[LIVE!] Lesson | How to CRUSH These Sounds

These students were brave and amazing! You can see the way I work with my live students and how to master these sounds.

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Video Transcript:

I just finished teaching a live class. I’m here in my office at my desk. I worked with two students and we worked on some sounds that can really help anybody sound natural, and so I want to share these live class lessons with you here.

Did you know that A, the vowel sounds different depending on the consonant that comes after.

When this a vowel comes before an N, we don’t say a, we say æʌ.

can I hear you just imitate me slowly?

æʌ

Okay. Væʌ. Not putting on the N, just going into an uh.

Van

Don’t do the N.

Væʌ

So it’s Væ-uh. Uh like in butter, uh. Væʌ

Væʌn

Yeah, yes. I heard you put on the N at the end which is okay, I want to get that uh

Væʌn

Uhuh. Now, let’s change it.

Mæʌn

Yes, that was okay. I want more uh.

Mæʌ

We’ll even exaggerate it a little bit to find that lower openness,

Mæʌ

Hold on, let me think. Mæʌ

Do you see how my jaw relaxes even more?

Mæʌ

And you can see my tongue goes down a little bit because it’s a little bit darker in there.

Mæʌ

That’s what I want. I want the tongue to lower in the back

Mæʌ

Yes. Do it again.

Mæʌ

Uhuh. Now, we’re exactly. We’re going to bring in the N.

Mæʌn

Yes. Now we want all of that to be faster of course, but I don’t want to lose the UH part of it, otherwise it goes back to man, van, and we don’t want that. We want man, van. Let me hear you, let’s try to just speed it up, play it, say it, Mæʌn.

Mæʌn

No, not mæn. Mæ-ʌ-ʌ, mæʌ.

Mæʌn

Yes, better.

Mæʌn

Yes, that’s perfect.

Mæʌn

Mhm, love it. Let’s just keep doing it ten times, settle it in.

Mæʌn

That last one was a little bit more mæn. Mæʌn.

Mæʌn

Mhm, that’s better. So we want to move into that uh. Let’s do it with another word. This is, this is the way that this vowel æ like cat is always pronounced before an N. It’s always æ and you can see æ. You can see that the tongue does go down a little bit and that’s why you see more of the darkness. Okay let’s try hand really slowly, exaggerating UH. Hand.

Hæʌnd

Good.

Hæʌnd

Hmhm. And I’m seeing your mouth get darker, I’m seeing the tongue go down in the back.

Hæʌnd

Okay, hold on, hæʌnd. Make sure the tongue is going down in the back. That’s where we want the movement.

Hæʌnd

Yes. That is perfect. The thing that’s so nice about this is it’s also making your placement lower. Because if we don’t do that it’s sort of like hand, man, than. Do you hear how the placement there is sort of pinched up in this part of my face?

Yeah.

Yes and that’s what we don’t ever want in American English.

Æ. We want æʌ, æʌ, man, hand. Let’s just do a little bit more play it, say it with hand.

Hæʌd

Yes.

Hæʌd

I want more UH.

Hæʌd

Yes, exactly. So when you speed it up, make sure you’re still hitting UH. They should, what you just did was absolutely beautiful but when you make it faster, don’t drop one part, just make all of the parts faster including the UH.

Hæʌd

Okay. There, I’m not hearing UH. I’m hearing h Hænd. Hæʌn. Let’s just drop the end of the word. We’re doing this: Hæ-ʌ but we’re doing it at a normal speech pace.

Hæʌ

Exactly.

Hæʌ

It’s tricky when we speed it up to get that movement in. But if we lose it, then we go back to that high placement. So here’s the thing, in the academy, there’s a whole section of this vowel with N and there’s slow motion audio, just do the slow motion. Don’t mess with the regular pace for one week, two weeks, get that uh, get that uh feeling, get that uh, half of it, and when you’ve done that for two weeks, you know, 10 or 20 minutes a day, then try the regular pace. Um, but then also this is kind of lowering your placement, in a way that that feeling of UH that you’re moving into, hæʌ, that feeling can be in everything that you say. Okay, uhm, and this is you know, it’s exactly what you were saying. You wanted to be able to teach was like the vowels, the diphthongs, these sounds. So æʌ, æʌ, this is just one of those sounds that’s going to really make a nice difference.

Let’s take another um, word which changes in a different way.

Uhm, thanks.

Exactly. This is one where it changes to æ, æ, æ. Let’s just hear that æ.

æ

Yes

æ

Thanks

Yes. Exactly. Your placement is nice and low there.

