Welcome to Day 3!
Welcome to Day 3! This is where the magic happens! Today is all about pronunciation and it’s going to help you change how you sound when you speak English.
In the Day 3 lesson, you worked on weak forms, contractions, vowel sounds, elision, glottal stops and all those little details that make British English flow. These are the pronunciation points that make people say, “Wow, your English sounds so natural!”
Want to watch the lesson again? Click below to watch the Day 3 video lesson before you practise with today’s exercises. Listen carefully to how these sounds work in real speech.
Today’s tasks are a bit different because pronunciation isn’t necessarily level-specific. These sounds and features are important at all levels, so we’ve organised the exercises as Task A, Task B and Task C instead of by level.
Whether you’re working at B1, B2 or C1, these pronunciation exercises will help you sound more natural and fluent. Let’s dive in!
Task A
Use the Interactive Phonemic Chart below to help you remember the symbols and sounds for each vowel sound covered in the lesson.
Task B
Before you complete Task B, let’s review some important pronunciation concepts:
Contractions
Contractions or short forms such as I’m, we’ve, they’d, etc. are very common in spoken British English. Had and would contract to /d/ after vowel sounds, e.g. I had /aɪ hæd/ → I’d /aɪd/. They contract to /əd/ after consonant sounds, adding an extra syllable, e.g. rain had /reɪn hæd/ → rain’d /ˈreɪnəd/.
Syncope
In the lesson, we saw that the schwa is often dropped from the middle of words such as favourite, camera and towards.
Click to hear some more common examples. Listen and repeat to practise.
The Glottal Stop
In my Modern RP accent, I sometimes use a glottal stop at the end of a word instead of a traditional /t/ sound. To make this sound, block the flow of air in the throat and then quickly release it like a small cough.
