As a French native speaker, thanks for the chez-t. And you are right, my jaws dropped when I realized what you said. I can hear the difference more clearly now.
I've done something similar with a French speaker who struggled with the Swedish "å, ä, ö" vowels. When I asked her to read "au, ai, eu" out loud, her Swedish boyfriend was amazed to hear the three Swedish vowels almost perfectly pronounced.
My mum grew up in France where she studied English at university. She had a teacher who used this method of using French vowels to create English sounds. She now has a perfect English accent and you would never know she lived in France until the age of 21.
@@byt4fse2 is it really that hard to believe that out of the 189000 french people living in England, not one has learnt how to speak with an English accent? Maybe you could tell us what teaching method would be required?
@@byt4fse2 There's so much wrong with your pretentious bullshit of an argument that I don't even know where to start. A child's language acquisition has barely anything to do with how a grown person would approach learning a language, for example because an adult ACTUALLY KNOWS HOW TO COMMUNICATE ALREADY and doesn't have to speedrun learning a language during every single minute of their life.
I think we can all agree that the only issue with Dr. Lindsey's channel is that there aren't enough videos. But we are grateful for the videos that are there. So, in the end, it seems there's actually nothing wrong with Dr. Lindsey's channel.
I did something similar, but for Korean to English. Back when I was first learning Korean over a decade ago, I made online penpals and I would learn Korean from them and teach them English in exchange. One of the girls I was talking to told me how much she struggled with the [l] at the beginning of words, like London. In Korean, there is actually an [l] sound, but it's only when two ㄹ meet or at the end of words - on its own, especially at the start of words, it sounds like tapped r (don't have IPA available right now!). So, I told her that when she wants to say [l], imagine there's a secret 을 (eul) in front of it (you can't have Korean letters on their own), so instead of 런던 (leondeon, but pronounced more like reondeon), it becomes (을)런던 ([eul]leondeon, can only be pronounced as [l] due to the extra ㄹ before it). She told me that was really clever and actually worked, so I'm proud of that. I wanted to teach English in Korea, but health problems got in the way of that. If I had, I hope more Korean students would know about this! How to get a good [l] at the beginning of words every time!
A friend of mine in Korea has no problem with the initial [l] in English but can’t really say it correctly as a final as in _level._ (His pronunciation for the final is something like that initial sound in 런던-it’s like an l/r mix). I’ll see if maybe having him say some combination like 런던 would work. He also is well aware of the 𝖪𝖨𝖳/𝖥𝖫𝖤𝖤𝖢𝖤 distinction in English but always exaggerates the [ij] sound in _beach_ to avoid saying the alternative-I tell him he doesn’t have to draw it out but he persists in doing so, anyway. And, incidentally, for native English speakers who are learning Korean, I point out that some double consonants actually have close equivalents in English-they’re just not what we think of as “legal” initial consonants: ㄸ is what Homer Simpson says when he exclaims “D’oh!” (he _doesn’t_ say “Dough!”) and ㅃ is what English speakers say when they imitate a trumpet: “빠 빠빠 빠”-they’re not asking a black sheep if it has any wool.
When Americans ask me how they can produce Russin 'R' sound I usually answer that they already can do it. That 'flapped T' sounds almost identical to short trilled 'R' in Russian.
Korean has only one liquid phoneme: /l/ which is realized as a flap intervocally, and as a lateral word-finally or when geminated. In the initial, /l/ is actually in free variation between a flap and a lateral, making "right" vs "light" challenging to typical Korean learners of English. A well-known trick for Koreans is inserting a quick /ɯl/ before an L (as you mentioned) and a quick /u/ before an R, so "light" and "right" would be /ɯl.lɑ.it/ (geminated /l/, thus [l]) and /u.lɑ.it/ (intervocalic /l/, thus [ɾ]) respectively. Also notice that different epenthetic vowels are added before L and R (/ɯ/ and /u/) to reflect the labialization of English R which is another phonetic cue used to discriminate it from L.
Interestingly, when teaching English to PORTUGUESE speakers, I have instinctively approximated the "i" in kit to Portuguese "ê", which is equivalent to French "é"! Incredible how you have arrived at the same conclusion. To arrive at the sound of "ee" in "feet", I make use of Portuguese's ability to precisely control syllable and vowel stress with "´" markers and form a "í + i | íi" in sequence to arrive at a sound similar to "ille" in French. The "íi" vs "ê" sound difference is much clearer to students. Many smile when they finally hear the difference for the first time in their lives. Necessary adjustments are exponentially easier afterwards.
I was teaching a Portuguese speaker Polish phonology the other day and to my surprise he remarked that the Polish "y" (pronounced more or less as [ɪ~ɘ]) sounded like Portuguese "ê" to him. Instinctively it made little sense to me but now in hindsight I shouldn't have been surprised. I guess I'm too used to thinking of "e sounds" and "i sounds" as two discrete categories.
@@hieratics O “e” som em “Kate” /kɛjt/ não es o mesmo de o som “ê” /e/. O som /ɛ/ é “é” não é “ê”. O som /e/ é mais perto de o /ɪ/ som em Inglês, é em Inglês não temos o som /e/, só /ɛ/. We’re not trying to teach _perfect_ native speech, we’re trying to get people to speak in a way _closer_ to native speech. And if we can use a sound that their language has, which is close, but not existing in the target language, then you can sound more native by just using /e/ (which listeners will just hear as /ɪ/ anyways, because it is in the allophonic range) rather than focusing on and demoralizing yourself by trying to keep saying /ɪ/, and just not getting it, or remembering it.
@@myaobyclepiej I don't remember it exactly, but I'm pretty sure that Portugal Portuguese pronounces that letter with a quality pretty much identical to the slavic "y" hard vowel sound.
For me, as a Polish speaker, it was very helpful when I was finally told that 'kit' vowels are closer to 'y' sound in Polish leaving 'i' sound for the 'fleece' ones. This finally made the difference between 'shit' and 'sheet' into something simple to hear and pronounce. Now if only I knew the way to explain difference between 'ćpa' and 'cipa' to foreigners...
Without IPA? i think an approximate way of explanation would be: ćpa - peaCH-PIE* (without the "-i" in "pai") cipa - CHEAP-PIE* (same thing here) The diphthong /aɪ/ in the standard English is the safest hint for the /a/ vowel in Polish. Obviously Polish /tɕ/ is quite unique but /tʃʲ/ is the closest to it in English. English doesn't allow affricates before a plosive on the onset syllable so another word before it is needed to simulate it. ⟨ć⟩ is a single consonant without a vowel, ⟨ci⟩ is one full open syllable
As a French native speaker I had this realization on my own a few years back and I thought I was crazy or my hearing was bad because I had never heard any of my English teachers mention that /ɪ/ might actually be closer to /e/ than to /i/. I'm glad you're talking about it here because it makes pronunciation of these two sounds so much easier for French speakers!
Just being petty here, but it's not necessarily that English /ɪ/ (as in "pit") is closer to [i] than [e] in terms of articulation, actually it's right in between the two (or at least in theory, I don't know if the precise value of the average degree of aperture for English speakers actually sits right in the middle but whatever). It's rather that [e] is a better approximation than [i] because to an English speaker's ear [i] is easier to confuse with long /ɪj/ (as in "Pete"), which is pretty much just a version of /ɪ/ that closes more towards the end (that is to say it becomes more like [i]), than [e] is to confuse with the noticeably more open /ɛ/ (as in "pet").
This is genius! I had a French teacher at university who always struggled to pronounce ‘law’. He was convinced it wasn’t possible for him to create the sound, until I told him to think about the French word ‘l’or’ - not quite the same, but much closer than everything he’d attempted up until that point. This has blown my mind - I will definitely share this with my French nearest and dearest! Merci beaucoup (carefully pronounced so as not to sound like something else…!)
Thank you for sharing that tip! I had commented on an earlier video on how I just struggle to pronounce ‘prawn’ different than ‘prone’. I feel the comment section on this video is going to be a gold mine of good tips for French speakers x)
Ah that’s a good example - hopefully the ‘l’or’ tip can help you here too! I will confess, I had a good giggle listening to my French other half trying to get Siri to ‘pause’ his music, when unfortunately Siri thought he was saying ‘pose’. Unlocking the similarities in sounds between the two languages is an absolute game changer!
For me, ‘l’eau’ would be closer to English ‘low’ whereas ‘law’ rhymes with ‘paw/poor/pore/pour’ and is therefore closer to French ‘l’or’. I’m no expert but that tip definitely help my teacher to pronounce ‘law’ correctly.
@@lora4462law does not rhyme with poor/pore/pour. Lore is a different word. It does rhyme with paw though. Call, gone, dog all have the aw sound youre looking for.
I have to say, as a native English speaker, who learned French in childhood, but still struggles to pronounce the variety of vowels correctly, this is extremely helpful in reverse as well.
You have officially all my respect and admiration. I'm a French native speaker who's always been interested in pronunciation and more generally in differences between French and English. We're taught in school that words that end with -ed make the sound t as in "asked", the sound d as in "called" or the sound "eed", as in "wanted". I'd always been confused by this, I had never heard any native pronounce wanted as "wanteed". So one day I started thinking real hard, saying the sound ɪ aloud, and it hit me! It wasn't a kind of i/ee/iː at all, just the sound é I always knew!! Everyone could do it, but no-one realised how simple it actually was, no teacher ever told us that! I'm so happy and glad that the reference in linguistics approved of that idea, I'm not alone anymore, thank you, I'm gonna show this to everyone x'D
Excellent comment - I'm amazed that any french teacher of english would instruct students to pronounced "wanted" as "wanteed", that's just bizarrely wrong!
@@lpsp442 It's 100% true. And when I was a kid I tried to follow those recommendations, it was really hard to pronounce two sounds that didn't have a clear distinction, i and ɪ. One day I got an English English teacher, and I started getting really into the language. Only then did I listen to the real sounds and realise how wrong my teachers were! Again, they confounded the letters, thinking an "e" MUST be pronounced i. It sounds ridiculous, and it is
Pour une simple raison, les cours de phonétique n'étaient pas aussi présent à l'époque. Je suis prof d'anglais à 24 ans et je donne bien cet exemple ( I / i:)aujourd'hui. Ma promotion entière a reçu énormément de cours de phonétiques très poussés. Notre accent en 2023 (pour les jeunes prof) est bien meilleure que celui des plus vieux.@@Ca-kn5hw
Incredible, as a French speaker, I thought I had a good grasp of the difference between ɪ and iː after years of practice, but I never realized that I did'nt really! A really great way to explain clearly to my fellow french speaker how to master the difference. Now the sentence "chez toi" will never feel the same again, thanks to you... 😅 Thanks for the great work!
I am French and a few years ago, I realized that this ee/i thing is not so much about length, but about vowel quality. It made my pronunciation significantly better! I am very happy to hear you talk about this, and I hope some day a similar approach will be used by our high school English teachers.
