Spoken English Tutorial – Long/Tense and Short/Lax Vowels For The Win!
August 27th 2011 Posted at Language
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The topic of this Spoken English Tutorial is not new, but the importance of it is not negligible, because the importance of learning the specifics of vowel sounds is highly underemphasized in English learning schools. In this article we will touch the topic of vowels, and explain the difference between lax (short) and tense (long) vowels.Symbols of Vowel sounds are not really letters of English alphabetYou might have encountered the phonetics symbols before and some of them do look familiar to the letters of the alphabet, although most of them are not. Basically, there are 5 vowel sounds that produce the same sounds and look the same as the certain letters of English alphabet ? they are a,e,i,o,u, but there also sounds that do not share common symbols with English alphabet ? the schwa sound, for example . Basically, the difference between phoneti find scholarships for high school students cs alphabet and standard alphabet is evident ? don’t confuse these two . (We are all used to thinking and reading in terms of the letters of English alphabet and completely are unaware of the phonetics symbols – one of the reason why many people in non-English speaking countries have trouble with speaking English.)In a nutshell, symbols of vowel sounds are a part of linguistics study and thus they are encountered in many other languages ? not only English . The sound [] exists in Turkish language (it even has the letter ) and the schwa sound is also encountered in many other languages. Again – don’t confuse the standard letters alphabet with phonetics alphabet. With this clear, let’s move on.Now let’s see what these Lax and Tense things meanLet’s start by driving your attention to the fact that some sounds in English are longer than other sounds.