit" - whereas in most dialects of European French I've come across, there's little or no difference between how "é" and "è" (and, for that matter, "ê") are pronounced. This has been obvious to me since childhood - when (often) European French dictation exercises focused on driving home the different spellings of what in Europe are homonyms but are here pronounced very differently, leaving US with no doubt as to how to spell them...

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Deserves another video. I didn't have as much access to Canadian recordings and have taught very few Québecois

@nflear

6 ай бұрын

@@DrGeoffLindsey The regional word icitte is very much like the fit vowel in English.

@boptillyouflop

5 ай бұрын

Dunno... I think French Canadian "é" is still very close to European "é", the difference is much more in the other vowels (a, â an, on, in, un, long ê, i, o, ô, ou, u, allophonic eur all differ way more). Doesn't really matter because fit/feet isn't the difficult vowel for French Canadians anyways, there's much more difficulty in cut vs cot~caught.

@JustinCase99999

5 ай бұрын

É and è are definitely different in French of France, except the final é and è. In many regions there's confusion between the two, or rather, more specifically, the è becomes é. Hence the similarity between j'irai (I will go) and j'irais (i would go). But é and è are always different inside the words.

@boptillyouflop

5 ай бұрын

@@JustinCase99999 That's interesting. In Canada, it's the other way around, final é / è are always clearly differentiated, but it's inside of the words in open syllables that they are sometimes interchangeable.

Thank you so much Dr Lindsey. This video was extremely illuminating. While I'm no native speaker, I'm more or less confident in my ability to produce native-like qualities of the FLEECE and KIT vowels. My only problem is how to teach what I know to other people, and it's been a real pain in the neck. My approach was always "the KIT vowel lies somewhere between /i/ and /e/", both of which do occur in my native Vietnamese. But for lower-level students, I just told them to use the Vietnamese /e/ for KIT and the Vietnamese /i/ for FLEECE, which, as I now remember, was much easier to grasp than trying to figure out where to put your tongue between /i/ and /e/. Like you said, it's always about phonemic contrast, and never about exact phonetic quality. Another possibility is to use an allophone of /i/, [ï], which occurs before velar consonants. I'm gonna have to review my approach to teaching pronunciation, placing more emphasis on what the students already know in their mother tongue, rather than forcing them to adhere to what I think is "correct". They're allowed to have their own accent, after all. Another thing I'll need to emphasize is to make them stop looking at the spelling which is always a major contributor to bad pronunciation (with no phonemic contrast), as you said.

I've taught a good handful of American English speakers learning Latin/Spanish how to "roll their r's" using d/t-tapping. My exercise has always been for them to say "kitty" repeatedly (the humor helps with retention) and reduce the sounds around the tap. So start with /kɪɾɪj/ and once they've gotten into it, reduce it to /ɪɾɪj/ then /əɾɪj/ then /(ə)ɾɪ/ then finally /(ə)ɾ/ so that they're pretty much just repeatedly going /ɾ/ and when you tell them, "congratulations you're tapping an r" they suddenly have this realization and it's great. They may have to repeat the exercise a few times to get it down, but so long as they incorporate their "new" consonant into their pronunciation they usually get comfortable with it quickly.

Some time ago I came up with a similar way for French people to pronounce my name Huib, featuring the Dutch "ui" sound, which is absent in a lot of languages and often somewhat tricky to teach people not familiar with the language. Although I believe it's very similar to the "eui" part of portefeuille, when you would stop just before the "y" sound of the "ille" starts. I like this way of teaching a lot because it makes me more aware of how words and letter combinations in certain languages actually sound and how you can "open up" your perception by using these "tricks". 1:13 Brings back memories of a Spanish co-worker who couldn't tell the difference between 'bitch' and 'beach' 😆And who made up his own English grammar and phrases in a uniquely poetic way, some of them still part of my own vocabulary every now and then.. Hope to meet this wonderful guy again some day ♥

@wesselvandermeer6019

5 ай бұрын

Similarly, ‘ui’ is very similar to how a Scot would pronounce ‘house’, almost like Dutch ‘huis’

I find your footnote about 'café' in Scotland funny because I've had people laugh that I pronounce 'bouquet' and 'bookie' exactly the same way.

As a Québécois the main takeaway for me is how badly the French pronounce the é sound. They don't make it significantly different from the è sound, unlike us. In fact, in France they've lost a lot of vowel distinctions that we kept here, e.g. between è and ê. Their un and in sound way too similar as well.

