Hi, everybody! I am Georgiana, your English teacher and founder of SpeakEnglishPodcast.com. My mission is to help you speak English fluently.

Today we will talk about how to pronounce vowels in English. And with a fun point of view story you will improve your grammar.

The truth is that vowels in English always represent a particular difficulty for many students.

But don't worry because there is a self-evident reason why this happens.

It turns out that in English, we have six vowel letters represented by the letters a, e, i, o, and u and fifteen vowel sounds.

Fifteen vowel sounds?

Yes. You see that's the real problem.

In English, we don't read vowels as they are written, simply because the same vowel letter can be pronounced in different ways.

For example, we can pronounce vowel A in seven different ways.

Amazing, right?

We divide vowel sounds into three different categories:

Long vowels (we pronounce the long vowels the same as the letter.)

These are the long vowel sounds in American English:

A /eɪ/, E /i/, I /ɑɪ/, O /oʊ/, U /yu/.

Examples:

Steak / steɪk /

Sleep / slip /

Bike / baɪk /

Home / hoʊm /

Cute / kyut /

Short vowels (have the most common sound for a single vowel spelling.)

Examples:

cat /kæt/

bed /bɛd/

sit /sɪt/ top /tɑp/

sun /sʌn/

Other vowels (the remaining vowel sounds)

other u /ʊ/ Put /pʊt/

oo sound /u/ soon /sun/

aw sound /ɔ/ dog /dɔg/

oi sound /ɔɪ/ join /ʤɔɪn/

ow sound /aʊ/. down /daʊn/

Ok, let’s continue.

I want to talk about the schwa (ə) sound.

What is Schwa?

The Schwa sound - is the most common vowel in English.

We find this sound in almost all words with more than a syllable.

Examples:

Doctor, about, the, center.

Schwa (ə) replaces any vowel in English if the vowel is unstressed.

It also appears in words consisting of only one syllable: a, the, of.

Examples with Schwa:

Here I will give several examples where you can see how schwa replaces the other vowels in English.

Ok, let’s start!

Let’s continue.

I will start by giving you 7 examples of different ways to pronounce vowel A.

This exercise will help you understand the different ways you can pronounce vowels in English. But don’t get intimidated. I will give you further instructions, but for now, make sure you have the transcript and that you listen carefully to the different examples.

Let’s continue with vowel E.

Let’s see some different ways you can pronounce the vowel I in English:

Let’s see how many ways we can pronounce the vowel O in English:

Now you will learn how to pronounce the vowel U seven different ways:

As you can see, there are multiple ways to pronounce vowels in English.

But don't worry. You don't have to memorize anything.

The reason I created this lesson, was to make you realize how important it is to listen, listen, and listen to obtain English fluency.

However, I do have some tips that will help you improve your pronunciation:

Helpful Tips:

Try the shadowing technique. While you listen to the audio, imitate the narrator. Listen to the material and try your best to talk at the same time as the narrator. It may be challenging, but it's fun! This technique requires a lot of concentration. So, leave this part for when you have listened to the content several times.

Let’s move on to the next section.

Now, let’s practice.