When the last letter of a word is a consonant sound and the word that follows it begins with a vowel sound, we connect or link both words.
A digraph is a pair of letters that follow each other that make one sound.
A question word is the word before the question mark?
The question tone is the tone we use in asking questions. So, it’s called the question tone.
This is also the tone we use to express doubt, politeness and more. Phoneticians say that the question tone is the rise tone.
Speech tone is generally known as intonation. This is the tone that tells your listeners things about your emotions when you speak.
It tells whether you are happy or sad, rude or polite, friendly or unfriendly. It’s the sound of your voice. Phoneticians call the speech tone intonation.
A syllable is loud when you say the consonants and the vowel in it. Phoneticians call the loud syllable a strong syllable.
A trigraph is a group of three letters that follow each other but make one sound.
We make words connect when we speak or read by linking two or more words and say them as one. Generally, consonants connect with vowels. And some consonants connect with other consonants. The rule is, when a word ends in a consonant, and the word next to it begins in a vowel, connect them.
The digraph ‘oo’ makes three different sounds. They are /u:/,/ᴧ/ and /ʊ/.
There are 24 consonant sounds in English language.
There are 20 vowel sounds in English language.
Tense means time in grammar. When you say something in English, your tense helps your listeners to know when it happened: Is it happening now? Has it happened? Is it going to happen?
Expressing yourself in the right tense tells people that you are educated. Wrong tenses may offend and annoy your listeners and turn them off. Wrong tenses do not dignify you and your presentation.
Four letters that occur successively that make one sound.
Verbs and nouns are opposite when they are in singular and plural form. In forming the singular of a verb, we add S. So when an S is added to a verb, it’s in its singular form.
A consonant digraph is two consonant letters that follow each other that make one consonant sound.
A vowel digraph is two vowels that follow each other that make one vowel sound.
Words are said to collocate when they regularly work together in sentences. Certain words just go together and if one is used and the other is omitted, the sentence sounds un- English.
The letter A can make up to ten sounds. The sounds of letter A includes
(1) /ɔ:/ as in ball.
(2) /ɒ/ as in watch.
(3) /æ/ as in bag.
(4) /e/ as in any.
(5) /ɪ/ as in village.
(6) /a:/ as in staff
(7) /ə/ as in woman.
Punctuation marks guide our speech tone or intonation. We say a word before the comma in the question (rise) tone. We say the word before a full stop in the sure (fall) tone. And a word before the question mark is said in the question (rise) tone.
A syllable is faint when you drop or reduce the vowel in it and say just the consonants. Phoneticians call the faint syllable the weak syllable.
You need to speak right in order to make a good impression. It convinces people that you are educated and makes you stand out among others.
Accent is the way we sound when we speak. Your accent can give you away. A person may have multiple accents. But generally, people have two accents: natural accent and self-conscious accent.
First, get familiar with the sounds of English. Once you get acquainted with the English phonemes (sounds), you need to train, not just your tongue, but your ear. Learn how to listen.
Try to listen to and speak English as often as possible. Train your tongue to make English sounds.
Master how to glide or slide and make words connect in a unique way when you speak English.
The sure (Answer) is the tone with which we express firmness, certainty, strong feelings and more. Phoneticians refer to the sure tone as the fall tone.
You rise in the question tone and fall in the sure tone.
To some extent, yes. You need to acquire a flexible accent, a kind of flexi-accent that you may use in different situations as the need arises. People generally prefer unaccented English.
Mastering all the 44 English sounds is a great step to speaking good English. However, there is more to speaking right than just mastering the sounds. To speak right, you need a complete spoken English course.
Always check the dictionary for correct pronunciation words.
To speak right, you need to understand and follows the basic rules of spoken English. Spoken English is different from written English.
(1) Pronouncing all the words you use correctly—observe the rule of loud and faint syllables.
(2) Connecting words where appropriate.
(3) Making good use of the question tone and the sure tone in your speech.
(4) Acquiring the right accent through listening and speaking practice.
The subject of a sentence is the person or thing that is the doer of the action performed by the verb.
To produce this sound, place the tip of your tongue between your upper and lower teeth.
Make a light contact with the edge and inner surface of the upper incisors and a firmer contact with the upper side teeth.
As the air escapes in this formation, there is a friction and the resulting sound is /θ/. /θ/ is the voiceless sound of the digraph th.
Phoneme is another word for sound.
The colon (:) in front of some vowel sounds is called length mark; and it represents duration or length. In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. The colon (:) therefore, indicates that the vowel is a long sound.
A syllable is any unit of a word that consists of one or more sounds while segmentation is the act of dividing words into units.
We greet in the question tone also known as the rise tone. It is considered good manners to greet in the question tone because it shows politeness.
Letters of the English alphabet don’t have fixed sounds. One vowel letter can make many sounds.
They behave like a chameleon – keep changing from one sound to another as they occur in different words.
So there are 5 vowel letters of the English alphabet used for writing, but
20 vowels of the English sound system used for speaking.
An alphabet and a letter are not the same. An alphabet is a set of letters used in a written language.
So an alphabet contains letters. We have just two English Alphabets.
One that comprises 26 letters is used for writing, while the other made up of more than 44 sounds are used for speaking. So we don’t say alphabet A, instead we say, letter A.
yes! It’s absolutely correct usage. We use Oh for telephone numbers, vehicle number plates, bank account numbers. However, it’s safer to use zero for (0) when we have a combination of Oh (0) and zero (O) in some numbers.