@tinfoilhomer909

6 ай бұрын

Belgians would say the same about the French, in Belgium "brin" and "brun" are pronounced differently. So are "il" vs "île" and "mettre" vs "maître".

@Zombie-lx3sh

5 ай бұрын

And their on and an sound way too similar as well.

an italian friend of mine asked me if i had seen the movie "it". he was exasperated when i claimed never to have heard of it. he was trying to say "heat" and he thought i was just being awkward in not realising that 'it' meant 'heat'

I once said in front of French people that in the Czech words "žáci" and "žáky", the i and y sound the same, and they disagreed with me. To my Czech ears, the i and y sounded the same, but the French people heard my i as i and my y as é. And now I can't unhear it.

@pawel198812

6 ай бұрын

Did they see the word beforehand or was it just based on your pronunciation?

Here in Portugal many people also pronounce fit and feet in the same way. Your “é”/“ill” trick for French is amazing and it kind of is applicable in Portuguese (“ê”/“i”). Very good channel ❤

@extasja

4 ай бұрын

mesma cena com algumas pessoas que não fazem a distinção entre "beach" e "b!tch" 😅

@AlephYobby

4 ай бұрын

for the "ille" think of it like "í + i" to get even closer!

YES!! THANK YOU, more people need to hear this! As a French native, I still don't understand why this is not taught at school in France. Since the day I discovered this trick, all my English teachers kept telling me my pronunciation was so good but without asking how I figured it out?! As sad as it is, I just feel like us French are condemned to mediocre level of language teaching by our educational system...

I noticed the similarity between French é and the English kit vowel recently and I was pretty surprised. Cool to see one of my favorite KZreadrs confirm it!

Fascinating! I'm French, and that's the first time someone correctly explains to me the kit-fleece problem! I've always been puzzled by the two different symbols that I couldn't pronounce differently, and by the vowel lengths that didn't always make sense. Umtimately, I wish the spelling of English was not that absurd (same for French, even though it is much more reasonable for French), since, as you say, we tend to trust our spelling more than our ears.

I once had a teacher from California who pronounced words like “deal” and “feel” like “dill” and “fill”, and we later found out that he seriously could not discern the difference.

I seem to remember you had also solved FOOT for French speakers by pointing out that French "schwa" is a pretty good approximation for it, certainly better than the /u/ quality suggested by the phonetic symbol.

Thank you so much for this video! I’m a native English speaker who learned the IPA in my French classes, and I have always had such a hard time understanding why the IPA doesn’t align with certain vowels that English and French should share. This relieves a lot of frustration.

As a french person learning english, thank you so much ! This is sooo helpful ! I study english in college and I have a phonetic class, but when we do "problem sounds" my teacher usually just repeats the two sounds she want us to distinguish and expect us to hear the difference without going further than saying "they're different" and "one's longer", but I really rarely manage to hear it.

Dr Geoff Lindsey, you continue to be one of the best educational channels on the platform :]

I absolutely love the amount of spoken language hiding in plain sight! Nice work, Dr L.

I really love the speed that you've been cranking out these phonetics videos. I could learn about this stuff all day.

Fantastic examples for teaching the core lesson, as always. Keep doing what you do, Dr. Lindsey.

Really informative video not just for English to French, but also to French to English speakers! You've helped me foster a great appreciation in phonetics, so thank you for every video you upload.

OMG, this blows my mind! As a native Italian, it's always been hard for me to grasp the difference between the KIT and the FLEECE vowel 'cause I've always been told they were a "short i" and a "long i", except that when I try to say "kit" thinking of a "short i", it sounds very different from a native saying "kit"... now I understand why! 'cause they're not a "short i" and a "long i"! thanks!

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Yes, as in French, standard Italian /e/ meaning 'and' is pretty close to KIT.

Thanks to you Dr. Lindsey, my girlfriend and my pets are huddled, scared, in a corner, because I, a québécois native french speaker, kept yelling at my screen because LITERALLY *NONE* OF YOUR EXPLANATIONS MAKE SENSE IN MY ACCENT! (fake anger for comedic purposes only) Great video! Although I would've put a bit more emphasis that most of this is tailored to the Parisian and metropolitan accents, it was very interesting!

oh man the ytp potential with this knowledge is massive

I'd love to see one of these for Spanish speakers. Spanish is even more limited in its vowels, so maybe this would be even more challenging for them.

