Hello everybody, welcome back. This is Jill with Go English Coach. I get a lot of questions about reductions and sometimes people don't even know what that even means. So we'll cover this again. You know, that's the way that learning goes. Kind of it's, we like to like circle, right? So you take you take a concept and you come back to it and you go up and you add more and you come back to it and then you add more, okay? So that's kind of the idea with the way that I like to teach and what I think works best specifically for, you know, when you're talking about language and speaking abilities. So let's just go over this list. So these are 10 short, small words that we use very often in English. And what happens to these words, we've talked about this a little bit. When you talk about this stress pattern in the English language, what we do is here's an example. Here's a sentence, a very simple sentence, okay? The car is blue. When I say that sentence, I want you to listen to which words. Now these are only one syllable words, each one. The car is blue. Now when a native speaker says the car is blue, we don't say the car is blue, right? What you hear is the car is blue, okay? So we're stressing, we're putting emphasis on some words and we are reducing other words. So let's listen to this again. The car is blue and you can clap or you can snap or you can bang your hands or like this, but it helps to make the point of where we are putting the stress. So which words do you guys hear when I say this sentence? The car is blue. The car is blue. So what we are stressing is car and blue, okay? The car is blue. Now what does it stress mean? What does stress, what does that mean? We're saying it louder. If I'm stressing a syllable or a word in English, I'm going to say the syllable or the word a little louder. I'm going to say it longer, more clearly, and with a higher pitch. Now this happens in all languages, okay? We generally have two categories of languages. We have we have syllable-kind languages and we have stress-time languages, okay? So there's kind of two general kinds and this will be easier for you, for example, if you come from a stressed-time language to learn the stress patterns in English. So English is a stress-tined language. That means that not every word in English is stressed. It means that we stress certain things. Now the question is, well, how will I know which words I'm supposed to stress? So what happens in English is that we stress the key words. We stress the words, key words. What does that mean? Well, it means the words that carry information, important information. So it's important in this sentence that we know that we're talking about a car and we're talking about the color of the car. So we stress things like nouns, right? This is a noun. We stress things like adjectives. This is an adjective, okay? There are more and we're going to get into that a little bit more. So this is just a little bit of a touch into talking about syllables and stress patterns, okay? So keeping in mind, when we stress something, we say it louder, longer, more clearly, and with a little higher pitch, higher pitch means your voice kind of goes up, right? So the car is blue. I said that louder, longer, more clearly, and my voice went up, okay? What happens here is these get it's called reduced, okay? So we reduce them. That means to make smaller, okay? So we minimize, we reduce or we make smaller these other words that don't carry meaning. These words are essential, they are necessary in this sentence to make it a grammatically correct sentence, but they are reduced, okay? Now, how do we reduce most words? Okay? Most words that we reduce, we reduce the vowel sound. So here's a list of very common reductions and we're going to look at longer words here in a second. Okay? So we have a, so the letter or the word a, they were going to use that a sound. So when we make a reduced sound, any vowel that is reduced will typically go to an a sound, the schwa, or it, okay? Those are the two vowel sounds that are reduced. So remember we talked about this in our last class. All of these have a, a, okay? So that is what we call the schwa sound. And if you saw the last class, we discussed how schwa is the most common sound in the English language, okay? And this is why, because all of these words that are not focused words, they're not, they are necessary in the sentences, but they don't carry meaning. If I had a sentence with only these words, it would not be a sentence, right? It would just be a collection of words. Okay, so let's practice, let's go over this again, I've changed some of these. So it was a mistake. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. Let's just talk quickly about where you're hearing the stress in here. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. So there's a, there's a little bit of a stress in here. And then there's a, we have two syllables here. And there's a big stress here. So we'll talk later on in in future classes about primary stress and secondary stress. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. So the sound is here, right? So we don't say it was a, a mistake, it was a mistake, a mistake. Okay, under the table, under the table. So the stress is here, under, under the table. So we've got a little bit of a stress here. This is the bigger stress under the table. And this is where we reduce. We reduce that sound to the, so remember here if we use our, our international phonetic alphabet, the, the, TH sound, the voiced TH sound. So we have two TH sounds in English. One is voiced and one is voiceless. So the voiceless one is like this. When I say, thank you, thank you. Right? If I say, and I go, there's no vibration here. This is the voiceless version of the TH sound. This one has voiced sounding. So this, this, same point of articulation, the same place in your mouth where the sound comes from, but it has, it has vibration here. So thank new vibration. This, their different sounds. Okay. Okay, this or that, Er, there we go. And black and white, and, and it sounds like this, if in black and white. Okay, piece of cake, gondolunch. So we've got this one that gets really reduced, gone to lunch, wrap the party at, at, at, the party. At, at, this one becomes just very wrap at, and we don't even say the T, but at, take them home. Remember, we did this. So it sounds like that. M, M, M, and teller, teller today, teller today. All right, and they got them. They got them. Now, these two are the same. Him and them sound exactly the same when they are reduced.