As a Peace Corps English teacher in Africa (1968), I had great fun showing fellow volunteers how to say the unvoiced Bantu language ng by showing them it's right there in English though never at the start of a word. In the middle of "going away" for instance It was great fun to say cow in Chinyanja: ngombe. Cows themselves say Ngoo. Cats say Ngeeyow. I eventually managed one of the clicks in Xhosa too but there were in fact over a dozen. Yikes.
Before I found you channel, I always more or less trusted IPA transcriptions to be fairly accurate. But you have continued to demonstrate how easy it is to trick yourself into hearing a different sound than the one that is there because of semantic or spelling associations. It fortunately never really stunted my language learning, since I am generally fairly good at mimicry, and the general approach of "don't think about it too much, just mimic" has been more effective for me than transcription. Especially for things like fine differences in the way phonemes are pronounced that don't result in IPA differences but do result in a noticeable accent (for me it was the fact that German consonants -- not even counting the whole fortis-lenis pairs thing -- are subtly different from "the same" consonants in English).
I couldn't agree more. It's heresy, but the phonetic method of pronunciation teaching is for most learners somewhere between difficult and futile. Of course it helps the dedicated *teacher* to know some phonetics. Except when the established phonetics is wrong... Eventually I'll have the courage to make a video on this.
Thank you. I spent several years teaching (American) English to Chinese business people. The final vowel (especially a final L) was always a difficult leap for them. I would tell them to think of it as 了(le). Getting them to say "nor meh le" rather than "nor mah" for "normal" helped them to understand. And it led to far fewer misunderstandings. That being said: One of the biggest things I love about English (both American and British) is that we have so many immigrants that we've become used to a wide array of accents, and can understand almost anyone. In my small town, and at work, I hear Accents that are Mexican, Persian, Bulgarian, Russian, Swedish, French, Hmong, and others I don't know. And we all understand each other.
I've also noticed learner errors are perpetuated by tradition in pedagogy and translation, even though the contrast exists in Mandarin (for example). The R/L confusion is one that is surprisingly common for some reason despite Mandarin having a comparable distinction. One example is the song *The Internationale*, where the word 'internationale' is left untranslated and instead nativized in the Mandarin version. Assuming English as the source, every syllable of /ɪntəɹˌnæʃəˈnæl(ə)/ has a reasonable approximation in Mandarin. However, the nativization is, for some reason, /iŋ.tʰɤ.na.ɕjʊŋ.nai.ɚ/. Something like eeng-tuh-nah-shyung-nigh-er. Somehow /nælə/ becomes /nai.ɚ/ despite /na.lə/ being perfectly fine syllables. A lot of these weird correspondences might've started as people imported conventions from a different variety of Chinese. The /ɚ/ sound in Mandarin historically came from Middle Chinese /ȵiᴇ/, which became in other varieties of Chinese /ni/, /li/, /ji/, /ɦəl/, etc, so perhaps it made better sense in a different language/dialect.
Canadian (Nova Scotian) here: My 6-year-old is learning to read and write in a French immersion school. At home, I read her stories in French. She also writes stories in English using French phonemes to make English-sounding words. I don't correct her for her teacher told me that is what she should be doing. It surprises me to see how some English words look when spelled out phonetically.
in the quebec french dialect the /ɪ/ vowel actually replaces /ij/! so we have [vɪl] instead of [vil] and [fɪj] instead of [fij] (and the é is said slightly lower although the transcription remains e) funny how that works.
I've actually told a French friend exactly about this thing after reading your "Seeing the Fleece vowel" blogpost. At first, the guy was like "How in the heck do you English speakers actually distinguish those two sounds" so I told him about the French "é vs ille" thing that I got from your blogpost. After I told him about that, immediately, he was like "wth, now the distinction is so much more obvious!"
Often times I couldn’t understand the difference between é & e (schwa sound) in French. I used to think it happens bc the é is more centralized towards reaching “e” but I couldn’t explain how. Now I have a better reference point for this sound; I really have never thought of it as a kit vowel, thank U for the clarifying analysis, Dr Geoffrey 🙏🏻
@@enricobianchi4499 i'm pretty sure they're referring to the e as in "mer", "bel", "chef", "elle", etc. and also, the "schwa" you're referring to is specifically a ROUNDED schwa, which would be close to [ɵ]. the vowel in "veux" also sounds more or less like [ɵ].
@@notwithouttextthere's actually 2 sounds that could be called shwa in french if you want, you're just describing one of them, and the person you've responded to, described the other one. "De" and "deux" don't have the same vowel. Kinda like the closed and open "o" in french too
@@watersnake1462de/deux are homophones in plenty of french accents, not universally admittedly. Eg "deux fois" vs "de foie" feels like more of a stress difference than really a different sound.
Open/closed O also depends, in my accent "gauche" and "moche" don't rhyme, but in the southwest of FR it's pretty common to pronounce words like gauche, rose, etc. with the "porte" vowel and I'm sure the opposite merger exists in other areas.
Perfect example. Instead of listening for the best equivalence in sound, people are (mis)guided by the writing. Of course French contains sounds that are closer to English banking.
I've taught a good handful of American English speakers learning Latin/Spanish how to "roll their r's" using d/t-tapping. My exercise has always been for them to say "kitty" repeatedly (the humor helps with retention) and reduce the sounds around the tap. So start with /kɪɾɪj/ and once they've gotten into it, reduce it to /ɪɾɪj/ then /əɾɪj/ then /(ə)ɾɪ/ then finally /(ə)ɾ/ so that they're pretty much just repeatedly going /ɾ/ and when you tell them, "congratulations you're tapping an r" they suddenly have this realization and it's great. They may have to repeat the exercise a few times to get it down, but so long as they incorporate their "new" consonant into their pronunciation they usually get comfortable with it quickly.
Thank you so much for this video! I’m a native English speaker who learned the IPA in my French classes, and I have always had such a hard time understanding why the IPA doesn’t align with certain vowels that English and French should share. This relieves a lot of frustration.
The hardwork I had to do to make my mother pronounced beach not like bitch is really memorable. The simplicity in which you explain it makes my heart soar! The whole world needs to know about you right this second! I think your point that the teacher must know about the student's language in order to teach well is what is stumping me in my third languages studies. I always study a third language via English, not my first language. I'm fluent in English but it doesn't help for something as pointed as phonetics. For example, Korean has three "k" and "p" sounds and the approximation I see are all English approximations that doesn't make any sense to me as a French speaker.
Thank you so much Dr Lindsey. This video was extremely illuminating. While I'm no native speaker, I'm more or less confident in my ability to produce native-like qualities of the FLEECE and KIT vowels. My only problem is how to teach what I know to other people, and it's been a real pain in the neck. My approach was always "the KIT vowel lies somewhere between /i/ and /e/", both of which do occur in my native Vietnamese. But for lower-level students, I just told them to use the Vietnamese /e/ for KIT and the Vietnamese /i/ for FLEECE, which, as I now remember, was much easier to grasp than trying to figure out where to put your tongue between /i/ and /e/. Like you said, it's always about phonemic contrast, and never about exact phonetic quality. Another possibility is to use an allophone of /i/, [ï], which occurs before velar consonants. I'm gonna have to review my approach to teaching pronunciation, placing more emphasis on what the students already know in their mother tongue, rather than forcing them to adhere to what I think is "correct". They're allowed to have their own accent, after all. Another thing I'll need to emphasize is to make them stop looking at the spelling which is always a major contributor to bad pronunciation (with no phonemic contrast), as you said.
A friend of mine, who is an English teacher in Poland, needed an example to compare these two sounds for her students. This is what she came up with (and I think this is brilliant): „Sheet is what you sleep on and shit is what you slip on.“ 😁
@@notwithouttextYou don’t use a bottom sheet?! Don’t forget that in Europe, it’s common to use duvets, in which case you have only a bottom sheet and no top sheet.
Here in Portugal many people also pronounce fit and feet in the same way. Your “é”/“ill” trick for French is amazing and it kind of is applicable in Portuguese (“ê”/“i”). Very good channel ❤
The influence of spelling is huge. I’ve had many coworkers for whom English is a second language. With a few of them who share my interest in languages, I’ve used Google Translate much like this. It shows how their accent sounds a bit like transliterating English to the spelling of their native language, and also how other such spellings can help them improve their English pronunciation. With one guy whose native language is Polish, our example was “it would be funny”-it became /it wud bi fani/ as if it were written “it łud bi fani”, even though something like “yt łot byj fony” comes closer. Also, if you want to imitate a foreign accent without knowing the target language, try cramming English pronunciation into the spelling of that language and listening to what Google Translate says! What it lacks in authenticity it makes up for in being very funny, especially alongside a native speaker of that language.
I think "yt łud bij fanij" is closer to 'fony' is 'phony' (although, really, it just as if someone pluralised 'phone' but Polish way not English) than 'funny'
Год назад+2
Indeed, I'm happy to see your comment, because I just wanted to write that a similar analogy to the French one, would be the "i" and "y" distinction in Polish (approximating the "feet" and "fit" vowels respectively).
@beesixteen7596 wow, that's make it even more convoluted. I always thought like MarekWoi that "i" or "ii" can be used for "feet". It looks then that the phonetic transcription of /iː/ is misleading...
Spelling makes people say the "t" in "often" even though they would never say it in "soften" (or whistle, listen, fasten, castle, moisten, apostle, christmas, etc.)
I have a french roommate, who is deaf. He is trying to learn german and I had a similar idea to make an app / website where you could put in a word in german and it would give you a list of french words that use the same kind of sounds to make up the german word. So amazing to see a similar idea being released here :D
YES!! THANK YOU, more people need to hear this! As a French native, I still don't understand why this is not taught at school in France. Since the day I discovered this trick, all my English teachers kept telling me my pronunciation was so good but without asking how I figured it out?! As sad as it is, I just feel like us French are condemned to mediocre level of language teaching by our educational system...
Anybody who likes the idea of making English words out of French sounds should track down the book "Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames" by Luis D'Antin van Rooten. This is a collection of English nursery rhymes spelt as if they were French. Here's the first one, which you can try pasting into Google Translate and getting the French voice to read: Un p'tit d'un p'tit s'étonne aux halles. Un p'tit d'un p'tit ah degrés te fallent. Indolent qui ne sort cesse Indolent qui ne se mène Qu'importe un p'tit d'un p'tit Tout Gai de Reguennes. I've changed "petit" to "p'tit" and modified the punctuation a bit to make it flow better.
@@notwithouttextMaybe, but what would the French words then be? The magic of these versions is that the French actually means something (albeit on a surreal level).
The last part summarises it all: "... Anyone who takes pronunciation teaching seriously needs to know two things: As much as possible about the phonetics of the language you're teaching and as much as possible about the phonetics of the learner's language. Because that's where at least 90% of the problems come from". Very good insight indeed!
I noticed the similarity between French é and the English kit vowel recently and I was pretty surprised. Cool to see one of my favorite RUclipsrs confirm it!
As a french person learning english, thank you so much ! This is sooo helpful ! I study english in college and I have a phonetic class, but when we do "problem sounds" my teacher usually just repeats the two sounds she want us to distinguish and expect us to hear the difference without going further than saying "they're different" and "one's longer", but I really rarely manage to hear it.
