The Schwa sound (/ə/) is the laziest sound 🛌

Описание: 🤗 Join The Club: https://www.englishlanguageclub.co.uk...

Hello there.
So, in this video we are going to practice the /ə/ Vowel sound. It is often called the Schwa sound, but I don’t like to call it the schwa sound and I will tell you why later.

It’s a very lazy sound. It’s very common in English because it is very neutral, so in natural speech, as we weaken other vowel sounds they move towards this sound.

Here are some common words that use this sound;

About: /əˈbaʊt/
Alone: /əˈləʊn/
Along: /əˈlɒŋ/
Another: /əˈnʌðə/
Banana: /bəˈnænə/
Comma: /ˈkɒmə/
Father: /ˈfɑːðə/
Mother: /ˈmʌðə/
Remember: /rɪˈmɛmbə/


It is technically called the “Mid-Central Vowel”. It is a very neutral sound. Your mouth is neither open or closed, thats what the “mid” refers to. Your tongue is very relaxed . If you just relax your mouth, lips, and tongue and voice a sound it should be pretty close to the /ə/, /ə/, /ə/.

Adrian Underhill says:

“The vowel sound /ǝ/ is as close to nothing as you can get and yet still have a sound”
Adrian Underhill

So, it is quite an easy sound to make. The difficult thing is that it is spelt in many different ways. I am not going to get into all the spellings because when you take into account regional accents, there are too many ways to spell it, some of which people will argue about and that isn’t the purpose of this video. But it's important to note that the pronunciation of the schwa sound can vary depending on regional accents, and it's usually found in unstressed syllables. This variability in spelling and pronunciation can make English spelling and pronunciation challenging for learners.

Here are some tongue twisters to help practice saying the sound.

"A little bit of butter in the batter made the batter better."
“His brother has another father but the same mother.”
"The clever shepherd never fed the leopard."
"In September, remember to wear a sweater."
"Every clever devil revels in the level desert."
"The elegant elephant met a velvet serpent."
"Several celebrated generals developed a special method for leveling the playing field."
"She never expected to get the letter with the message about the treasure."

So as you can see this sound comes up a lot and that's why people like it so much.

00:00 Introduction
00:21 Explanation of the Schwa Sound:
00:53 Common Words with the Schwa Sound:
01:16 Variability and Regional Accents:
02:49 Usage in Words with 'er':
04:39 /ə/ sound vs. Schwa Sound
06:36 Tongue Twisters Practice
08:01 Join the Club