Amazing. Working on a vowel can also lower placement. Now we’ll move into another way the a vowel changes, and from there we move into other sounds like the R. Everything is working to improve the overall sound and create a more natural American English sound.

And I think your pitch came down a little bit too which is exactly what we want. Okay, so think about that lower pitch, that lower placement like æ they thanks and tell me what time it is there in a sentence.

Uh, sorry, could you repeat I didn’t..

Yes, just tell me what time it is where you are.

Uh, 22:49.

Okay, but I want it here.

Twenty-two forty-nine.

Good. Now hold on. Twenty-two forty-nine. Twenty-two, twenty-two. See if we can bring it down. Twenty-two is what you said. Twenty-two, uh, uh is what I want. A little bit lower. Twenty-two.

Twenty-two forty-nine.

Yes, right. Now, let’s try forty with the flap T. Forty.

Forty.

Okay. I do think I want to work on that R a little bit, sort of like in learn as well. It’s a little bit for, ur, ur. I wanted to feel a little bit more focused here maybe creating just a little bit of space here, ur will help bring the focus forward.

Ur

Yeah, that’s better. Tell me if you hear the difference.

Ur

Right. One is further back, kind of trapped in the mouth, that’s not the one we want. In American English, we want the one that’s sort of shooting out the front and you can think of just moving the lip away from the gum, ur, just a little bit it helps bring that sound out.

Ur

Yeah.Ur, even more space here.

Ur

Uhhuh, better. Bring the corners in a little bit.

Ur

I don’t see your corners moving in at all. Ur. Let’s exaggerate it.

Ur

Uhhuh, that’s better. Now bring that, can you bring the tongue forward a little bit? Same position but a little more forward.

Ur

Yes, that’s better. So we think of the tongue being back for the R which it is, but it’s not nearly as far back as we sometimes make it. It’s just a little further back than other sounds but it’s still pretty far forward. Ur, and that helps bring this sound really focused and out. Ur. So wait, what was the word we were doing?

Oh, we were saying twenty, twenty-four or something? What was the time you were saying?

It was twenty-two fifty-two now.

Okay. So we were probably saying forty. So let’s just take that word four and think of that R with a little more space here, for.

Forty.

Okay, hold on. Another thing, we don’t want to lose the vowel. We don’t want to go for, we want to go for, first the vowel for.

For

Yeah, yes. Now, we’re going to tweak the E vowel and the schwa and we’ll talk about rhythm.

Correct rhythm makes such a huge difference in the American accent. And that’s exactly what I want. You know that makes your placement better too.

Chicken. Muffin.

Yeah, yes. So, it’s less here. Chicken. Eat chicken, and you’re really bringing it down and I want you to think about trying to make everything you say coming from this place down here. This is recorded and it will go in the academy and you can watch it in a couple of weeks. Really think about that. Think about we sort of found like an opening in a lower place. You’re also bringing your pitch down some, but yeah go to that a plus n section because I think finding that UH within that is also helping to lower your placement in a way that sounds really nice. But I think that you sound great and I think that your students are going to learn so much good English from you, and it’s so nice when they learn it right the first time. They don’t have to be adults working so hard to change their accent to understandable.

Yeah, and this is my main aim to be here.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you sound you sound great. Keep it up and keep posting in the community so you can keep getting that feedback from the teachers.

Sure, sure.

Okay. Soheila, thank you so much.

You’re welcome

I appreciate it. You’re welcome. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye.

The thing I loved about working with this student is we get to see how changing one thing like a vowel or Rhythm can have an impact on another part of the accent like placement. All the pieces are working together to create a really natural sound.

The next student shares with me why she joined Rachel’s English Academy. I’m sure this is something a lot of you can relate to.

I also participated in other speaking projects and I noticed lack of improvement. And it was a bit of frustrating for me because in general I use a lot of English mostly uh written and um, I also write because I am a scientist working in medicine but my speaking is a bit of you know, I have a lot of struggles with it. Not in speaking in general but with my placement which I wasn’t totally aware of before joining the academy and I suppose with intonation and with rhythm which is a bit of choppy in some moments. And this the biggest motivation to be more active in this.

Okay, great.

And I think I still struggle with placement. It’s without my conscious control.

Yes, I think it’s something we can work on I’m also noticing one other thing that I think is one habit that we can work to change that will make a big  difference with the smoothness and that is I’m not really hearing flap T. I’m hearing true T, true T, true T.

With her, we’ll work on placement and smoothness you’ll see how working on one improves the other. Also the flap T is so important for the character of how you sound for the smoothness of how you sound.