Really informative video not just for English to French, but also to French to English speakers! You've helped me foster a great appreciation in phonetics, so thank you for every video you upload.
Fascinating! I'm French, and that's the first time someone correctly explains to me the kit-fleece problem! I've always been puzzled by the two different symbols that I couldn't pronounce differently, and by the vowel lengths that didn't always make sense. Umtimately, I wish the spelling of English was not that absurd (same for French, even though it is much more reasonable for French), since, as you say, we tend to trust our spelling more than our ears.
I LOVE your videos!!! I actually noticed Spanish speakers can do something similar by grabbing their "e" sound from unstressed syllables and using that for the "kit" vowel in English. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and observations here on RUclips!!!
Native french speaker here also, and also amazed of this revelation. So much time wasted when you made it finally seems so easy... Thank you very much sir
Some time ago I came up with a similar way for French people to pronounce my name Huib, featuring the Dutch "ui" sound, which is absent in a lot of languages and often somewhat tricky to teach people not familiar with the language. Although I believe it's very similar to the "eui" part of portefeuille, when you would stop just before the "y" sound of the "ille" starts. I like this way of teaching a lot because it makes me more aware of how words and letter combinations in certain languages actually sound and how you can "open up" your perception by using these "tricks". 1:13 Brings back memories of a Spanish co-worker who couldn't tell the difference between 'bitch' and 'beach' 😆And who made up his own English grammar and phrases in a uniquely poetic way, some of them still part of my own vocabulary every now and then.. Hope to meet this wonderful guy again some day ♥
Finally! I was wating this for a long time. Everytime people told me 'oh, it's just one vowel is longer and the other is shorter' I was like 'But that's exactly what I'm doing! And you're saying I'm wrong!' It took a lot of time to start hearing the difference, though I still suck at producing them. Now when people tries to bring up that 'longer/shorter' thing I just make a word with a looong 'short i' sound, since it's not that difficult to stretch that kind of centralized version. Also, realising that there are no strongly palatilized consonants in English made me think that in that case you have to make more movements with your tongue to make the 'long i'. Which means that it should be if not diphtong then at least a 'glidy' sound.
Thanks for this great video! I give accent reduction classes and I also suggest my French students to use their /e/ sound for the English /ɪ/. I demonstrate English native speakers on Forvo to prove that the English /ɪ/ actually sounds that way. The next vowel that I modify is STRUT which is more similar to the French /a/ than to [ø~ɵ] as in "le".
Apart from treacherous spelling and phonetic transcription, I'm thinking of another reason why French speakers tend not to spontaneously think of the and sounds as acceptable equivalents to the KIT and FLEECE vowels. In French these sounds always occur at the end of a syllable, unlike the KIT and FLEECE vowels. You mentioned that French learners have to be taught to pronounce a consonant after the sounds because it doesn't come naturally to them. The sound doesn't occur with a consonant after it in the same syllable either. While, for some speakers of French, both /e/ and /ɛ/ can occur in open syllables, and they are distinct phonemes, only /ɛ/ can be found in closed syllables. As a result /e/ in a closed syllable doesn't sound natural to a French ear (at least not to mine).
OMG, this blows my mind! As a native Italian, it's always been hard for me to grasp the difference between the KIT and the FLEECE vowel 'cause I've always been told they were a "short i" and a "long i", except that when I try to say "kit" thinking of a "short i", it sounds very different from a native saying "kit"... now I understand why! 'cause they're not a "short i" and a "long i"! thanks!
Thanks to you Dr. Lindsey, my girlfriend and my pets are huddled, scared, in a corner, because I, a québécois native french speaker, kept yelling at my screen because LITERALLY *NONE* OF YOUR EXPLANATIONS MAKE SENSE IN MY ACCENT! (fake anger for comedic purposes only) Great video! Although I would've put a bit more emphasis that most of this is tailored to the Parisian and metropolitan accents, it was very interesting!
I once said in front of French people that in the Czech words "žáci" and "žáky", the i and y sound the same, and they disagreed with me. To my Czech ears, the i and y sounded the same, but the French people heard my i as i and my y as é. And now I can't unhear it.
Just love this channel -- the insight and lucidity... Orthography is the villain/culprit -- I have felt along the years how much is misguides foreign speakers. It many times makes it impossible to recognize cognates.
French dialects here in Canada have a broader range of vowel and diphtong sounds than those in Europe. In general, our "é" is closer to the English pronunciation of the "long a" than it is to its "kit" pronunciation of the "short i". It's our "è" sound that's closer to "kit" - whereas in most dialects of European French I've come across, there's little or no difference between how "é" and "è" (and, for that matter, "ê") are pronounced. This has been obvious to me since childhood - when (often) European French dictation exercises focused on driving home the different spellings of what in Europe are homonyms but are here pronounced very differently, leaving US with no doubt as to how to spell them...
Dunno... I think French Canadian "é" is still very close to European "é", the difference is much more in the other vowels (a, â an, on, in, un, long ê, i, o, ô, ou, u, allophonic eur all differ way more). Doesn't really matter because fit/feet isn't the difficult vowel for French Canadians anyways, there's much more difficulty in cut vs cot~caught.
É and è are definitely different in French of France, except the final é and è. In many regions there's confusion between the two, or rather, more specifically, the è becomes é. Hence the similarity between j'irai (I will go) and j'irais (i would go). But é and è are always different inside the words.
@@JustinCase99999 That's interesting. In Canada, it's the other way around, final é / è are always clearly differentiated, but it's inside of the words in open syllables that they are sometimes interchangeable.
I seriously had trouble believing you until I said "une séquence" myself repeatedly. I'm not a native French speaker and haven't used it for ages, but I did learn it very young and have always had a nearly native accent ... and I can still only barely make myself believe that that vowel is what you say it is. Wow.
Standard Indonesian, our formal language, has only short vowels [a i u e o ə]. If we lengthen the vowels, the meaning of words will not change at all. Many Indonesians do not see any difference between tense vowels and laxed vowels. Javanese language, one of our dialects, however, has [i] and [ɪ], as in 'titik' [titɪʔ] (dot). It has also [u] and [ʊ], as in 'tutok' [tutʊʔ] (mouth). Such laxed vowels occur in the last syllables of Javanese words. Therefore, it is easy to introduce [i] - [ɪ] and [u] - [ʊ] to Javanese people. I am not Javanese. So, I am not sure if or not [o] - [ɔ], [e] - [ɛ] and [a] [ɑ] exist in Javanese language.
What a wonderful approach! As a native Spanish speaker, I think a similarly helpful comparison for Spanish speakers learning English is to think of the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (as in the English word _thing_ )as the letter Z as pronounced in Spain. This blows their minds every single time, as it's simply not the way it's taught - at least in Venezuela where I grew up. I think the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (as in _this_ ) is much harder to teach since there is no direct equivalent in Spanish.
I teach English to french speakers and I always tell them to think of our short i as an "é". It makes sense but it's hard for them to deprogram what they've already assimilated ! I'm glad to find a video confirming my thoughts 😁
this sort of thing helped me so much as an english speaker learning german. once someone told me that the ch in ich is pronounced like the c in cute i've never had trouble pronouncing it since
Год назад+8
I seem to remember you had also solved FOOT for French speakers by pointing out that French "schwa" is a pretty good approximation for it, certainly better than the /u/ quality suggested by the phonetic symbol.
an italian friend of mine asked me if i had seen the movie "it". he was exasperated when i claimed never to have heard of it. he was trying to say "heat" and he thought i was just being awkward in not realising that 'it' meant 'heat'
I am a Portuguese-French bilingual person and this video totally blew my mind. As a Romance language speaker, I'd never naturally associate our "standard e" (the so-called "closed e") to the sound of "kit" in English, even if I'm able to perform the kit/fleece distinction with ease. Alors là je te dis bravo mon cher Geoff !
I have been telling people the kit vowel is closer to the e in です(desu), el (in Spanish), and pen than to the i in いる(iru), piña, and the ee in tree. I felt like I might be telling them bad things by turning /I/ into /ε/ for them, but "that e sound pretending to be an i" seems to be what you are suggesting here, so I guess I was on the right track. I based it on the pen-pin merger... if they are that close, people will understand them well enough.
As a Québécois the main takeaway for me is how badly the French pronounce the é sound. They don't make it significantly different from the è sound, unlike us. In fact, in France they've lost a lot of vowel distinctions that we kept here, e.g. between è and ê. Their un and in sound way too similar as well.
You have broken my French brain! At first the -ille trick sounded strange to me, but the more I watched your video, the more it made sense. Thanks a lot for the help.
As a French learner, I appreciate you pointing out that é is like the kit vowel. Where can I find more correspondences for French vowels in English? Too often foreign language instruction allows students to get away with bad pronunciation when a good habit could be made easily early on by pointing these out.
@@joluju2375 I think "le" to "œuf" is a good analog for the difference between the "book" and "buck" vowels, except as an (american) English speaker they both sound like the "book" vowel to me, with the "œuf" vowel being closer. I really can't think of a way to replicate the "buck" (also known as "strut") vowel in french. That really is a tricky one, I feel bad for you guys lol.
I once had a teacher from California who pronounced words like “deal” and “feel” like “dill” and “fill”, and we later found out that he seriously could not discern the difference.
As a native level speaker of both English and French (yes, I’m Canadian) and a teacher and language nerd, this was a really interesting video. Canadian French retains older French vowel sounds including a long i that is basically the kit vowel (such as the second i in icitte or the i in fuite - and we’ve got sh*t as a loanword to boot) but that fleece vowel trips up a lot of Francophones learning English. I have absolutely heard the exact pronunciation issues you describe in the English spoken by francophone immigrants to Canada (including French folks).
I wanted to learn how to pronounce Korean names (just for the sake of pronouncing it right in my head when reading translated manner) so I watched a K-drama and when someone pronounced the name “Seoha” I noticed the “eo” sounded shockingly similar to the “ö” sound in German(e.g. Öl, Österreich). By making an association with a language I already knew, I was able to grasp the pronunciation much quicker.
??? Am I misunderstanding something because the eo in Seoha doesn't sound anywhere alike to ö to me. I don't speak any German but Korean eo is pretty much just English "uh". is that how ö is pronounced in German? I used Wiktionary to hear how österreich is pronounced and ö sounds much more closer to the korean "eu"
@@emie2052 it might sound closer to that, it's just what sounded closest from the language in knew. It's supposed to be more of an estimation of what it sounds like to make it easier to pronounce. It also could be a difference of accent or dialect.
Oh chez t ! You mad all of my country say a dirty word. Not gonna lie, that's a very mind blowing video for a french speaker with an attrociously french accent. But now I can pronounce a bunch of words correctly !
You just blew my mind! 🤯🤯 I'm a native Spanish speaker, but I know the basics if French, and I've been learning English since I was 3yo, and started using actual books when I was 8, and started learning all these IPA symbols. I just understood the difference between those two vowels being 33 years old 😆😆😆 Thank you very much!
