hello everybody today we are going to practice our pronunciation
i hear many learners make the same vowel mistake so today i'm going to
teach you how to pronounce some very common vowels
in english so to get started i wanted to show you two things
what is this and what is this this is a boot
it's a red boot this is a book it's a
blue book so we have a boot and we have a book now if we look at the
spelling of these words boot and book
they both have two o's in them do we pronounce these two o's the same
or do we pronounce them differently so listen carefully one more time
is the pronunciation of o-o the same in these two words
the answer is we pronounce the two o's differently in these words so this is a
problem many learners of english have they see
the two o's and they pronounce them the same way
in every word but in fact there are different ways to pronounce
two o's in english there's also uh here's another example
so there is a vowel sound in this word luke like luke skywalker
luke and boot have the same vowel that's strange right
because if you think about it boot has two o's in it and luke
has a u so here we have a situation where two or the same pronunciation
in this case an oo sound can be represented by
different spellings so this is difficult in english what i'm
going to teach you today are some common words um that have
uh this sound in english i'm going to teach you how to pronounce the sound
in the different ways for some of the most common words
so let's get started okay so we are going to focus
on two vowel sounds today when you learn pronunciation i recommend
using a mirror and looking at what your nose does
what your lips do what your teeth do and what your tongue does
this can really help you improve your pronunciation
so once you have a mirror um you can look at what you're doing while
you say these words so what is the difference between the
one of the differences is what my lips are doing
so i have here two lips in this case the lips are rounded boot
so in boot if i slow it down my lips actually make a circle boot
boot ooh okay so it has a circle sound an
oo sound it's the same with in
luke so sometimes with you and sometimes with
two o's we circle our lips and we make an
the this is very different from the word book
book in this case my lips are not round they're more like this
they're more spread book and compare that to
so the lips are doing a lot of the work to make these sounds different
another thing you might notice is that some vowels
are very long and so we pronounce them for a longer time
and some vowels are very short we say them very quickly
listen carefully and tell me what is the long vowel and what is the short vowel
boot book which one is longer boot
is the longer one book is very short so that's another difference sometimes
two o's is pronounced long sometimes two o's is pronounced short
it's the same with you sometimes like in luke
it's a long vowel sound whereas in this word
look it's a short vowel sound so the words we are going to learn today
i want you to really focus on if the lips
are round or if they're spread and if the vowel sound is long or if it
is short okay this will really help your
pronunciation so um what i want you to do
is we are going to say these different words
listen to my pronunciation and then you try
okay so the first word is boot so again a circle
your lips are in a circle boot and it's a long word or a long vowel
sound now try to say this one book
book it's nice and short okay let's try this word luke
look look okay now here's another word
this word pool my lips go like this and it's a long vowel sound
pool pool now this is different from um
this vowel sound which is the same as in book
pull pull it's a fast sound pull and our lips are spread
like this okay now we have here the word cook do you think cook
is a long vowel sound or a short vowel sound
cook it's a short vowel sound and what are our lips doing with this
word cook are they in a round shape or are they
spread cook they're actually spread
this is very different from the word cool
cool in this case my lips make a circle cool
and it's a longer sound so again what you will notice is sometimes these
are pronounced the same these letters and sometimes they're pronounced
differently okay so let's look at a couple more
words where you might need to use these
different vowel pronunciations so we've talked about the spelling of o
o and how sometimes that can have an u sound to it like tool
and sometimes they can have a sound to it like
took and we said the same thing for you sometimes it has that ooh sound and
sometimes it has that uh sound now i'm so sorry guys
but i am going to add one more spelling oh you sometimes it also has that
uh sound so let's look at some examples and again the main thing here is we're
looking at two different pronunciations of a vowel
so you're going to hear two different vowel sounds
and i want you to think with these vowel sounds
do we round our lips do we spread our lips
do we say the vowel for a long time or a short time
okay so let's look at this word tool tool
tool what do you think what kind of lips are we doing
we're doing the uh lips tool okay so when you pronounce this
word um it's important your lips are like a
circle it's like the word cool now this is very
different from the word took took notice my lips are not
in a circle they're more spread out took i took the exam
this is a very common word so you really want to work on the pronunciation of
this word took so what about with the length
tool that's a long sound compared to took that's a short sound a
okay now let's look at another word we have here a word fool
it has the same vowel sound as tool tool fool um so this has
the circular lips and the long vowel sound fool
now this is very different from the word full
full has the spread lips full and it's a short
quick sound full full full um and that
is really one important part of pronunciation
whenever you're learning any vowel sound you should always
ask yourself are my lips in a circle are they spread is the vowel long
or is it short that can really help you master your
vowels so now we are going to come to three common words in english these are
the last words we're going to talk about today
should would could we use these a lot so they're very
important to master the pronunciation of the vowel so o u can also have the
should has the same vowel sound as took so we say should it's a very
fast vowel sound so it's a short vowel sound
should and our lips do not round if i said this word with rounded
lips it would sound like should but that's not what i'm saying
i'm saying should it's the same with could
could you don't round your lips you keep them spread
and it's a short sound could finally would i hear many students say
wood and they make that round lip for this word no round lip it's spread
and we say it fast would i would like to do that would okay
so that is our pronunciation lesson today
what i want you to remember are is that there are different ways
to pronounce these spellings sometimes two o's u and o u
might have the same pronunciation sometimes they might have different
pronunciations today we talked about some very common
words in english like took book cool
so these are the words that you really want to start to focus on
in terms of pronunciation you can watch this video
multiple times i recommend that you watch it
and say these words after me with your mirror
and really focus on what your lips are doing and
how long you are saying each vowel sound for
so to get more practice i recommend you come check out
www.engvid.com there you can actually take my quiz
on what you learned here today you can also find
other lessons on many different topics i also recommend that you check out my
youtube channel and you subscribe um there you
can actually find a lot of different english resources on
pronunciation vocabulary grammar and many other
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