@MurasakiOp

5 ай бұрын

Absolutely! The struggle is real 😅

@SmashhoofTheOriginal

5 ай бұрын

I thought the "ill" in "silla" would be a good equivalent, but that depends on the dialect, so it doesn't work for every Spanish speaker :(

@cardsharper1909

14 күн бұрын

​@@MurasakiOpFR

Your arguments and demonstrations are so convincing, you opened my eyes to a lot of things as a language hobbyist :)

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Praise indeed. Thank you!

As a Spanish speaker I found all of this fascinating.

I started watching your videos a few years ago and I'm now taking linguistics classes in university and loving it!

What a wonderful approach! As a native Spanish speaker, I think a similarly helpful comparison for Spanish speakers learning English is to think of the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (as in the English word _thing_ )as the letter Z as pronounced in Spain. This blows their minds every single time, as it's simply not the way it's taught - at least in Venezuela where I grew up. I think the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (as in _this_ ) is much harder to teach since there is no direct equivalent in Spanish.

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

ð is Spanish d except at the beginning of an utterance or after n. So dedo is deðo.

@Suzukixd89

6 ай бұрын

Iba a dar el mi punto que el Dr.Lindsey acaba de hacer, pero se me adelantó xd. Pero sí, sí tenemos ambas versiones de la «Th» en español.

It's nice hearing someone else is on to that. I'm monolingual but I've enjoyed this game for years. Ouatte de foque is another good one

That was realy instructive I'm a french native speaker and I never thought about that thank you docteur !

Thanks for another eye-opening video! Your conclusion is a perfect illustration of the adage, "The obstacle is the way."

Thanks for this great video! I give accent reduction classes and I also suggest my French students to use their /e/ sound for the English /ɪ/. I demonstrate English native speakers on Forvo to prove that the English /ɪ/ actually sounds that way. The next vowel that I modify is STRUT which is more similar to the French /a/ than to [ø~ɵ] as in "le".

@u4tiwasdead

6 ай бұрын

What do you tell French people who can’t pronounce ‘h’?

Standard Indonesian, our formal language, has only short vowels [a i u e o ə]. If we lengthen the vowels, the meaning of words will not change at all. Many Indonesians do not see any difference between tense vowels and laxed vowels. Javanese language, one of our dialects, however, has [i] and [ɪ], as in 'titik' [titɪʔ] (dot). It has also [u] and [ʊ], as in 'tutok' [tutʊʔ] (mouth). Such laxed vowels occur in the last syllables of Javanese words. Therefore, it is easy to introduce [i] - [ɪ] and [u] - [ʊ] to Javanese people. I am not Javanese. So, I am not sure if or not [o] - [ɔ], [e] - [ɛ] and [a] [ɑ] exist in Javanese language.

Thanks a lot for your work. I find your videos very useful and to the point. I wish I had been taught these 'é' and 'ille' sounds when I started learning English. I surely would not have had such a hard time trying to pick up English.

Your videos are absolutely fantastic. Thank you!

As a French learner, I appreciate you pointing out that é is like the kit vowel. Where can I find more correspondences for French vowels in English? Too often foreign language instruction allows students to get away with bad pronunciation when a good habit could be made easily early on by pointing these out.

@alloallie

6 ай бұрын

Ê and È = the "ea" in "sweat" and "breath", for one.

@notwithouttext

6 ай бұрын

the e in "le" for the vowel in "foot". (not exact, but very close)

@joluju2375

6 ай бұрын

@@notwithouttext Can be usefull, the short oo sound is difficult for me to grasp. When I try to say "book" properly, I'm afraid people hear "buck".

@samuelwaller4924

5 ай бұрын

​​@@joluju2375 I think "le" to "œuf" is a good analog for the difference between the "book" and "buck" vowels, except as an (american) English speaker they both sound like the "book" vowel to me, with the "œuf" vowel being closer. I really can't think of a way to replicate the "buck" (also known as "strut") vowel in french. That really is a tricky one, I feel bad for you guys lol.

I have been telling people the kit vowel is closer to the e in です(desu), el (in Spanish), and pen than to the i in いる(iru), piña, and the ee in tree. I felt like I might be telling them bad things by turning /I/ into /ε/ for them, but "that e sound pretending to be an i" seems to be what you are suggesting here, so I guess I was on the right track. I based it on the pen-pin merger... if they are that close, people will understand them well enough.

