Are you having trouble with your English vowels? Do people think you've brought snakes to share instead of snacks? After school, English can fix that. Welcome back. We're going to be reviewing all the vowel sounds in English. That is, American English and we'll be learning symbols that will represent each of these sounds. There are 11 vowels in English. These are not including the diffung sounds, which are two vowels put together. We'll be reviewing those next. And when that video is ready, you'll find it here. First of all, what are vowels? Vowels are sounds that are produced in the middle of your mouth, and your tongue is not touching a specific area of your mouth. So these can be the most difficult to learn because it's very hard to describe what your tongue is doing. What we're going to use is the shape of your mouth and what your face is doing to help you learn the vowels. Let's get started. I'm going to be putting these vowels in pairs so you can hear the differences between them. Our first pair is I and E. I and E. These are both front vowels, as you see from the chart here. They're pronounced in the front of your mouth. So let's look at these two sounds closely. I'm going to pronounce them for a long time so you can hear and see the difference. Did you notice a change in my face with E? I make a smile. And my face is tight. E. My tongue is also tight. With E, my face is more relaxed. So I don't have to smile. My lips can rest. E. E. I can also drop my jaw a little bit. E. E. So let's hear some words with these two vowels. Bit. Bit. Beat. Beat. If you look at the actual spelling of those words, you can see a pattern. E.A. is often going to be pronounced E.E. When you see it show up in words. And I, by itself, is often going to be pronounced E. We also have E.T. It. And we have C.T. Sit. So you see that pattern. Okay, let's move on to our next pair. E.A. This pair is really hard to hear the difference for many language learners. Again, I'll pronounce them for a long time. E.A. Did you see how my jaw is going up and down? Also with E, my face is pretty relaxed. E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E.E… my face becomes tighter. And my jaw is moving really far down. A lot of learners sound like they're saying E because they won't open their mouth enough. So, if you're not opening your mouth enough, you're going to sound like you're saying E. Let's look at two example words for these vowel sounds. have, set, set, and sat. Sat. Don't be afraid to open your mouth widely for a. If it helps, you can use a mirror when you're practicing at home. So far we have bit, bit, bit, bat. All right, let's move on to another pair that's very difficult even for Americans to hear the difference. This pair is a-a-a-a-a is the most common of these two and the one that's disappearing is a. So let's look at two words that have these sounds. Our first word is bat, bat, like robot, and our second word is bat, bat. I bought a bat. If you can't hear the difference between those, you could just use a and most Americans will understand you. However, if you hear some Americans using a, it's really helpful to know what that symbol is. So I'm going to hold out those sounds and I want you to see the difference in my face. If you notice with a, my mouth is wider. The part you can't see is that my tongue moves down in the middle of it, like a bowl with awe. The next vowel we're going to talk about is not a pair. It's just the vowel sound, o. O is pretty simple. It shows up in a lot of different languages, but the thing you should know about the English pronunciation in America is the sound at the end of O. There's almost no pure o sound in American English, unless you're from Minnesota. People in Minnesota say O, but the rest of us say O. So don't forget to add that O at the end, unless you want to sound like you're from Minnesota. So our word for O is boat. If you see the spelling here, we have O-A, and that's a common spelling when you're pronouncing O. Alright, our next two vowels are A and A. What's the difference? There's no difference in the actual sound itself, just the length. So A, I'm introducing here because it's really useful when we talk about sentence stress and English rhythm. We use A when we want to unstress a syllable. And A is the stressed sound or the longer sound. How do you make the sound? A, you relax your face, you bring your jaw down, and you rest your tongue at the bottom of your mouth. Our last pair also causes some confusion. We've got A and O. Actually for me, this one is the most difficult to pronounce. It's kind of a strange sound, so look carefully at my face. Let's hold out those vowels and see the difference between them. These two words help us distinguish them. We've got look and look. The spelling doesn't help us out here. You might think, okay, when there's two O's like look, I'll just say A, but you would be wrong because we also have words like boots. And that one is not A. But you're also not wrong that double O can be A more often than just the word look. So we've also got book and hook. And you're also not wrong in thinking that B would be often associated with this spelling of U, a consonant, an E after the consonant. So we have look here, but we also have words like fluke or tune. And if you want to be more confused, this word and this word are both pronounced tune. Sorry about that. If that confuses you well, you're just going to have to watch our video about commonly mispronounced words because of the vowel spelling. We'll teach you some rules and some patterns that will help you predict which of these vowel symbols you should use. In all of our videos from now on, when we go over the pronunciation of a word, we're going to be using the symbols that we've taught you in this video. I hope you learned them because they're about to be really useful for you. Stay tuned for a quiz. We're going to test how well you remember the symbols. And if you can tell the difference between the vowel sounds. If you can't hear the difference between the vowel sounds, it probably means you're also not able to pronounce the difference between those vowel sounds. So this quiz will help you know which vowel sounds you need to work on pronouncing better. Thanks for your attention today and good luck with the quiz. Did you like this video? Give us a thumbs up so we can make more videos. Don't forget to subscribe below so you can catch everything we're doing each week. Bring that bell so you know when there's a new video and we'll see you in the classroom. The most common example word for a and a are apple and apple.