I think the fact that conventional IPA transcription for English is so innacurate is a huge barrier for the teaching, both in teaching English to non-natives *and* teaching English speakers other languages. You've provided and example of the former; for example of the latter, I often see explanations for English speakers on how to pronounce the French /u/ - /y/ contrast (problematic for English speakers) by saying "you have /u/ in English, it's the vowel in GOOSE etc", even though the GOOSE vowel in most varieties of English patently sounds nothing like the French /u/ in "vous" etc. In fact, to my (London) ears, my GOOSE vowel is, if anything, slightly closer (though very far from identical) to the French /y/ in "tu" etc. These faulty explanations come from the fact that the (native French-speaking) teachers are familiar with the conventional IPA transcription for English, and unaware of just how inaccurate it is as a description of most modern varities of English. This makes understanding and producing the French /u/ - /y/ contrast far harder than it needs to be, as I don't believe any language contrasts fronted /y/ with central /ʉ/, for good reason! If you start from the reference that French /y/ is like your GOOSE vowel you will find it much harder to produce and perceive a distinct /y/ than if you start with the knowledge that your GOOSE vowel lies roughly equidistant between the two, and is diphthongised unlike the French vowels, and both French phonemes require you to produce something substantially different from anything in your English vowel inventory.
Yes, many English speakers (and more or less all Scots) have a GOOSE nearer to French u than to ou. In Scotland it makes sense to teach that French u is like GOOSE and French ou is not far from GOAT; but then you have the problem of differentiating French ou and au!
Yeah, learning French at school I always kind of intuitively thought of the French "tu" vowel as a GOOSE vowel pushed extremely* forwards lip-wise, but also pronounced with a significant dollop of KIT vowel added in there. The "sous" vowel was the more awkward one. I was surprised at the suggestion in the video that FACE was a bad initial waypoint for English people approaching the French é though. The French é was always to me a sort of modified FACE with the offglide heavily suppressed. (If you just used an unmodified English FACE vowel of course, you'd sound very "Mange tout, mange tout, Rodney"! But we're just looking for a jumping off point to waypoint it from. The same way that if French people just use their é for the English KIT without bothering to modify it at all, they're likely to fall into a bit of a DRESS/KIT hole.) I suppose I had the "tu" vowel already marked off in my head as my "kind of adjusted KIT vowel" so thinking of both that and é as differently adjusted KIT vowels might have got confusing. I know I get that issue with two of the nasalised French vowels, the "enfant" vowel and the "bonbon" vowel. I can hear the difference, but in categorisation they both slip into a "nasalised kind of o" bracket, so that if I hear them in isolation or want to reproduce them and I'm not paying very conscious attention, they unfortunately occupy the same space in my brain and become the same vowel! * and just in general all of the French vowels seemed more "extreme" than English ones to my mind, to get them right it felt like you often had to contort your face into positions that you would think would give some sort of over-exaggerated comedy accent if they were English vowels!
I studied a bit of french. My girlfriend was in French BA, and then started studying english. I joked with her that she spoke english with a perfect french accent. Joking aside, I usually try to correct english pronunciation of brazilian/portuguese words using english sounds, not with same finesse as our good doctor here.
One interesting thing ive noticed is that kit and fleece vowels appear to be swapped sometimes in AAVE. For instance, "hill" and "heel" I've noticed being pronounced essentially swapped compared to my dialect.
I’m a Canadian learning Japanese, and I immediately picked up on a relationship between Canadian and Japanese. A Canadian uses “Eh?” at the end of a sentence to solicit agreement, and in Japanese they use “ですね？” (desu ne?)
I think at least some American dialects use either 'huh?' or 'nah?'/'no?' at the end of a sentence, though the 'huh?' is usually pronounced more like 'uh?'. It looks like a signal of confusion in text form but "he's really going at it, huh?" is an example usage. Also in Japanese, it's really just the "ね" part that does the trick. the "desu" part is a verb.
Big fan of your channel Geoff. You have such a talent for showing us all these things that have been under our noses all this time. Your “chez-t” phoneme takes the biscuit/cake (according to English dialect). Bravo!
Geoff, wouldn't it be great to have a Pronunciation Teacher Academy where we could teach and share this kind of knowledge? I'd love that. Just reading the comments tells me that many teachers successfully use the technique you describe in this video. And btw, my American English pronunciation teachers were always wondering why transcribing schwa as "uh" never did the trick for me as a German speaker.... 😅
I've actually started on a new language, and although I haven't been using IPA to get pronunciation, I have been doing something similar, making mental rules for how the sounds in the new language sound compared to my native english.... Long story short, this is helpful and adds a new tool to my efforts, thanks.
Indeed it is extremely important to create this distinction. For example, when teaching Russian speakers we can use "ий" to represent /i:/ and "ы" to represent /ı/. Or, the main reason that Japanese learners confuse /r/ and /l/ is because in their head they are both represented by the same sound "r" in Japanese. Instead, we could make a distinction where, for example, "light" would be ライト but "right" would be ルアイト. And as by magic, they wouldn't mix them up anymore.
Woah that's so weird how that works for Japanese. I'm guessing it has to do with the way that sequence of syllables forces your mouth to make the appropriate sound?
Native Russian speaker here. -ий in reality for many Russian speakers isn't fully pronounced, most commonly it's reduced to [i], and even if it is fully pronounced, the й in the end tends to be devoiced.
@@Trenz0 I think because "ru" forces you to bunch your tongue in a similar position to the normal way english speakers pronounce R, whereas "ra" is more like the flapped version one typically associates with japanese, which is phonetically very similar to an english L.
I remember 7 years ago when I just started to learn the IPA I kept wondering what the difference between these 2 sounds is like they sounded the same to me 🤯 nowadays it's the exact opposite when I hear someone pronouncing "ih" as "ee" it really stands out 😂 btw my native language is Russian and apparently there we also have both sounds, however /i/ only happens in stressed syllables whereas /ɪ/ only in unstressed ones so there aren't minimal pairs and therefore people don't notice the difference (I only started noticing when I started learning the IPA and paying attention to the pronunciation)
@@prplt it's [i] and [ɪ], not /i/ and /ɪ/. Having no contrast between them means they're the same phoneme, meaning if you use slashes, the letter is the same, because slashes are for phonemes. [i] and [ɪ] are both allophones of /i/ (the thing you put in slashes you choose yourself, you could use /ɪ/ instead of /i/. But you can't use both at the same time)
Sir I am an Indian Bengali speaker. I would appreciate it if you will make a video on the retroflex consonants found in most Indian languages and how it is carried over to English while Indians speak..
Seconding this. I'm a native speaker of American English, and I would be fascinated to learn just what it is in Indian accents that makes them so distinctive.
THIS IS THE SAME I HAVE TO TEACH TO EVERY NON FINNISH SPEAKER ABOUT DOUBLE LETTERS! Even English.. Somehow it's just so hard to differentiate KAKKA and KAKAA. (In Overwatch League there's MASAA and he was called MAASSA) I'd love to hear what you think of Finnish phonetics in comparison to other languages.
Wow that is enlightning! If I were teaching this thing to Russian native speakers the closest equivalent would be: fleece - флийс kit - кэт/кет (although this vowel is a bit more chalenging and it would need some exaples in Russian words such as "пакет")
As a French native speaker, thanks for the chez-t. And you are right, my jaws dropped when I realized what you said. I can hear the difference more clearly now.
I love cheeze-its!
Or should I say Fromag'ilz!
@@user-rb4dy4kh2u Obviously not.
💩
Correction: jaw (you only have one). I'm sure it was just a typo but just in case I'll be that guy and correct you ☝️🤓
@@user-rb4dy4kh2uis there *any* thing obvious regarding English pronunciation vs spelling ?
was not prepared for that "chez t" montage
I've done something similar with a French speaker who struggled with the Swedish "å, ä, ö" vowels. When I asked her to read "au, ai, eu" out loud, her Swedish boyfriend was amazed to hear the three Swedish vowels almost perfectly pronounced.
I leave a comment to remember this in the future.
I've used this style to teach American 50 year old to pronounce Finnish
Leur = löör
Monsieur = mösjöö. I'm native finnish speaker
Learn = lörn
My mum grew up in France where she studied English at university. She had a teacher who used this method of using French vowels to create English sounds. She now has a perfect English accent and you would never know she lived in France until the age of 21.
Wonderful story, thank you!
I have used the exact same method to teach this concept to speakers of Portuguese.
@@byt4fse2 is it really that hard to believe that out of the 189000 french people living in England, not one has learnt how to speak with an English accent? Maybe you could tell us what teaching method would be required?
@@byt4fse2 ...and you... study linguistics? PhD? Professor? Researcher? I'd believe it if you said you have Permanent head Damage.
@@byt4fse2 There's so much wrong with your pretentious bullshit of an argument that I don't even know where to start. A child's language acquisition has barely anything to do with how a grown person would approach learning a language, for example because an adult ACTUALLY KNOWS HOW TO COMMUNICATE ALREADY and doesn't have to speedrun learning a language during every single minute of their life.
I think we can all agree that the only issue with Dr. Lindsey's channel is that there aren't enough videos. But we are grateful for the videos that are there. So, in the end, it seems there's actually nothing wrong with Dr. Lindsey's channel.
Worked it right up there, eh.
Thank you, I wish it were so!
I did something similar, but for Korean to English. Back when I was first learning Korean over a decade ago, I made online penpals and I would learn Korean from them and teach them English in exchange. One of the girls I was talking to told me how much she struggled with the [l] at the beginning of words, like London. In Korean, there is actually an [l] sound, but it's only when two ㄹ meet or at the end of words - on its own, especially at the start of words, it sounds like tapped r (don't have IPA available right now!). So, I told her that when she wants to say [l], imagine there's a secret 을 (eul) in front of it (you can't have Korean letters on their own), so instead of 런던 (leondeon, but pronounced more like reondeon), it becomes (을)런던 ([eul]leondeon, can only be pronounced as [l] due to the extra ㄹ before it). She told me that was really clever and actually worked, so I'm proud of that. I wanted to teach English in Korea, but health problems got in the way of that. If I had, I hope more Korean students would know about this! How to get a good [l] at the beginning of words every time!
A friend of mine in Korea has no problem with the initial [l] in English but can’t really say it correctly as a final as in _level._ (His pronunciation for the final is something like that initial sound in 런던-it’s like an l/r mix). I’ll see if maybe having him say some combination like 런던 would work. He also is well aware of the 𝖪𝖨𝖳/𝖥𝖫𝖤𝖤𝖢𝖤 distinction in English but always exaggerates the [ij] sound in _beach_ to avoid saying the alternative-I tell him he doesn’t have to draw it out but he persists in doing so, anyway.
And, incidentally, for native English speakers who are learning Korean, I point out that some double consonants actually have close equivalents in English-they’re just not what we think of as “legal” initial consonants: ㄸ is what Homer Simpson says when he exclaims “D’oh!” (he _doesn’t_ say “Dough!”) and ㅃ is what English speakers say when they imitate a trumpet: “빠 빠빠 빠”-they’re not asking a black sheep if it has any wool.