@DawnDavidson

6 ай бұрын

Plus, bech is much less problematic than bitch! LOL

I seriously had trouble believing you until I said "une séquence" myself repeatedly. I'm not a native French speaker and haven't used it for ages, but I did learn it very young and have always had a nearly native accent ... and I can still only barely make myself believe that that vowel is what you say it is. Wow.

In 12 minutes you've really improved my French pronunciation. No more ays for me. Thank you!

One interesting thing ive noticed is that kit and fleece vowels appear to be swapped sometimes in AAVE. For instance, "hill" and "heel" I've noticed being pronounced essentially swapped compared to my dialect.

@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate

6 ай бұрын

But only before L right?

@KirkWaiblinger

6 ай бұрын

@@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate as far as I can think of, I guess so, yeah

I’m a Canadian learning Japanese, and I immediately picked up on a relationship between Canadian and Japanese. A Canadian uses “Eh?” at the end of a sentence to solicit agreement, and in Japanese they use “ですね？” (desu ne?)

@J7Handle

6 ай бұрын

I think at least some American dialects use either 'huh?' or 'nah?'/'no?' at the end of a sentence, though the 'huh?' is usually pronounced more like 'uh?'. It looks like a signal of confusion in text form but "he's really going at it, huh?" is an example usage. Also in Japanese, it's really just the "ね" part that does the trick. the "desu" part is a verb.

@ryandoesstuffapparently1540

6 ай бұрын

@@J7Handle I’m still very much a rookie in Japanese

@J7Handle

6 ай бұрын

@@ryandoesstuffapparently1540 I'm also a rookie, but I've focused a lot on learning grammar and special words over bulk vocabulary.

I'm a native Hungarian, who's been learning English as a second language since his childhood. I'd say I'm also quite confident in my listening and reading (and to some extent, my speaking and writing) skills. But to my ears, the two vowels sound literally the same with their only distinguishing quality being their length. I only found out that there is even a difference during my short-lived project of learning Icelandic, when I got confused by how the long í [iː] can be short [i], and the short i [ɪ] can be long [ɪː], and the difference is phonemic. This explains a lot about how I've been pronuncing not just English, but also Russian wrong all my life... I still can't quite pronunce [ɪ], I just substitute it with and [e].

Thank you so much!!! Having been learning French since third grade, I never would’ve come to this realization because it’s always definitely just sounded like ay to me!

I encountered the Beach/Βitch confusion about 10 years ago with a fellow from Mexico while we were studying at ASU.

@dragonfractal6361

6 ай бұрын

“I was on the bitch…” “Where? Who? You did what? With who?”

I think the fact that conventional IPA transcription for English is so innacurate is a huge barrier for the teaching, both in teaching English to non-natives *and* teaching English speakers other languages. You've provided and example of the former; for example of the latter, I often see explanations for English speakers on how to pronounce the French /u/ - /y/ contrast (problematic for English speakers) by saying "you have /u/ in English, it's the vowel in GOOSE etc", even though the GOOSE vowel in most varieties of English patently sounds nothing like the French /u/ in "vous" etc. In fact, to my (London) ears, my GOOSE vowel is, if anything, slightly closer (though very far from identical) to the French /y/ in "tu" etc. These faulty explanations come from the fact that the (native French-speaking) teachers are familiar with the conventional IPA transcription for English, and unaware of just how inaccurate it is as a description of most modern varities of English. This makes understanding and producing the French /u/ - /y/ contrast far harder than it needs to be, as I don't believe any language contrasts fronted /y/ with central /ʉ/, for good reason! If you start from the reference that French /y/ is like your GOOSE vowel you will find it much harder to produce and perceive a distinct /y/ than if you start with the knowledge that your GOOSE vowel lies roughly equidistant between the two, and is diphthongised unlike the French vowels, and both French phonemes require you to produce something substantially different from anything in your English vowel inventory.

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Yes, many English speakers (and more or less all Scots) have a GOOSE nearer to French u than to ou. In Scotland it makes sense to teach that French u is like GOOSE and French ou is not far from GOAT; but then you have the problem of differentiating French ou and au!

