010: Vowels, Part 1
Conversation & Pronunciation: Learn English with The Rachel's English Podcast
Rachel's English
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 13 September 2017
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David and I discuss five of the 11 vowels of American English, and go over the various ways each sound can be spelled. This leads to discussions of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and spelling bees (David won his school spelling bee!). The idioms 'rule of thumb' and 'off the top of my head' come up in conversation. Vowels covered: AH [ɑ], AW [ɔ], AA [æ], EE [i], IH [ɪ].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Rachel's English podcast. I'm so glad to have you listening. This is coming to you from Philadelphia, PA, from our son's closet, because we think it's the best place in the room to record. I'm here with my husband David. |
| 0:17.2 | Everybody. And today we're going to be discussing vowels. |
| 0:26.0 | If you can't understand everything we're saying or you just want a copy of the transcript, |
| 0:28.7 | you can get one absolutely free. |
| 0:32.7 | Please visit rachelsenglish.com slash podcast. |
| 0:51.2 | Okay, guys, I've been looking forward to taping this podcast for a while because I think it's always fun to discuss something that's technically related to English pronunciation that, you know, your average native speaker would know nothing about with my husband, David. |
| 0:53.9 | Because he is your average native speaker. He has not studied English or |
| 0:56.4 | teaching English or English pronunciation or any of that. Truth. So this should be interesting. |
| 1:03.6 | Okay, to start off, David, how would you define vowels? What would you say a vowel is? |
| 1:09.7 | I would say that a vowel, they're the most important letters. |
| 1:15.8 | That's what I would say. |
| 1:17.3 | Okay. |
| 1:19.8 | They, I don't know what I would say. |
| 1:23.0 | They're the vowels. |
| 1:23.8 | Okay. |
| 1:24.1 | So your definition of a vowel is the most important letter, comma, the vowel. |
| 1:31.1 | Exactly. Yeah, that's good. A rule of thumb is you do not define a word by having that same word in the definition. |
| 1:38.1 | All right. All right. Vowels, they make the important sounds, the most important sounds in the word that link the consonants together. |
| 1:50.0 | Okay. |
| 1:50.8 | I want to go back quickly and just point out an idiom I used, which was rule of thumb, which is the way something is generally done. |
| 2:00.1 | Right. |
| 2:00.6 | A rule of thumb is you don't use a word in a definition for that word. |
... |
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