Learn to use and pronounce the idiom “Spread the Word” comfortably in conversational English. Discover which words or syllables to reduce, how to link them together, and the melodic shape of the phrase.
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Video Text:
Happy New Year everyone. I hope you had a great time spending New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day with friends and family. 2010 was an awesome year. Well, it had its ups and downs I suppose for everybody, but, it was a great year. And I want to thank everyone who watched my videos, who contacted me with a question, who was involved in the community of Rachel’s English on Facebook. And, I want to thank everybody who told somebody else about my website and my YouTube channel. I know a lot of users did because they told me.
And that brings us to the idiom we are going to go over today, spread the word. It’s what some of my users have been doing, and I hope that they will continue to do. And I’m inviting everyone who uses my website to spread the word about Rachel’s English because in 2011 I would love to quit my job and have Rachel’s English be what I do. Period. The only thing I give my time to work-wise. So let’s go over the idiom to spread the word. It means not just to tell one person, but to tell many people. For example, I’m having a party tonight, spread the word. That doesn’t mean tell John and Mary, it means tell everyone you know.
Another example sentence: Thanks for using Rachel’s English, and thanks for helping to spread the word. As I said a lot of people have already told me that they’ve done this. If they’re a teacher perhaps they’ve used it in their classroom, told students. A student, maybe they’ve told fellow students, their teachers, friends and family, some people have posted it to their friends on Facebook. It’s all so helpful in spreading the word, and I thank you for it.
Now, how to pronounce spread the word. It begins with the SPR consonant cluster, and you do go through all three of those sounds: ss, pp, rr. Spr-, spr-, spre-. Opens into the ‘eh’ as in ‘bed’ vowel, spre-, dd. The tongue comes up for the D: spread, the. Voiced TH sound and the schwa, it’s an unaccented syllable. Spread the, spread the, word.
The W consonant sound, the R vowel/consonant sound, ww, rr, dd. And the D sound. So the lips start very tight for the W, rr, they open a little bit for that R vowel, wor-, wor-, d. And the tongue, which has been back a bit for the R, wor-d, comes up and the top touches, dd, the roof of the mouth and pulls down to make the D sound. So we’ve got the W consonant, the R vowel/consonant sound, it’s just one sound here, and the D sound. WW, rr, dd. Word. Spread the word. That’s it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.
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