Back To Basics Common English Words You May Mispronounce
Hey there I’m Emma from mmmEnglish!
In this little video today, I’ll be sharing some incredibly
common English words
that you may be mispronouncing.
Now these are definitely words that you already know,
you use them all the time when you speak English,
when you read, when you listen.
They’re really familiar words
but you may not be pronouncing them correctly.
So we’re gonna practise how they sound together
today.
Let’s go!
To be honest, sometimes I feel like the English
language is a little unfair to you.
Some aspects of pronunciation are just really hard,
aren’t they? We’ve got silent letters
and letters that are pronounced in more than one way.
Vowels in particular, I mean there’s only five
vowel letters but there are twenty vowel sounds.
I mean I’m just thankful you’re still here
watching my lessons.
Just kidding, of course you should be here
and of course, we’re gonna be able to improve
your pronunciation together.
That’s what we’re doing here right now.
Like I said, all the words that I’m sharing today are
extremely common. They’re everyday words
that I say multiple times each day
so it’s worth spending a little bit of time tweaking
and perfecting your pronunciation to get them right.
So you might feel quite confident talking about
people in English, right? Is that you?
These nouns are some of the first ones
that you learn when you’re learning any language, right?
But the pronunciation of the singular and plural
forms in English is a little confusing
and it’s quite common for my English students to make
mistakes with them especially if they
never quite learnt the correct pronunciation and so
over time,
they’ve just continued pronouncing it incorrectly.
So I want to go through a few of them with you.
Child and children.
Now both words start with that sound
but when you look at the phonemic script,
what’s different about the sound that’s following that
after that sound?
It’s the vowel sound. It’s different, right?
It’s a different vowel sound
so that’s why using the phonemic script is so important
for your pronunciation because you can see the sound
and see that it’s different.
I mean, hear it right?
and
So when you’re using these two words,
it’s really important that you hear that difference.
It’s not
and it’s not
it’s child and children.
So here’s a couple of sentences to practise with
out loud okay?
My neighbours have seven children.
When I was a child, we lived by the sea.
Great stuff!
Alright, surely you knew this one was coming, right?
Woman.
Women.
Now it’s really easy to get the singular ‘woman’
mixed up with the plural ‘women’ because of that O.
You can see in the phonemic script that that first
syllable is the stressed one.
You can see it because that little mark over there
is always there to show you which syllable is stressed.
It comes before the stressed syllable.
The second syllable is unstressed.
So what often happens in unstressed syllables
in English is the vowel sound
reduces to a schwa and that’s that
sound, really lazy sound. So it’s like great
when the letter is the same, it sounds different.
When the letter is different, sounds the same.
Let’s focus on the singular form first ‘woman’
So start with the sound,
make sure that your lips are rounded and that your teeth
are not touching your lips.
Then we have the as in ‘book’ sound.
Now this is the stronger syllable, right? It’s stressed,
we need to hear it really clearly.
It’s the unstressed syllable that follows in
So that’s the schwa sound, it’s really soft
and it’s low in pitch.
Almost not there.
You don’t hear
That second syllable is reduced.
Alright now what about that plural form?
The plural form again is that
sound, then
as in ‘hit’
Okay so again that’s the strong syllable,
you need to hear it.
Make sure you’ve got air in your lungs to push it out.
Then the unstressed syllable follows, right?
So we reduce it down.
So let’s compare the two of them.
One woman.
Four women.
I asked the woman if she’d seen three women
arrive in a red car.
I asked the woman if she’d seen three women
arrive in a red car.
So these are really subtle differences
but they’re important ones if you’re trying to improve
your pronunciation and your accent
when you want to sound
more natural and relaxed as you speak.
Let’s keep going!
So again we’ve got some really simple,
really common words here, right?
But they are so often mispronounced by English
learners that we need to focus on them
for a few minutes.
And again, it’s that vowel sound
that we really need to pay attention to.