When Americans ask me how they can produce Russin 'R' sound I usually answer that they already can do it. That 'flapped T' sounds almost identical to short trilled 'R' in Russian.
Korean has only one liquid phoneme: /l/ which is realized as a flap intervocally, and as a lateral word-finally or when geminated. In the initial, /l/ is actually in free variation between a flap and a lateral, making "right" vs "light" challenging to typical Korean learners of English. A well-known trick for Koreans is inserting a quick /ɯl/ before an L (as you mentioned) and a quick /u/ before an R, so "light" and "right" would be /ɯl.lɑ.it/ (geminated /l/, thus [l]) and /u.lɑ.it/ (intervocalic /l/, thus [ɾ]) respectively. Also notice that different epenthetic vowels are added before L and R (/ɯ/ and /u/) to reflect the labialization of English R which is another phonetic cue used to discriminate it from L.
Strange how I can't sit still for a five minute tutorial, but Dr Lindsey always has me immersed in. The miracle in its full definition.
🙏🙏🙏
Interestingly, when teaching English to PORTUGUESE speakers, I have instinctively approximated the "i" in kit to Portuguese "ê", which is equivalent to French "é"! Incredible how you have arrived at the same conclusion. To arrive at the sound of "ee" in "feet", I make use of Portuguese's ability to precisely control syllable and vowel stress with "´" markers and form a "í + i | íi" in sequence to arrive at a sound similar to "ille" in French. The "íi" vs "ê" sound difference is much clearer to students. Many smile when they finally hear the difference for the first time in their lives. Necessary adjustments are exponentially easier afterwards.
E ainda sim não são os mesmos sons. O nosso "ê" é o som deles em parte do "a" em "Kate" > Keit. E esse som é diferente do "i" em "Kit"
I was teaching a Portuguese speaker Polish phonology the other day and to my surprise he remarked that the Polish "y" (pronounced more or less as [ɪ~ɘ]) sounded like Portuguese "ê" to him. Instinctively it made little sense to me but now in hindsight I shouldn't have been surprised. I guess I'm too used to thinking of "e sounds" and "i sounds" as two discrete categories.
@@hieratics O “e” som em “Kate” /kɛjt/ não es o mesmo de o som “ê” /e/. O som /ɛ/ é “é” não é “ê”. O som /e/ é mais perto de o /ɪ/ som em Inglês, é em Inglês não temos o som /e/, só /ɛ/.
We’re not trying to teach _perfect_ native speech, we’re trying to get people to speak in a way _closer_ to native speech. And if we can use a sound that their language has, which is close, but not existing in the target language, then you can sound more native by just using /e/ (which listeners will just hear as /ɪ/ anyways, because it is in the allophonic range) rather than focusing on and demoralizing yourself by trying to keep saying /ɪ/, and just not getting it, or remembering it.
@@myaobyclepiej I don't remember it exactly, but I'm pretty sure that Portugal Portuguese pronounces that letter with a quality pretty much identical to the slavic "y" hard vowel sound.
@@enricobianchi4499 euro portuguese /ɨ/ sounds at least to me much more like the russian "y" than the polish one. it's more closed
For me, as a Polish speaker, it was very helpful when I was finally told that 'kit' vowels are closer to 'y' sound in Polish leaving 'i' sound for the 'fleece' ones. This finally made the difference between 'shit' and 'sheet' into something simple to hear and pronounce. Now if only I knew the way to explain difference between 'ćpa' and 'cipa' to foreigners...
Without IPA? i think an approximate way of explanation would be:
ćpa - peaCH-PIE* (without the "-i" in "pai")
cipa - CHEAP-PIE* (same thing here)
The diphthong /aɪ/ in the standard English is the safest hint for the /a/ vowel in Polish. Obviously Polish /tɕ/ is quite unique but /tʃʲ/ is the closest to it in English. English doesn't allow affricates before a plosive on the onset syllable so another word before it is needed to simulate it. ⟨ć⟩ is a single consonant without a vowel, ⟨ci⟩ is one full open syllable
@@Pingijno wow, that's great
As a French native speaker I had this realization on my own a few years back and I thought I was crazy or my hearing was bad because I had never heard any of my English teachers mention that /ɪ/ might actually be closer to /e/ than to /i/. I'm glad you're talking about it here because it makes pronunciation of these two sounds so much easier for French speakers!
Just being petty here, but it's not necessarily that English /ɪ/ (as in "pit") is closer to [i] than [e] in terms of articulation, actually it's right in between the two (or at least in theory, I don't know if the precise value of the average degree of aperture for English speakers actually sits right in the middle but whatever). It's rather that [e] is a better approximation than [i] because to an English speaker's ear [i] is easier to confuse with long /ɪj/ (as in "Pete"), which is pretty much just a version of /ɪ/ that closes more towards the end (that is to say it becomes more like [i]), than [e] is to confuse with the noticeably more open /ɛ/ (as in "pet").
Dr Geoff Lindsey upload, let's HECKIN GO
This is genius! I had a French teacher at university who always struggled to pronounce ‘law’. He was convinced it wasn’t possible for him to create the sound, until I told him to think about the French word ‘l’or’ - not quite the same, but much closer than everything he’d attempted up until that point. This has blown my mind - I will definitely share this with my French nearest and dearest! Merci beaucoup (carefully pronounced so as not to sound like something else…!)
Thank you for sharing that tip! I had commented on an earlier video on how I just struggle to pronounce ‘prawn’ different than ‘prone’. I feel the comment section on this video is going to be a gold mine of good tips for French speakers x)
Ah that’s a good example - hopefully the ‘l’or’ tip can help you here too! I will confess, I had a good giggle listening to my French other half trying to get Siri to ‘pause’ his music, when unfortunately Siri thought he was saying ‘pose’. Unlocking the similarities in sounds between the two languages is an absolute game changer!
wouldn't "l'eau" be a closer approximation?
For me, ‘l’eau’ would be closer to English ‘low’ whereas ‘law’ rhymes with ‘paw/poor/pore/pour’ and is therefore closer to French ‘l’or’. I’m no expert but that tip definitely help my teacher to pronounce ‘law’ correctly.
@@lora4462law does not rhyme with poor/pore/pour. Lore is a different word. It does rhyme with paw though. Call, gone, dog all have the aw sound youre looking for.
I have to say, as a native English speaker, who learned French in childhood, but still struggles to pronounce the variety of vowels correctly, this is extremely helpful in reverse as well.
You have officially all my respect and admiration. I'm a French native speaker who's always been interested in pronunciation and more generally in differences between French and English. We're taught in school that words that end with -ed make the sound t as in "asked", the sound d as in "called" or the sound "eed", as in "wanted". I'd always been confused by this, I had never heard any native pronounce wanted as "wanteed". So one day I started thinking real hard, saying the sound ɪ aloud, and it hit me! It wasn't a kind of i/ee/iː at all, just the sound é I always knew!! Everyone could do it, but no-one realised how simple it actually was, no teacher ever told us that!
I'm so happy and glad that the reference in linguistics approved of that idea, I'm not alone anymore, thank you, I'm gonna show this to everyone x'D
Excellent comment - I'm amazed that any french teacher of english would instruct students to pronounced "wanted" as "wanteed", that's just bizarrely wrong!
ouentéde
@@lpsp442 It's 100% true. And when I was a kid I tried to follow those recommendations, it was really hard to pronounce two sounds that didn't have a clear distinction, i and ɪ. One day I got an English English teacher, and I started getting really into the language. Only then did I listen to the real sounds and realise how wrong my teachers were! Again, they confounded the letters, thinking an "e" MUST be pronounced i. It sounds ridiculous, and it is
@@lpsp442 italian mob boss saying "wanted" would sound like that ig but more like "WAHneed"
Pour une simple raison, les cours de phonétique n'étaient pas aussi présent à l'époque. Je suis prof d'anglais à 24 ans et je donne bien cet exemple ( I / i:)aujourd'hui. Ma promotion entière a reçu énormément de cours de phonétiques très poussés. Notre accent en 2023 (pour les jeunes prof) est bien meilleure que celui des plus vieux.@@Ca-kn5hw
Incredible, as a French speaker, I thought I had a good grasp of the difference between ɪ and iː after years of practice, but I never realized that I did'nt really! A really great way to explain clearly to my fellow french speaker how to master the difference.
Now the sentence "chez toi" will never feel the same again, thanks to you... 😅
Thanks for the great work!
I am French and a few years ago, I realized that this ee/i thing is not so much about length, but about vowel quality. It made my pronunciation significantly better! I am very happy to hear you talk about this, and I hope some day a similar approach will be used by our high school English teachers.
As a Peace Corps English teacher in Africa (1968), I had great fun showing fellow volunteers how to say the unvoiced Bantu language ng by showing them it's right there in English though never at the start of a word. In the middle of "going away" for instance It was great fun to say cow in Chinyanja: ngombe. Cows themselves say Ngoo. Cats say Ngeeyow. I eventually managed one of the clicks in Xhosa too but there were in fact over a dozen. Yikes.
How is an *unvoiced* ng in English? It's voiced by default, and putting a vowel each side of it, as in "going away", won't change that.
@@rosiefay7283Perhaps the issue was that it was initial, rather anything to do with voicing.
Before I found you channel, I always more or less trusted IPA transcriptions to be fairly accurate. But you have continued to demonstrate how easy it is to trick yourself into hearing a different sound than the one that is there because of semantic or spelling associations.
It fortunately never really stunted my language learning, since I am generally fairly good at mimicry, and the general approach of "don't think about it too much, just mimic" has been more effective for me than transcription. Especially for things like fine differences in the way phonemes are pronounced that don't result in IPA differences but do result in a noticeable accent (for me it was the fact that German consonants -- not even counting the whole fortis-lenis pairs thing -- are subtly different from "the same" consonants in English).
I couldn't agree more. It's heresy, but the phonetic method of pronunciation teaching is for most learners somewhere between difficult and futile. Of course it helps the dedicated *teacher* to know some phonetics. Except when the established phonetics is wrong... Eventually I'll have the courage to make a video on this.
Thank you.
I spent several years teaching (American) English to Chinese business people. The final vowel (especially a final L) was always a difficult leap for them. I would tell them to think of it as 了(le). Getting them to say "nor meh le" rather than "nor mah" for "normal" helped them to understand. And it led to far fewer misunderstandings.
That being said: One of the biggest things I love about English (both American and British) is that we have so many immigrants that we've become used to a wide array of accents, and can understand almost anyone. In my small town, and at work, I hear Accents that are Mexican, Persian, Bulgarian, Russian, Swedish, French, Hmong, and others I don't know. And we all understand each other.
I've also noticed learner errors are perpetuated by tradition in pedagogy and translation, even though the contrast exists in Mandarin (for example).
The R/L confusion is one that is surprisingly common for some reason despite Mandarin having a comparable distinction.
