Pronunciation Tutorial 1: English Pronunciation and IPA: Voicing and Place

A video tutorial about the International Phonetic Alphabet and the English language. This is the first in a series of several videos that will help you understand English pronunciation so that you can learn another language's pronunciation. Here we cover consonants, specifically the concepts of voicing and place.

http://www.towerofbabelfish.com

Second Video (Consonants: Place): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJR1VP...
Third Video (Vowels): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeaghq...
Anki Deck: http://www.towerofbabelfish.com/cms/?...

@TowerBabelfish: https://t.co/QyVhampn

• Category

  Education

[hoa nguyen]

tôi là người Việt Nam. tôi rất thích học tiếng anh....các bạn có thể chia sẻ kinh nghiệm học tiếng anh như thế nào cho tốt không? thank you very much!

[Gabriel Wyner]

Hi hoa! You can try my website, although the translation won't be very good!

[Anthony Cip]

Hey Gabe, I have a question regarding a cleft palate and it's possible affect on proper articulation. For the Sh sound in show and S in pleasure, the place of my passive articulation is dental, not post alveolar. In your alveolar demonstration, the place of articulation for T and D correspond to your video, but not S and Z, which is also dental. I'm wondering if this is caused by the cleft palate that I have.

[Gabriel Wyner]

Hi Anthony. That's almost definitely caused by your cleft palate. At some point in your childhood, you figured out a way to approximate S and Sh with your tongue much further forward than the standard pronunciation (I imagine if your tongue went too far back, you'd hit the cleft and the sound wouldn't work the way it usually does.)

[spore637]

Gabe, are you a linguist or a language enthusiast?

[Gabriel Wyner]

I'm an enthusiast (although by the time I finish this book, I'll have read enough about linguistics that I might as well get a degree :)

[Jamie Braly]

This just blew my mind... 30+ years of speaking and I never gave a thought about how I made those sounds.

[Dandrew Wolf]

He also forgot the uvular nasal eng (which is /ŋ/), as in "thing", or "English".

[gewelg]

This corrresponds with what I am studying in my Articulatory Ponetics class. other vidoes has variants to stuff that I am learning so I like this video and I like the clear exmples you give...Thanks When you are finished learning it you should offer interractive narrow phonetic transcription exercises. Thats what i need help with now, writing connected speech and putting in diacritic marks.

[ricardojavierp]

You missed palato-alveolar sounds (like ʧ or ʤ), as in "church" or "judge"

[guoqinzou]

ssssssssssssssssso ffffffffffffffffffffffffacking good

[dbsk06]

really interesting so far. hope i can correct my bad pronunciation habits!

[Xiaxun Ding]

Great video! I'm linguistics major so I get excited when I hear people talking about IPA! Thnak you.

[hummingbirdchen]

Thanks Gabe, really helpful for my studies learning IPA :)