Ask questions quickly like a native speaker by learning natural pronunciation. When native speakers of English speak fast, the clear boundaries between words disappear and this is what gives the impression of talking fast. In reality, native speakers are not talking faster than normal — it’s just that the sounds in their pronunciation flow together in the most smooth and efficient way. For this natural, flowing effect to happen in pronunciation there are three important changes in pronunciation that may occur. The first change is that whole sounds in the sentence may disappear completely (“elision”). The second change in pronunciation is that for the sounds to flow more smoothly, individual sounds may shift to a different sound (“assimilation”). And finally, new sounds that are not in the individual words themselves may appear when the sentence is spoken quickly (“intrusion”). No need to worry if that makes learning natural pronunciation seem very complicated; I break everything down for you in this lesson. All you need to do is follow the lesson and repeat after me. I’ll also teach you some IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) so that you can recognise the individual sounds of English more easily. For a lot more information on sounding like a native speaker and improving your accent, take my accent course: https://www.engvid.com/out/jadeaccentcourse
TRANSCRIPT
Hi, everyone. In this lesson we’re going to learn how to speak fast like a native speaker. When you’re learning English and you hear native speakers, why is it that they sound so fast and it’s hard for them to understand? Are they really talking like: “Blub-blub-blub-blub-blub-blub-blub”, or is it something that they’re doing when they pronounce sentences that makes it seem fast, but it’s not really? Let’s look at some example sentences, and I’ll teach you how to speak fast like a native English speaker.
All my question phrases are questions with “Do” or “Did”, and this is them written out in the full sentence, then I have in this column what the sentence sounds like. If we don’t know how to read IPA transcription, here, this is very useful for us. But the problem, when we write out the pronunciation in this way, is we don’t have letters for all the sounds. We don’t have letters from the English alphabet for all the sounds in English, so it’s helpful, but we can still sound slightly wrong if this is all we know about the pronunciation. That’s why I’m going to teach you little bits that we need to know from here, so that you get the correct pronunciation. And this is what, altogether, will help you speak fast like a native speaker.
So, let’s start here, question phrase: “Do you like it?” That’s really slow. If you’re a beginner in English, you can understand it. “Do you like it?” But this is not how native speakers actually speak. It sounds something like: “D-you lie-kit? D-you lie-kit?” What happens is the “Do” and “you” join: “D-you”, “Do you”, and the “like” and the “it” change. The “k” goes to the second… The “k” joins “it”. “D-you lie-kit? D-you lie-kit?” And we can see this also in the IPA transcription. “Ii: kIt”, “də.ju: Ii: kIt”.
What’s also happening, here, in the IPA transcription, if you look here, this is “də. ju”, “də. ju”. This is schwa. “də. ju”. When I write it here, we don’t have any letter in English that can… In the English alphabet that can represent schwa, so that’s why I just put the “d” consonant: “D-you”, “D-you”, “D-you”.
Another… Now, you have to listen really, really, really carefully to hear the difference. “Do you like it?” can also sound like: “Jew lie-kit? Jew lie-kit?” I’m going to say the first one, then the second one: “D-you lie-kit? D-you lie-kit? Jew lie-kit?” You have to listen really, really carefully. So, I suggest you watch this video a few times so that you can start to hear the difference between very similar pronunciations. Here’s the transcription: “dʒU: li: kIt”. The same thing is happening, here, in the two examples: “li: kIt”, but the first part is different. “də.ju”, “dʒU”, “də.ju:”, “dʒU”. “dʒU: li: kIt”.
Let’s look at the next example: “Did you see that?” That’s how a beginner would say it. “Did you see that?” What does it sound like? “Did-yah see that? Did-yah see that?” Am I speaking fast now—“Did-yah see that?”—or am I just joining up the words so that they flow? “Did-yah see that?” If we look at the IPA transcription: “you” becomes “jə”. Although it’s… It looks like the letter “j”, this is the sound for “yah”, together with the schwa. “jə”. “did.jə si: đaet”. Don’t be scared by this; we don’t use this IPA symbol that often, and this is the word “that”. “did.jə si: đaet”. “Did-yah see that?”
Can you hear the difference between the first example and the second example? “Di-jah see that? Di-jah see that?”, “Did-yah see that?”, “Di-jah see that?”, “Did-yah see that?”, “Di-jah see that?” “di.dʒə si: đaet”. “jə”, “dʒə”, “jə”, “dʒə”. “Di-jah see that?”, “Did-yah see that?”, “Di-jah see that?”