@pawel198812

6 ай бұрын

Swedish has a phonemic contrast between/y(:)/ (spelled and /ʉ:/ or /ɵ/ (spelled ), which is also present in many (if not most) dialects of Norwegian

@zak3744

6 ай бұрын

Yeah, learning French at school I always kind of intuitively thought of the French "tu" vowel as a GOOSE vowel pushed extremely* forwards lip-wise, but also pronounced with a significant dollop of KIT vowel added in there. The "sous" vowel was the more awkward one. I was surprised at the suggestion in the video that FACE was a bad initial waypoint for English people approaching the French é though. The French é was always to me a sort of modified FACE with the offglide heavily suppressed. (If you just used an unmodified English FACE vowel of course, you'd sound very "Mange tout, mange tout, Rodney"! But we're just looking for a jumping off point to waypoint it from. The same way that if French people just use their é for the English KIT without bothering to modify it at all, they're likely to fall into a bit of a DRESS/KIT hole.) I suppose I had the "tu" vowel already marked off in my head as my "kind of adjusted KIT vowel" so thinking of both that and é as differently adjusted KIT vowels might have got confusing. I know I get that issue with two of the nasalised French vowels, the "enfant" vowel and the "bonbon" vowel. I can hear the difference, but in categorisation they both slip into a "nasalised kind of o" bracket, so that if I hear them in isolation or want to reproduce them and I'm not paying very conscious attention, they unfortunately occupy the same space in my brain and become the same vowel! * and just in general all of the French vowels seemed more "extreme" than English ones to my mind, to get them right it felt like you often had to contort your face into positions that you would think would give some sort of over-exaggerated comedy accent if they were English vowels!

@209PH

6 ай бұрын

@@pawel198812 Thanks for the info.

Big fan of your channel Geoff. You have such a talent for showing us all these things that have been under our noses all this time. Your “chez-t” phoneme takes the biscuit/cake (according to English dialect). Bravo!

So refreshing, yet again.

I have a French banker friend who could do with your training, as whenever asked what she does for a living, she says "bonking".

@DrGeoffLindsey

6 ай бұрын

Perfect example. Instead of listening for the best equivalence in sound, people are (mis)guided by the writing. Of course French contains sounds that are closer to English banking.

@johnshields3658

6 ай бұрын

@@DrGeoffLindsey Yes - simply telling them to say 'binque' would work pretty well.

Indeed it is extremely important to create this distinction. For example, when teaching Russian speakers we can use "ий" to represent /i:/ and "ы" to represent /ı/. Or, the main reason that Japanese learners confuse /r/ and /l/ is because in their head they are both represented by the same sound "r" in Japanese. Instead, we could make a distinction where, for example, "light" would be ライト but "right" would be ルアイト. And as by magic, they wouldn't mix them up anymore.

@rasmusn.e.m1064

6 ай бұрын

why not use "е" instead of "ы"? I know it palatalises the previous consonant but the vowel quality itself is far more similar than the one of "ы".

@Trenz0

6 ай бұрын

Woah that's so weird how that works for Japanese. I'm guessing it has to do with the way that sequence of syllables forces your mouth to make the appropriate sound?

@ptero

6 ай бұрын

​@@rasmusn.e.m1064 Nah, "е" is far, far more different from short i than "ы"

@ulfr-gunnarsson

6 ай бұрын

Native Russian speaker here. -ий in reality for many Russian speakers isn't fully pronounced, most commonly it's reduced to [i], and even if it is fully pronounced, the й in the end tends to be devoiced.

@timseguine2

6 ай бұрын

@@Trenz0 I think because "ru" forces you to bunch your tongue in a similar position to the normal way english speakers pronounce R, whereas "ra" is more like the flapped version one typically associates with japanese, which is phonetically very similar to an english L.

Thank you for these amazing videos!!

The last part summarises it all: "... Anyone who takes pronunciation teaching seriously needs to know two things: As much as possible about the phonetics of the language you're teaching and as much as possible about the phonetics of the learner's language. Because that's where at least 90% of the problems come from". Very good insight indeed!

Geoff, wouldn't it be great to have a Pronunciation Teacher Academy where we could teach and share this kind of knowledge? I'd love that. Just reading the comments tells me that many teachers successfully use the technique you describe in this video. And btw, my American English pronunciation teachers were always wondering why transcribing schwa as "uh" never did the trick for me as a German speaker.... 😅

I wanted to learn how to pronounce Korean names (just for the sake of pronouncing it right in my head when reading translated manner) so I watched a K-drama and when someone pronounced the name “Seoha” I noticed the “eo” sounded shockingly similar to the “ö” sound in German(e.g. Öl, Österreich). By making an association with a language I already knew, I was able to grasp the pronunciation much quicker.