One example is the song *The Internationale*, where the word 'internationale' is left untranslated and instead nativized in the Mandarin version. Assuming English as the source, every syllable of /ɪntəɹˌnæʃəˈnæl(ə)/ has a reasonable approximation in Mandarin. However, the nativization is, for some reason, /iŋ.tʰɤ.na.ɕjʊŋ.nai.ɚ/. Something like eeng-tuh-nah-shyung-nigh-er. Somehow /nælə/ becomes /nai.ɚ/ despite /na.lə/ being perfectly fine syllables.
A lot of these weird correspondences might've started as people imported conventions from a different variety of Chinese. The /ɚ/ sound in Mandarin historically came from Middle Chinese /ȵiᴇ/, which became in other varieties of Chinese /ni/, /li/, /ji/, /ɦəl/, etc, so perhaps it made better sense in a different language/dialect.
@@BlinkyLass No need to assume. Wikipedia says that Qu Qiubai translated the song from out of the original French.
@@BlinkyLass here is the transcription given by Wiktionary for the french 'Internationale': /ɛ̃.tɛʁ.na.sjɔ.nal/
make of that what you will
Canadian (Nova Scotian) here: My 6-year-old is learning to read and write in a French immersion school. At home, I read her stories in French. She also writes stories in English using French phonemes to make English-sounding words. I don't correct her for her teacher told me that is what she should be doing. It surprises me to see how some English words look when spelled out phonetically.
I work with a bilingual 8 year old and he is going through a "bad grammar" period at the moment. I think that's totally normal too so expect it.
From the book "Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames”:
Reine, reine, gueux éveille.
Gomme à gaine, en horreur, taie.
in the quebec french dialect the /ɪ/ vowel actually replaces /ij/! so we have [vɪl] instead of [vil] and [fɪj] instead of [fij] (and the é is said slightly lower although the transcription remains e) funny how that works.
C'est vrai ! Moi, j'interpole la prononciation de /ɪ/ et /ij/, il me semble.
I've actually told a French friend exactly about this thing after reading your "Seeing the Fleece vowel" blogpost.
At first, the guy was like "How in the heck do you English speakers actually distinguish those two sounds" so I told him about the French "é vs ille" thing that I got from your blogpost. After I told him about that, immediately, he was like "wth, now the distinction is so much more obvious!"
Often times I couldn’t understand the difference between é & e (schwa sound) in French. I used to think it happens bc the é is more centralized towards reaching “e” but I couldn’t explain how. Now I have a better reference point for this sound; I really have never thought of it as a kit vowel, thank U for the clarifying analysis, Dr Geoffrey 🙏🏻
the normal e in french is a schwa lol
@@enricobianchi4499 i'm pretty sure they're referring to the e as in "mer", "bel", "chef", "elle", etc. and also, the "schwa" you're referring to is specifically a ROUNDED schwa, which would be close to [ɵ]. the vowel in "veux" also sounds more or less like [ɵ].
@@notwithouttextthere's actually 2 sounds that could be called shwa in french if you want, you're just describing one of them, and the person you've responded to, described the other one. "De" and "deux" don't have the same vowel. Kinda like the closed and open "o" in french too
@@watersnake1462de/deux are homophones in plenty of french accents, not universally admittedly.
Eg "deux fois" vs "de foie" feels like more of a stress difference than really a different sound.
Open/closed O also depends, in my accent "gauche" and "moche" don't rhyme, but in the southwest of FR it's pretty common to pronounce words like gauche, rose, etc. with the "porte" vowel and I'm sure the opposite merger exists in other areas.
I have a French banker friend who could do with your training, as whenever asked what she does for a living, she says "bonking".
Perfect example. Instead of listening for the best equivalence in sound, people are (mis)guided by the writing. Of course French contains sounds that are closer to English banking.
@@DrGeoffLindsey Yes - simply telling them to say 'binque' would work pretty well.
I've taught a good handful of American English speakers learning Latin/Spanish how to "roll their r's" using d/t-tapping.
My exercise has always been for them to say "kitty" repeatedly (the humor helps with retention) and reduce the sounds around the tap.
So start with /kɪɾɪj/ and once they've gotten into it, reduce it to /ɪɾɪj/ then /əɾɪj/ then /(ə)ɾɪ/ then finally /(ə)ɾ/ so that they're pretty much just repeatedly going /ɾ/ and when you tell them, "congratulations you're tapping an r" they suddenly have this realization and it's great.
They may have to repeat the exercise a few times to get it down, but so long as they incorporate their "new" consonant into their pronunciation they usually get comfortable with it quickly.
Thank you so much for this video! I’m a native English speaker who learned the IPA in my French classes, and I have always had such a hard time understanding why the IPA doesn’t align with certain vowels that English and French should share. This relieves a lot of frustration.
The hardwork I had to do to make my mother pronounced beach not like bitch is really memorable.
The simplicity in which you explain it makes my heart soar! The whole world needs to know about you right this second!
I think your point that the teacher must know about the student's language in order to teach well is what is stumping me in my third languages studies. I always study a third language via English, not my first language. I'm fluent in English but it doesn't help for something as pointed as phonetics. For example, Korean has three "k" and "p" sounds and the approximation I see are all English approximations that doesn't make any sense to me as a French speaker.
Thank you so much Dr Lindsey. This video was extremely illuminating. While I'm no native speaker, I'm more or less confident in my ability to produce native-like qualities of the FLEECE and KIT vowels. My only problem is how to teach what I know to other people, and it's been a real pain in the neck. My approach was always "the KIT vowel lies somewhere between /i/ and /e/", both of which do occur in my native Vietnamese. But for lower-level students, I just told them to use the Vietnamese /e/ for KIT and the Vietnamese /i/ for FLEECE, which, as I now remember, was much easier to grasp than trying to figure out where to put your tongue between /i/ and /e/. Like you said, it's always about phonemic contrast, and never about exact phonetic quality. Another possibility is to use an allophone of /i/, [ï], which occurs before velar consonants. I'm gonna have to review my approach to teaching pronunciation, placing more emphasis on what the students already know in their mother tongue, rather than forcing them to adhere to what I think is "correct". They're allowed to have their own accent, after all. Another thing I'll need to emphasize is to make them stop looking at the spelling which is always a major contributor to bad pronunciation (with no phonemic contrast), as you said.
A friend of mine, who is an English teacher in Poland, needed an example to compare these two sounds for her students. This is what she came up with (and I think this is brilliant): „Sheet is what you sleep on and shit is what you slip on.“ 😁
more like sleep under, but clever!
@@notwithouttextYou don’t use a bottom sheet?!
Don’t forget that in Europe, it’s common to use duvets, in which case you have only a bottom sheet and no top sheet.
@@tookitogo i was dumb i forgot about that
Here in Portugal many people also pronounce fit and feet in the same way. Your “é”/“ill” trick for French is amazing and it kind of is applicable in Portuguese (“ê”/“i”). Very good channel ❤
mesma cena com algumas pessoas que não fazem a distinção entre "beach" e "b!tch" 😅
for the "ille" think of it like "í + i" to get even closer!
The influence of spelling is huge. I’ve had many coworkers for whom English is a second language. With a few of them who share my interest in languages, I’ve used Google Translate much like this. It shows how their accent sounds a bit like transliterating English to the spelling of their native language, and also how other such spellings can help them improve their English pronunciation. With one guy whose native language is Polish, our example was “it would be funny”-it became /it wud bi fani/ as if it were written “it łud bi fani”, even though something like “yt łot byj fony” comes closer.
Also, if you want to imitate a foreign accent without knowing the target language, try cramming English pronunciation into the spelling of that language and listening to what Google Translate says! What it lacks in authenticity it makes up for in being very funny, especially alongside a native speaker of that language.
I think "yt łud bij fanij" is closer to 'fony' is 'phony' (although, really, it just as if someone pluralised 'phone' but Polish way not English) than 'funny'
Indeed, I'm happy to see your comment, because I just wanted to write that a similar analogy to the French one, would be the "i" and "y" distinction in Polish (approximating the "feet" and "fit" vowels respectively).
@beesixteen7596 wow, that's make it even more convoluted. I always thought like MarekWoi that "i" or "ii" can be used for "feet". It looks then that the phonetic transcription of /iː/ is misleading...
Spelling makes people say the "t" in "often" even though they would never say it in "soften" (or whistle, listen, fasten, castle, moisten, apostle, christmas, etc.)
I have a french roommate, who is deaf. He is trying to learn german and I had a similar idea to make an app / website where you could put in a word in german and it would give you a list of french words that use the same kind of sounds to make up the german word. So amazing to see a similar idea being released here :D
YES!! THANK YOU, more people need to hear this!
As a French native, I still don't understand why this is not taught at school in France.
Since the day I discovered this trick, all my English teachers kept telling me my pronunciation was so good but without asking how I figured it out?!
As sad as it is, I just feel like us French are condemned to mediocre level of language teaching by our educational system...
oh man the ytp potential with this knowledge is massive
Anybody who likes the idea of making English words out of French sounds should track down the book "Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames" by Luis D'Antin van Rooten. This is a collection of English nursery rhymes spelt as if they were French. Here's the first one, which you can try pasting into Google Translate and getting the French voice to read:
Un p'tit d'un p'tit s'étonne aux halles.
Un p'tit d'un p'tit ah degrés te fallent.
Indolent qui ne sort cesse
Indolent qui ne se mène
Qu'importe un p'tit d'un p'tit
Tout Gai de Reguennes.
I've changed "petit" to "p'tit" and modified the punctuation a bit to make it flow better.
i wonder if it would go better if the "a" sound as in "sat" was, well, "a", while "king" had the french "é"
@@notwithouttextMaybe, but what would the French words then be? The magic of these versions is that the French actually means something (albeit on a surreal level).
@@citolero
Un p'tit d'un p'tit s'attend aux halles.
can't find anything to replace "qui ne" though
The last part summarises it all: "... Anyone who takes pronunciation teaching seriously needs to know two things: As much as possible about the phonetics of the language you're teaching and as much as possible about the phonetics of the learner's language. Because that's where at least 90% of the problems come from". Very good insight indeed!
I noticed the similarity between French é and the English kit vowel recently and I was pretty surprised. Cool to see one of my favorite RUclipsrs confirm it!
As a french person learning english, thank you so much ! This is sooo helpful ! I study english in college and I have a phonetic class, but when we do "problem sounds" my teacher usually just repeats the two sounds she want us to distinguish and expect us to hear the difference without going further than saying "they're different" and "one's longer", but I really rarely manage to hear it.
I absolutely love the amount of spoken language hiding in plain sight! Nice work, Dr L.
Merci, docteur. C'est très utile !
Really informative video not just for English to French, but also to French to English speakers! You've helped me foster a great appreciation in phonetics, so thank you for every video you upload.
Fascinating! I'm French, and that's the first time someone correctly explains to me the kit-fleece problem! I've always been puzzled by the two different symbols that I couldn't pronounce differently, and by the vowel lengths that didn't always make sense.
Umtimately, I wish the spelling of English was not that absurd (same for French, even though it is much more reasonable for French), since, as you say, we tend to trust our spelling more than our ears.
I LOVE your videos!!! I actually noticed Spanish speakers can do something similar by grabbing their "e" sound from unstressed syllables and using that for the "kit" vowel in English. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and observations here on RUclips!!!
