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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 209th episode.

I received a great question from a listener named Victoria about the difference between

Schwa and short U.

Victoria wrote,

Hi, I am kind of confused about the schwa sound and short U sound.

Both of them have the same symbol, upside down letter E, for pronunciation.

How do I know what words I should pronounce schwa sound or short U sound when I look

at the dictionary? Like duck and sun, the symbols in the dictionary are the upside down letter

E. I know it's pronounced short U sound, but some people from Asia pronounce schwa sound because the symbol is the same as shua.

I don't know how to explain why it should be pronounced with a short U sound and why not with shua.

Could you please help me with the question? Thanks.

This is an excellent question, Victoria, and I certainly understand your confusion.

First, let me give some background for those of you who aren't familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, known as the IPA.

The IPA are those symbols that dictionaries use to show how to pronounce a word.

There are two symbols that are important for today's discussion, the upside down letter E and the upside down letter V.

It sounds like the dictionary Victoria is referring to only uses the upside down letter E.

Generally, I prefer dictionaries that use both the upside down E and the upside down V because of exactly the question Victoria has.

In dictionaries that use both symbols, the upside-down E is the symbol for schwa, and the

upside-down V is the short U symbol.

These are the symbols we use on pronuncian.com, and Cambridge Dictionaries Online is an example of an online dictionary with this notation.

So why do some dictionaries do it one way and some the other way?

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