@emie2052

Ай бұрын

??? Am I misunderstanding something because the eo in Seoha doesn't sound anywhere alike to ö to me. I don't speak any German but Korean eo is pretty much just English "uh". is that how ö is pronounced in German? I used Wiktionary to hear how österreich is pronounced and ö sounds much more closer to the korean "eu"

@doodleplayer4014

Ай бұрын

@@emie2052 it might sound closer to that, it's just what sounded closest from the language in knew. It's supposed to be more of an estimation of what it sounds like to make it easier to pronounce. It also could be a difference of accent or dialect.

Just love this channel -- the insight and lucidity... Orthography is the villain/culprit -- I have felt along the years how much is misguides foreign speakers. It many times makes it impossible to recognize cognates.

I studied a bit of french. My girlfriend was in French BA, and then started studying english. I joked with her that she spoke english with a perfect french accent. Joking aside, I usually try to correct english pronunciation of brazilian/portuguese words using english sounds, not with same finesse as our good doctor here.

THIS IS THE SAME I HAVE TO TEACH TO EVERY NON FINNISH SPEAKER ABOUT DOUBLE LETTERS! Even English.. Somehow it's just so hard to differentiate KAKKA and KAKAA. (In Overwatch League there's MASAA and he was called MAASSA) I'd love to hear what you think of Finnish phonetics in comparison to other languages.

@mirkoson

3 ай бұрын

You'd have a much better experience with Italian and Japanese people 😁

Another fantastic video as per uzhe! I hate making requests, but is there any way you could make a similar video for English speakers learning Spanish? I think the video would be very useful for other English students because the 5-vowel system is so common and even unrelated vowel systems like Japanese and Indonesian are very similar in vowel quality

thanks for another very interesting video dr lindsey!

This is a truly inspired approach to language. Holy cow.

I remember 7 years ago when I just started to learn the IPA I kept wondering what the difference between these 2 sounds is like they sounded the same to me 🤯 nowadays it's the exact opposite when I hear someone pronouncing "ih" as "ee" it really stands out 😂 btw my native language is Russian and apparently there we also have both sounds, however /i/ only happens in stressed syllables whereas /ɪ/ only in unstressed ones so there aren't minimal pairs and therefore people don't notice the difference (I only started noticing when I started learning the IPA and paying attention to the pronunciation)

@errandir

6 ай бұрын

Exactly!

@comradewindowsill4253

6 ай бұрын

oh, could you give an example of a word which has /ɪ/ and /i/ in it? I want to teach my parents how to say 'shit' properly.

@prplt

6 ай бұрын

@@comradewindowsill4253 you mean in English or Russian? in English "city", in Russian most words that have 2 И's, били for example

@F_A_F123

5 ай бұрын

​@@prplt it's [i] and [ɪ], not /i/ and /ɪ/. Having no contrast between them means they're the same phoneme, meaning if you use slashes, the letter is the same, because slashes are for phonemes. [i] and [ɪ] are both allophones of /i/ (the thing you put in slashes you choose yourself, you could use /ɪ/ instead of /i/. But you can't use both at the same time)

Wow that is enlightning! If I were teaching this thing to Russian native speakers the closest equivalent would be: fleece - флийс kit - кэт/кет (although this vowel is a bit more chalenging and it would need some exaples in Russian words such as "пакет")

@kaengurus.sind.genossen

6 ай бұрын

What about ы?

@ierof1

6 ай бұрын

E in пакет is under stress. English short i is like unstressed E: осень [осинь], весна [висна].

Australian “moon” has the German ü, “bird” has ö, and “huge” has ch. “Clock” has Arabic Qaf. There are a lot of these to find.

@nom3nnescio

6 ай бұрын

It's like monsieur is in finnish mösjöö

@nom3nnescio

6 ай бұрын

First = först, Thursday = törsdei 😂

This could help my French sister improve her pronunciation a lot, very smart trick, thanks!