Thank you! Yes, many languages have an 'e' which is similar to KIT.
Native french speaker here also, and also amazed of this revelation. So much time wasted when you made it finally seems so easy... Thank you very much sir
Some time ago I came up with a similar way for French people to pronounce my name Huib, featuring the Dutch "ui" sound, which is absent in a lot of languages and often somewhat tricky to teach people not familiar with the language. Although I believe it's very similar to the "eui" part of portefeuille, when you would stop just before the "y" sound of the "ille" starts. I like this way of teaching a lot because it makes me more aware of how words and letter combinations in certain languages actually sound and how you can "open up" your perception by using these "tricks".
1:13 Brings back memories of a Spanish co-worker who couldn't tell the difference between 'bitch' and 'beach' 😆And who made up his own English grammar and phrases in a uniquely poetic way, some of them still part of my own vocabulary every now and then.. Hope to meet this wonderful guy again some day ♥
Similarly, ‘ui’ is very similar to how a Scot would pronounce ‘house’, almost like Dutch ‘huis’
Finally! I was wating this for a long time.
Everytime people told me 'oh, it's just one vowel is longer and the other is shorter' I was like 'But that's exactly what I'm doing! And you're saying I'm wrong!'
It took a lot of time to start hearing the difference, though I still suck at producing them. Now when people tries to bring up that 'longer/shorter' thing I just make a word with a looong 'short i' sound, since it's not that difficult to stretch that kind of centralized version.
Also, realising that there are no strongly palatilized consonants in English made me think that in that case you have to make more movements with your tongue to make the 'long i'. Which means that it should be if not diphtong then at least a 'glidy' sound.
A diphthong is a glidy sound, that's the point. It's simply wrong to think of them as two vowels stuck together.
Thanks for this great video!
I give accent reduction classes and I also suggest my French students to use their /e/ sound for the English /ɪ/. I demonstrate English native speakers on Forvo to prove that the English /ɪ/ actually sounds that way.
The next vowel that I modify is STRUT which is more similar to the French /a/ than to [ø~ɵ] as in "le".
What do you tell French people who can’t pronounce ‘h’?
Thanks, I'm French and it is fantastic
Thank YOU!
Dr Geoff Lindsey, you continue to be one of the best educational channels on the platform :]
Apart from treacherous spelling and phonetic transcription, I'm thinking of another reason why French speakers tend not to spontaneously think of the and sounds as acceptable equivalents to the KIT and FLEECE vowels. In French these sounds always occur at the end of a syllable, unlike the KIT and FLEECE vowels. You mentioned that French learners have to be taught to pronounce a consonant after the sounds because it doesn't come naturally to them. The sound doesn't occur with a consonant after it in the same syllable either. While, for some speakers of French, both /e/ and /ɛ/ can occur in open syllables, and they are distinct phonemes, only /ɛ/ can be found in closed syllables. As a result /e/ in a closed syllable doesn't sound natural to a French ear (at least not to mine).
OMG, this blows my mind! As a native Italian, it's always been hard for me to grasp the difference between the KIT and the FLEECE vowel 'cause I've always been told they were a "short i" and a "long i", except that when I try to say "kit" thinking of a "short i", it sounds very different from a native saying "kit"... now I understand why! 'cause they're not a "short i" and a "long i"! thanks!
Yes, as in French, standard Italian /e/ meaning 'and' is pretty close to KIT.
This could help my French sister improve her pronunciation a lot, very smart trick, thanks!
I find your footnote about 'café' in Scotland funny because I've had people laugh that I pronounce 'bouquet' and 'bookie' exactly the same way.
Thanks to you Dr. Lindsey, my girlfriend and my pets are huddled, scared, in a corner, because I, a québécois native french speaker, kept yelling at my screen because LITERALLY *NONE* OF YOUR EXPLANATIONS MAKE SENSE IN MY ACCENT! (fake anger for comedic purposes only)
Great video! Although I would've put a bit more emphasis that most of this is tailored to the Parisian and metropolitan accents, it was very interesting!
I once said in front of French people that in the Czech words "žáci" and "žáky", the i and y sound the same, and they disagreed with me. To my Czech ears, the i and y sounded the same, but the French people heard my i as i and my y as é. And now I can't unhear it.
Did they see the word beforehand or was it just based on your pronunciation?
Just love this channel -- the insight and lucidity... Orthography is the villain/culprit -- I have felt along the years how much is misguides foreign speakers. It many times makes it impossible to recognize cognates.
French dialects here in Canada have a broader range of vowel and diphtong sounds than those in Europe.
In general, our "é" is closer to the English pronunciation of the "long a" than it is to its "kit" pronunciation of the "short i".
It's our "è" sound that's closer to "kit" - whereas in most dialects of European French I've come across, there's little or no difference between how "é" and "è" (and, for that matter, "ê") are pronounced.
This has been obvious to me since childhood - when (often) European French dictation exercises focused on driving home the different spellings of what in Europe are homonyms but are here pronounced very differently, leaving US with no doubt as to how to spell them...
Deserves another video. I didn't have as much access to Canadian recordings and have taught very few Québecois
@@DrGeoffLindsey The regional word icitte is very much like the fit vowel in English.
Dunno... I think French Canadian "é" is still very close to European "é", the difference is much more in the other vowels (a, â an, on, in, un, long ê, i, o, ô, ou, u, allophonic eur all differ way more). Doesn't really matter because fit/feet isn't the difficult vowel for French Canadians anyways, there's much more difficulty in cut vs cot~caught.
É and è are definitely different in French of France, except the final é and è. In many regions there's confusion between the two, or rather, more specifically, the è becomes é. Hence the similarity between j'irai (I will go) and j'irais (i would go). But é and è are always different inside the words.
@@JustinCase99999 That's interesting. In Canada, it's the other way around, final é / è are always clearly differentiated, but it's inside of the words in open syllables that they are sometimes interchangeable.
I seriously had trouble believing you until I said "une séquence" myself repeatedly. I'm not a native French speaker and haven't used it for ages, but I did learn it very young and have always had a nearly native accent ... and I can still only barely make myself believe that that vowel is what you say it is. Wow.
I'd love to see one of these for Spanish speakers. Spanish is even more limited in its vowels, so maybe this would be even more challenging for them.
Absolutely! The struggle is real 😅
I thought the "ill" in "silla" would be a good equivalent, but that depends on the dialect, so it doesn't work for every Spanish speaker :(
@@MurasakiOpFR
That was realy instructive
I'm a french native speaker and I never thought about that
thank you docteur !
Standard Indonesian, our formal language, has only short vowels [a i u e o ə]. If we lengthen the vowels, the meaning of words will not change at all. Many Indonesians do not see any difference between tense vowels and laxed vowels. Javanese language, one of our dialects, however, has [i] and [ɪ], as in 'titik' [titɪʔ] (dot). It has also [u] and [ʊ], as in 'tutok' [tutʊʔ] (mouth). Such laxed vowels occur in the last syllables of Javanese words. Therefore, it is easy to introduce [i] - [ɪ] and [u] - [ʊ] to Javanese people. I am not Javanese. So, I am not sure if or not [o] - [ɔ], [e] - [ɛ] and [a] [ɑ] exist in Javanese language.
In 12 minutes you've really improved my French pronunciation. No more ays for me. Thank you!
What a wonderful approach! As a native Spanish speaker, I think a similarly helpful comparison for Spanish speakers learning English is to think of the voiceless dental fricative /θ/ (as in the English word _thing_ )as the letter Z as pronounced in Spain. This blows their minds every single time, as it's simply not the way it's taught - at least in Venezuela where I grew up. I think the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (as in _this_ ) is much harder to teach since there is no direct equivalent in Spanish.
ð is Spanish d except at the beginning of an utterance or after n. So dedo is deðo.
Iba a dar el mi punto que el Dr.Lindsey acaba de hacer, pero se me adelantó xd. Pero sí, sí tenemos ambas versiones de la «Th» en español.
I teach English to french speakers and I always tell them to think of our short i as an "é". It makes sense but it's hard for them to deprogram what they've already assimilated ! I'm glad to find a video confirming my thoughts 😁
It's nice hearing someone else is on to that. I'm monolingual but I've enjoyed this game for years. Ouatte de foque is another good one
this sort of thing helped me so much as an english speaker learning german. once someone told me that the ch in ich is pronounced like the c in cute i've never had trouble pronouncing it since
I seem to remember you had also solved FOOT for French speakers by pointing out that French "schwa" is a pretty good approximation for it, certainly better than the /u/ quality suggested by the phonetic symbol.
So refreshing, yet again.
an italian friend of mine asked me if i had seen the movie "it". he was exasperated when i claimed never to have heard of it. he was trying to say "heat" and he thought i was just being awkward in not realising that 'it' meant 'heat'
As a Spanish speaker I found all of this fascinating.
Your arguments and demonstrations are so convincing, you opened my eyes to a lot of things as a language hobbyist :)
Praise indeed. Thank you!
I am a Portuguese-French bilingual person and this video totally blew my mind. As a Romance language speaker, I'd never naturally associate our "standard e" (the so-called "closed e") to the sound of "kit" in English, even if I'm able to perform the kit/fleece distinction with ease.
Alors là je te dis bravo mon cher Geoff !
I have been telling people the kit vowel is closer to the e in です(desu), el (in Spanish), and pen than to the i in いる(iru), piña, and the ee in tree.
I felt like I might be telling them bad things by turning /I/ into /ε/ for them, but "that e sound pretending to be an i" seems to be what you are suggesting here, so I guess I was on the right track. I based it on the pen-pin merger... if they are that close, people will understand them well enough.
Plus, bech is much less problematic than bitch! LOL
As a Québécois the main takeaway for me is how badly the French pronounce the é sound. They don't make it significantly different from the è sound, unlike us. In fact, in France they've lost a lot of vowel distinctions that we kept here, e.g. between è and ê. Their un and in sound way too similar as well.
Belgians would say the same about the French, in Belgium "brin" and "brun" are pronounced differently. So are "il" vs "île" and "mettre" vs "maître".
And their on and an sound way too similar as well.
You have broken my French brain! At first the -ille trick sounded strange to me, but the more I watched your video, the more it made sense. Thanks a lot for the help.
As a French learner, I appreciate you pointing out that é is like the kit vowel. Where can I find more correspondences for French vowels in English? Too often foreign language instruction allows students to get away with bad pronunciation when a good habit could be made easily early on by pointing these out.
Ê and È = the "ea" in "sweat" and "breath", for one.
the e in "le" for the vowel in "foot". (not exact, but very close)
@@notwithouttext Can be usefull, the short oo sound is difficult for me to grasp. When I try to say "book" properly, I'm afraid people hear "buck".
@@joluju2375 I think "le" to "œuf" is a good analog for the difference between the "book" and "buck"
vowels, except as an (american) English speaker they both sound like the "book" vowel to me, with the "œuf" vowel being closer. I really can't think of a way to replicate the "buck" (also known as "strut") vowel in french.