Even though we have the same vowel letter,
the sound that you use to pronounce these words
is different. Listen.
Let’s start with ‘can’.
Open your mouth up wide for that one.
I can do that.
So when I said that sentence, I’m really stressing
the word ‘can’ for emphasis
so this is really useful if someone is suggesting that
you can’t but you want to try and contradict them.
You want to tell them the opposite.
I can do it. I can.
The interesting thing about this word is that it actually
has two forms.
A stressed form and an unstressed form.
So the unstressed form is
Using that schwa sound again.
I can do that.
Now compare the two together, alright?
I can do that.
I can do that.
So there’s quite a difference there
when we’re stressing that word for emphasis.
I can do it.
Compared to the unstressed form.
I can do that.
I can do that.
Now there are a lot of grammatical words in English
that have a stressed and an unstressed form.
So these unstressed forms are a really
important part of natural English pronunciation.
It’s that schwa sound, it’s so important in unstressed
syllables and unstressed words.
So if you want to keep practising with the differences
between those stressed and unstressed forms,
check out that lesson up there,
I go into it in great detail.
Now you know that the negative form of ‘can’
is ‘cannot’ right?
And it’s often contracted in spoken English
so instead of saying ‘can not’,
you’ll hear ‘can’t’
and that’s a very different vowel sound
to what we were practising earlier, right?
Can’t.
In my accent, it sounds like the word ‘car’
but with a on the end, okay?
Now there’s some subtle differences between
my accent
and an American accent there because you’ll hear it
a little differently in some American accents, more like
But in my accent, it’s
So it’s that longer vowel sound
and very different to the short
Sorry. You can’t use the lift today
but you can use the stairs at the end of the hall.
So let’s just try that same sentence again but with the
unstressed form of ‘can’.
You can’t use the lift today
but you can use the stairs at the end of the hall.
Another super common word that I often
hear my students mispronouncing
is ‘Wednesday’.
Wednesday.
Now again you would have learnt this word
way back at the start
of your English learning journey, right?
But I still hear my students saying
So it doesn’t have three syllables. It only has two.
Wednesday.
And that first D is completely silent.
Wednesday.
I’m working late on Wednesday night.
They’re open for dinner from Wednesday to Sunday.
So the last pair of words that I want to share with you
are often mispronounced
and I’m talking about ‘advise’ and ‘advice’.
So one of these words is a verb, the other is a noun.
Listen.
Advise.
Advice.
Can you hear the difference in the pronunciation?
Advise. Advice
It’s that final consonant sound, the
unvoiced sound and the
voiced sound okay.
Now this sentence right here is not grammatically
correct. We’re using the noun form of this word
incorrectly as a verb
and you can hear it when I say it as well.
He adviced me.
He advised me.
One of the most common mistakes that I keep hearing
my students making again and again
is using a plural form of ‘advice’.
He gave me some advices.
Now that’s incorrect, right? You’ll never hear a native
speaker using ‘advices’
because it’s an uncountable noun.
When you use it, you need to use a determiner
or a quantifier to explain how much of it
you gave or you received, right?
He gave me some advice.
She shared three pieces of advice.
My boss advised me that
now was not the time to apply for a new job.
He advised me.
Awesome! Nice work!
Even though these words are really simple,
they’re ones that get used all the time
so it’s important that you take the time
every now and again to check yourself, right?
It’s really easy to slip back into
bad habits with your pronunciation
especially if you haven’t practised
speaking English in a little while.
If I was you and any of these words in this lesson
are a little challenging for you and you need to get your
tongue around them, I would go back, write down
all of the examples that we went through
and keep them somewhere where you can
practise them out loud each day.
Well done for sticking with me all the way
through to the end of that lesson.
If you want to keep practising your pronunciation
with me right now,
then here are a couple of other lessons
that you can dive into straight away.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel if you
haven’t already just down there.
I make new lessons every week
so I will see you in the next one.
Bye for now!