Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 125th episode.

It's been a while since I've talked about Schwaw, and since it's been an active topic in the English Assembly forums lately,

it seems like a good time to revisit it and a podcast.

Let's review, what is shua, and how do we pronounce it?

At its simplest,

schwa is a weak, unstressed vowel sound. It most frequently occurs adjacent to stressed syllables,

and its pronunciation is very, very close to that of a short U sound. The short U is the

vowel sound in the word sun. Uh. If that were all there was to say about unstressed vowel sounds,

schwa would be very easy to understand.

But we're talking about English, and so nobody should be surprised

when I say that it's actually not that simple. First, let me say that schwa

isn't the only sound we use in an unstressed vowel sound position. The short I,

is also sometimes weak and also commonly occurs adjacent to a stressed syllable. I'm going to talk more about

that in our next episode. Next, let's get confusion about dictionary transcriptions out of the way.

Schwa is transcribed in pretty much every dictionary as an upside-down letter E.

This at least is consistent.

However, some dictionaries will also use the schwa symbol for the short U sound.

If your dictionary does this, you should understand that schwa and short U are very

nearly identical in pronunciation.

You can assume that whenever you see an upside-down E, you will use the vowel sound of

the word sun.

...