And that tt,tt,tt makes it a little choppy. So I’ve just written down four words from what you’ve said that I want to go over. This is one of them. Actually, let’s take off the Ed ending just to simplify it and make it present tense. Let me hear that.

Notice

Right, that’s what I want. Notice is sort of how I heard it first and that true T makes it feel a little separate.

Notice

Right, notice.

Notice

Yeah, notice.

Notice

I’m going to change the pitch a little bit.

Notice

Hold on. I want to make sure that you were not missing the beginning. I’m getting a little bit nou, but I want, I want there to be a little bit up before the down.

Notice

Right.

Notice

Yeah, do your hand with it.

Notice

Hmhm. So we’re getting the up and the down. If I was going to slow it down, it would be notice but I’m doing it notice, fast.

Notice

That’s pretty good and it’s definitely smoother and I think also it helps your placement be lower. At first it was notice, notice, so your o diphthong was more like oh, and your true T was tt, kind of sharp, your syllables were similar in length. None of that is really the characteristic of American English. The characteristic of American English is short and long, connected together, and when you’re doing that, I think your placement is automatically going to lower, your higher placement is linked to other characteristics of your habit I think. And if you change those other habits like true Ts to into flap Ts, smoothing your speech, shortening unstressed syllables, I think all of that will probably bring the placement down without having to consciously thinking so much about lowering the placement,  I would start focusing on those things in order to get lower placement rather than trying to somehow force lower placement. I think that things like the flap T, this is a more concrete thing that we can focus on and really work and immediately understand and know the difference. So, let me grab another couple words. Um, you actually said restarted but I’m just going to say started to make it more simple. So this is a flap T. Started. So let’s hear it.

Started

Hmhm. And now let’s do it with an up down shape of stress.

Started

Right. And you notice that we changed the rhythm so that the last one was very short which is what we want.

Started

Hmhm. And now, we’ll speed it up.

Started

And now, let’s just, to make it a little bit more complicated, let’s see what it’s like if we put restarted. So we put the prefix re-, re- re- but I want the lengthen star.

Restarted

Exactly, exactly.

Restarted

Hmhm. Okay, I’m getting a little bit re, re and I went ri, ri, ri, ri.

Restarted

Yes, exactly.

Restarted

Uhuh. I’m going to maybe work on your R in a second, but for now I want to do one more word of the flap T. I’m going to do a shortened version of what you said and then we’ll do the version of what you said. Okay, can you say this word for me.

Total

Okay, to- exactly. You knew right away, total, that that’s how you did it and you corrected it because that’s never what we want, we never want dada, equal length, as you noticed without me having to say anything so that’s great. And then you fixed it and you said total, which is what we want. Exactly, total. We want long, short, in this case we want that flap T just bouncing quickly. When you had said it earlier you said this word, and it was more like totally. But it’s of course totally.

Totally

Right.

Totally

Hmhm. And we can say this like if I want to say what you’re doing is correct, I can say ‘totally’ because that means right, totally. You’re doing it totally, totally correctly. Exactly. So now, your placement feels lower, certainly we’ve got less choppiness and more smoothness, it’s partly that flap T, but it’s also partly just changing your rhythm of it. Uhm, and I just want to point out again that you knew it right away. I didn’t stop you and say dunt, dunt, you notice it. Okay, here’s one other thing I want to work on now. Think about it again. What’s my stress going to be, how am I going to shape that which is going to be long which is going to be short.

Biggest

Right, exactly. When you said it earlier it was sort of biggist, big, so I wanted to work on that vowel, that’s why I wrote it down. But it was also kind of dada, dada-dada instead of da-da. Let me just hear you do that on da.

Da-da

Exactly. That’s very good. I know that some people get really hung up with repeating on da, and it feels sort of choppy and difficult, and so they skip it, and then I say no no, if it’s choppy and difficult we need to work to smooth that out because that’s what we’re going to bring into every other word we ever practice.

Biggest

Exactly. You know what? Your vowel even got better.

Because before—

When I’m speaking more spontaneously,

yeah

I had to keep everything that,

Yeah. That’s fair.

Think it’s easier because you know, listen repeat, listen repeat. But speaking just from my head is, I didn’t achieve this level.

Yes, that’s okay. There are ways to get there. So, the first one of course is you’re doing, the play it say it repetition practice which is exactly what you should do. You hear me say ‘biggest’ and then you say ‘biggest’ and it’s lower your placement and everything then, at the end of the day, um, record yourself just speaking for maybe 10-15 seconds. It doesn’t have to be very long at all, just saying what you did today.