That really is a tricky one, I feel bad for you guys lol.
Chez-t
Je t'aime, chez-t
Je chante, chez-t
Que je le veuille ou pas, tout me ramène à toi, rien qu'à toi
Chez-t
Un refrain, chez-t
Un regard, chez-t
I once had a teacher from California who pronounced words like “deal” and “feel” like “dill” and “fill”, and we later found out that he seriously could not discern the difference.
As a native level speaker of both English and French (yes, I’m Canadian) and a teacher and language nerd, this was a really interesting video. Canadian French retains older French vowel sounds including a long i that is basically the kit vowel (such as the second i in icitte or the i in fuite - and we’ve got sh*t as a loanword to boot) but that fleece vowel trips up a lot of Francophones learning English. I have absolutely heard the exact pronunciation issues you describe in the English spoken by francophone immigrants to Canada (including French folks).
I wanted to learn how to pronounce Korean names (just for the sake of pronouncing it right in my head when reading translated manner) so I watched a K-drama and when someone pronounced the name “Seoha” I noticed the “eo” sounded shockingly similar to the “ö” sound in German(e.g. Öl, Österreich). By making an association with a language I already knew, I was able to grasp the pronunciation much quicker.
??? Am I misunderstanding something because the eo in Seoha doesn't sound anywhere alike to ö to me. I don't speak any German but Korean eo is pretty much just English "uh". is that how ö is pronounced in German? I used Wiktionary to hear how österreich is pronounced and ö sounds much more closer to the korean "eu"
@@emie2052 it might sound closer to that, it's just what sounded closest from the language in knew. It's supposed to be more of an estimation of what it sounds like to make it easier to pronounce. It also could be a difference of accent or dialect.
Oh chez t ! You mad all of my country say a dirty word. Not gonna lie, that's a very mind blowing video for a french speaker with an attrociously french accent. But now I can pronounce a bunch of words correctly !
I encountered the Beach/Βitch confusion about 10 years ago with a fellow from Mexico while we were studying at ASU.
“I was on the bitch…”
“Where? Who? You did what? With who?”
You just blew my mind! 🤯🤯
I'm a native Spanish speaker, but I know the basics if French, and I've been learning English since I was 3yo, and started using actual books when I was 8, and started learning all these IPA symbols. I just understood the difference between those two vowels being 33 years old 😆😆😆
Thank you very much!
I think the fact that conventional IPA transcription for English is so innacurate is a huge barrier for the teaching, both in teaching English to non-natives *and* teaching English speakers other languages. You've provided and example of the former; for example of the latter, I often see explanations for English speakers on how to pronounce the French /u/ - /y/ contrast (problematic for English speakers) by saying "you have /u/ in English, it's the vowel in GOOSE etc", even though the GOOSE vowel in most varieties of English patently sounds nothing like the French /u/ in "vous" etc.
In fact, to my (London) ears, my GOOSE vowel is, if anything, slightly closer (though very far from identical) to the French /y/ in "tu" etc.
These faulty explanations come from the fact that the (native French-speaking) teachers are familiar with the conventional IPA transcription for English, and unaware of just how inaccurate it is as a description of most modern varities of English.
This makes understanding and producing the French /u/ - /y/ contrast far harder than it needs to be, as I don't believe any language contrasts fronted /y/ with central /ʉ/, for good reason! If you start from the reference that French /y/ is like your GOOSE vowel you will find it much harder to produce and perceive a distinct /y/ than if you start with the knowledge that your GOOSE vowel lies roughly equidistant between the two, and is diphthongised unlike the French vowels, and both French phonemes require you to produce something substantially different from anything in your English vowel inventory.
Yes, many English speakers (and more or less all Scots) have a GOOSE nearer to French u than to ou. In Scotland it makes sense to teach that French u is like GOOSE and French ou is not far from GOAT; but then you have the problem of differentiating French ou and au!
Swedish has a phonemic contrast between/y(:)/ (spelled and /ʉ:/ or /ɵ/ (spelled ), which is also present in many (if not most) dialects of Norwegian
Yeah, learning French at school I always kind of intuitively thought of the French "tu" vowel as a GOOSE vowel pushed extremely* forwards lip-wise, but also pronounced with a significant dollop of KIT vowel added in there. The "sous" vowel was the more awkward one.
I was surprised at the suggestion in the video that FACE was a bad initial waypoint for English people approaching the French é though. The French é was always to me a sort of modified FACE with the offglide heavily suppressed. (If you just used an unmodified English FACE vowel of course, you'd sound very "Mange tout, mange tout, Rodney"! But we're just looking for a jumping off point to waypoint it from. The same way that if French people just use their é for the English KIT without bothering to modify it at all, they're likely to fall into a bit of a DRESS/KIT hole.) I suppose I had the "tu" vowel already marked off in my head as my "kind of adjusted KIT vowel" so thinking of both that and é as differently adjusted KIT vowels might have got confusing.
I know I get that issue with two of the nasalised French vowels, the "enfant" vowel and the "bonbon" vowel. I can hear the difference, but in categorisation they both slip into a "nasalised kind of o" bracket, so that if I hear them in isolation or want to reproduce them and I'm not paying very conscious attention, they unfortunately occupy the same space in my brain and become the same vowel!
* and just in general all of the French vowels seemed more "extreme" than English ones to my mind, to get them right it felt like you often had to contort your face into positions that you would think would give some sort of over-exaggerated comedy accent if they were English vowels!
@@pawel198812 Thanks for the info.
I studied a bit of french. My girlfriend was in French BA, and then started studying english. I joked with her that she spoke english with a perfect french accent.
Joking aside, I usually try to correct english pronunciation of brazilian/portuguese words using english sounds, not with same finesse as our good doctor here.
One interesting thing ive noticed is that kit and fleece vowels appear to be swapped sometimes in AAVE. For instance, "hill" and "heel" I've noticed being pronounced essentially swapped compared to my dialect.
But only before L right?
@@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate as far as I can think of, I guess so, yeah
Holy chez t! The difference between ‘e saying “ay” and “i” isn’t even a subtle difference. 🤯 This is a game changer for my French pronunciation!
I’m a Canadian learning Japanese, and I immediately picked up on a relationship between Canadian and Japanese. A Canadian uses “Eh?” at the end of a sentence to solicit agreement, and in Japanese they use “ですね？” (desu ne?)
I think at least some American dialects use either 'huh?' or 'nah?'/'no?' at the end of a sentence, though the 'huh?' is usually pronounced more like 'uh?'. It looks like a signal of confusion in text form but "he's really going at it, huh?" is an example usage.
Also in Japanese, it's really just the "ね" part that does the trick. the "desu" part is a verb.
@@J7Handle I’m still very much a rookie in Japanese
@@ryandoesstuffapparently1540 I'm also a rookie, but I've focused a lot on learning grammar and special words over bulk vocabulary.
Big fan of your channel Geoff. You have such a talent for showing us all these things that have been under our noses all this time. Your “chez-t” phoneme takes the biscuit/cake (according to English dialect). Bravo!
Geoff, wouldn't it be great to have a Pronunciation Teacher Academy where we could teach and share this kind of knowledge? I'd love that. Just reading the comments tells me that many teachers successfully use the technique you describe in this video. And btw, my American English pronunciation teachers were always wondering why transcribing schwa as "uh" never did the trick for me as a German speaker.... 😅
I've actually started on a new language, and although I haven't been using IPA to get pronunciation, I have been doing something similar, making mental rules for how the sounds in the new language sound compared to my native english.... Long story short, this is helpful and adds a new tool to my efforts, thanks.
Indeed it is extremely important to create this distinction.
For example, when teaching Russian speakers we can use "ий" to represent /i:/ and "ы" to represent /ı/.
Or, the main reason that Japanese learners confuse /r/ and /l/ is because in their head they are both represented by the same sound "r" in Japanese. Instead, we could make a distinction where, for example, "light" would be ライト but "right" would be ルアイト. And as by magic, they wouldn't mix them up anymore.
why not use "е" instead of "ы"? I know it palatalises the previous consonant but the vowel quality itself is far more similar than the one of "ы".
Woah that's so weird how that works for Japanese. I'm guessing it has to do with the way that sequence of syllables forces your mouth to make the appropriate sound?
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 Nah, "е" is far, far more different from short i than "ы"
Native Russian speaker here.
-ий in reality for many Russian speakers isn't fully pronounced, most commonly it's reduced to [i], and even if it is fully pronounced, the й in the end tends to be devoiced.
@@Trenz0 I think because "ru" forces you to bunch your tongue in a similar position to the normal way english speakers pronounce R, whereas "ra" is more like the flapped version one typically associates with japanese, which is phonetically very similar to an english L.
Thank you for helping me pronounce French words more accurately
I remember 7 years ago when I just started to learn the IPA I kept wondering what the difference between these 2 sounds is like they sounded the same to me 🤯 nowadays it's the exact opposite when I hear someone pronouncing "ih" as "ee" it really stands out 😂
btw my native language is Russian and apparently there we also have both sounds, however /i/ only happens in stressed syllables whereas /ɪ/ only in unstressed ones so there aren't minimal pairs and therefore people don't notice the difference (I only started noticing when I started learning the IPA and paying attention to the pronunciation)
Exactly!
oh, could you give an example of a word which has /ɪ/ and /i/ in it? I want to teach my parents how to say 'shit' properly.
@@comradewindowsill4253 you mean in English or Russian? in English "city", in Russian most words that have 2 И's, били for example
@@prplt it's [i] and [ɪ], not /i/ and /ɪ/. Having no contrast between them means they're the same phoneme, meaning if you use slashes, the letter is the same, because slashes are for phonemes. [i] and [ɪ] are both allophones of /i/ (the thing you put in slashes you choose yourself, you could use /ɪ/ instead of /i/. But you can't use both at the same time)
Work in italian too!
- perché no= (ché n) = kin
- chi innova = '(chi in) = keen
Sir I am an Indian Bengali speaker. I would appreciate it if you will make a video on the retroflex consonants found in most Indian languages and how it is carried over to English while Indians speak..
Seconding this. I'm a native speaker of American English, and I would be fascinated to learn just what it is in Indian accents that makes them so distinctive.
as a non-native english speaker this is illuminating. thank you dr geoff!
THIS IS THE SAME I HAVE TO TEACH TO EVERY NON FINNISH SPEAKER ABOUT DOUBLE LETTERS! Even English..
Somehow it's just so hard to differentiate KAKKA and KAKAA. (In Overwatch League there's MASAA and he was called MAASSA)
I'd love to hear what you think of Finnish phonetics in comparison to other languages.
You'd have a much better experience with Italian and Japanese people 😁
I really love the speed that you've been cranking out these phonetics videos. I could learn about this stuff all day.
Wow that is enlightning!
If I were teaching this thing to Russian native speakers the closest equivalent would be:
fleece - флийс
kit - кэт/кет (although this vowel is a bit more chalenging and it would need some exaples in Russian words such as "пакет")
What about ы?
E in пакет is under stress. English short i is like unstressed E: осень [осинь], весна [висна].