The same sort of spelling confusion is why non-native speakers will often try to approximate English /ɑ/ when spelled as ⟨o⟩ with their “o” vowel (usually [o̞] for five-vowel systems like that of Spanish or [ɔ] for seven-(plus)-vowel systems like that of French or Italian), e.g. _hot_ as [xo̞t] or [ɔt]. (Granted, this is less inaccurate for British English /ɒ/, but the same thing happens regardless of which accent they're trying to imitate.) It's even worse and more noticeable when they think of “short” ⟨u⟩ (/ʌ/) as related in some way to [u], which it is absolutely not-e.g. _suck_ becomes [suk].

@that_orange_hat

6 ай бұрын

To be fair, /ʌ/ used to be /ʊ/ which is a lot more related

@objective_psychology

6 ай бұрын

@@that_orange_hat But this is a synchronic issue of phonetics, so my use of the word “related” was not tied to the etymological sense of cognacy. No one's pronunciation is influenced by etymology further than what is retained in speech and spelling. People who still use that /ʊ/ do so not because they remember a time before the split but because they happen to be in the minority with that conservative accent.

@that_orange_hat

6 ай бұрын

@@objective_psychology If an L2 English speaker decided for some reason to adopt a Welsh accent the /u/ pronunciation would be perfectly reasonable, but of course I understand what you mean and /a/ (generally realized [ä]) is certainly a closer approximation to English strut (often realized [ɐ]) than /u/ iz

Sir I am an Indian Bengali speaker. I would appreciate it if you will make a video on the retroflex consonants found in most Indian languages and how it is carried over to English while Indians speak..

@steve470

3 ай бұрын

Seconding this. I'm a native speaker of American English, and I would be fascinated to learn just what it is in Indian accents that makes them so distinctive.

Native french speaker here also, and also amazed of this revelation. So much time wasted when you made it finally seems so easy... Thank you very much sir

as a non-native english speaker this is illuminating. thank you dr geoff!

Thanks a lot! I took English as a foreign language in college in France and learned that the “short i” was in-between the French “i” and “è” sound, and have tried to approximate that since. Maybe it was taught as between the French “i” and “é”, and I misremembered it. This video taught me it’s closer to “é” than “i”, so I’ll try to course-correct! Plus I learned that the “long i” is /ij/, which I didn’t know! But now I’m wondering: does English have an /i/ sound that doesn’t have that extra /j/ part?

@eelsemaj99

6 ай бұрын

I don’t think we do, at least not in my (standard British) dialect. Sometimes the letter i is pronounced as a /ə/ though so look out for that. e.g. in Family it’s often pronounced /ə/, or not at all and squashed into 2 syllables (famly). When learning french, the long I was one of the hardest sounds for me to learn to make, and often it still doesn’t sound native

@notwithouttext

6 ай бұрын

it kinda does, but it's usually considered the same as /ij/. frequently when it's at the end of a word and unstressed, it's pronounced [i], as in "frequentlY". this doesn't make much of a distinction though, and many people still say it with [j] at the end. also, when followed by a schwa sound ("a" as in "China"), it can often get smoothed out, sometimes to [i] or even [ɪ]. this is why "really", while you might expect someone to say "ree-lee", is actually more commonly pronounced "rilly" (or "rearly" with the "r" dropped). similarly in british (and i think australian and new zealand) english, "idea" rhymes with "hear", smoothing out /ɑjdijə/ into [ɑjdɪː]

Can we elaborate more on those regions where the two th-sounds are not even distinguished? Thank you, Dr. for this video.

@enricobianchi4499

6 ай бұрын

a lot of places in great britain replace them with f/v and a huge amount of people occasionally replace them with t/d (in some speakers always)

I'm amazed Thanks for that enlightment !

I play in a rock band in Toulouse, France. We once wrote a song in which 3 of us would sing the chorus together, and one of the lines was "with me on my ship". Hearing our guitarist sing it, I noticed his "ship" sounded more like "sheep", tried to correct him, but now he does the opposite thing, opening his vowel a bit too much and sounding like [ɛ]. That's a prevalent thing in southern France, in our dialect of French, [ɛ] and [e] are allophones (pretty much the same can be said for [o] and [ɔ], or for [ø] and [œ]) Basically, close-mid vowels like [e] are reserved for open syllables, and open-mid vowels like [ɛ] are for closed syllables. So that's why trying to say "chez-p" might be hard for some over here. But that's a brilliant idea, I'm surprised it works so well when you manage to do it!