This is one of the main things I hear from my students. I can practice with the method and get more comfortable with certain words, but when it comes to conversation, I can’t use the accent I want. In the academy we have lessons to help students take their practice into real life, basically it has to do with recording yourself in a certain way each day. And this is sort of what I say can be a really good bridge into all of it being there for you when you’re speaking. Now it will take a long time you know you’re doing your exercises but I would add this, it’s maybe like a five-minute exercise to do every day as well if you can and that will really take help you bridge that practice time into your just spontaneous speaking time.

But you know where you’re at is sometimes the most frustrating place for people because they say well I know the things I’m doing the work but it’s not my habit yet and then that’s just frustrating like I notice them more than I used to, and now I like my own accent less than I used to. So it’s a really frustrating place to be when you started the work and you start to understand it but the habit hasn’t caught up with you yet. But definitely, recording yourself doesn’t have to be a video it can just be an audio. It’s a great way for your brain to just start taking in your voice in spontaneous conversation, and of course the end goal is that you’re doing zero thinking about it. Um, but yeah, it’s a great, it’s a great, great way to bridge the gap.

Um okay, I said I wanted to work on the R so I’m going to come back to that. What was the word? It was start. That was the word I was working on. Um it was sort of like what I was working on earlier with Soheila which was the R is a little bit R, is a little bit farther back than I want it. Um, let’s just forget the T and just use the word ‘star’, and now we’ll circle back to the

Star

Do you know the difference between ah like in father and ah like in law like physically?

Yes.

Okay. I want more of an AH, just like the cheeks may be coming in a little bit, I think it could help bring the sound out a little bit more.

Star

Uhhuh, yeah. The first one was a little bit star, it was a, I’m not, I’m not imitating you right at all. It was kind of like stuck in your mouth like it wasn’t really coming out that much and I wanted that energy to feel and the placement to feel like coming out of the body, I’m not stuck in here. Ah, star.

Star

Uh-huh.

Star

Yes. That was pretty good. And the thing to think about is we want, we wanted to feel like there’s this thing coming out of us,  I sometimes say it’s like a tube of toothpaste, you know you just squeeze it and it just keeps coming, and we want all of our sounds to fit in that. A little bit before it was like ah, and then R. But I want the R to fit right into that same tube, right into that same shape of what’s coming out. Star. So the whole time it’s like connected to the abdomen and it’s coming out, there’s no like stopping, holding, less energy it’s always ‘star’, just let’s do that really slowly and think about that star.

Star.

Right. Exactly. The sound never stopped, the sound never pulled back. It’s like you have to take the sound and shape the R around it, rather than stop the sound to shape the R. The r has to catch on to what’s coming.

Star

Hmhm. Now, let’s try a little bit faster.

Star

Yeah.

Started

Okay, now one thing I want to try is not to have you do that. Star, started. Try not to move, I mean I know you’re doing a single word, you want to stress it naturally with your head and neck a little bit, let’s try not to do that.

Star

Yes. So here’s what you did: You started star and then you shaped your lips a little bit more, star, and the sound opened up. It’s like you heard that it wasn’t quite the sound that you wanted, your mouth made a change whether you knew it or not and it really clarified the sound. This is one thing that’s really advantageous about holding out the sounds is our ears can sometimes know that’s not quite the sound I want and then make an adjustment and that’s exactly what your body did.

Star

Hmhm. And that R is feeling more forward, it’s feeling a little bit more free, do you feel like it feels any different as far as how you’re producing it?

In general, yes because when I produce it, it’s more backward.

Yeah, we really don’t want that. We really want it to be tip not touching anything, not so far forward that it’s touching, but we want the general feel of it to still be pretty far forward, and part of that can be just thinking oh, the sound’s coming straight out I just got to get the r right in on that rather than stopping, holding, putting it in.

Okay, awesome. Um, let’s keep going. Why don’t you, is there anything you want to work on outside of what we’re already working on?

Uh, yes. I thought about placement.

Okay, yes. Well, let’s try some where we’re just working on placement then and we’re not talking about it in terms of rhythm or sounds. So, in order to do that I would love to have you just free talk a sentence or two maybe you can tell me where you live or a little bit more about your work.

Okay, I can tell you a bit of about my work. Like I mentioned,

That was a good enough sentence. I can tell you a little bit about my work. Let’s do that.

It’s such a pleasure to work with my students every month in the academy. When they learn how to change their sound and change their habits, they know it’s going to take a lot of time and consistency but that they will get there, they will reach their goals.

I teach live in the academy once a month, you can join and learn more at Rachelenglishacademy.com.

Keep your learning going now with this video and don’t forget to subscribe with notifications on. I just love being your English teacher. That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.