Hi! It's me again - Professor Panda! I hope everyone is fine. Did you have fun over the Lunar New Year? I sure did!
Today I want to talk a little more about vowel sounds in English. I know just about everybody who comes to this blog is studying English as a second language - a language they want to speak in addition to the language spoken in their home or country. Even Mrs. Panda is studying English as a second language and she says our cat is learning it as well! I guess the kitty will speak three languages, Kitty, Kitty Japanese, and Kitty English! Busy cat!
Whenever we are learning a new and different language, how the language sounds, especially what sounds the vowels make is extremely important to us. Unfortunately, here in this blog, it's very hard to teach much about the actual sounds, especially in a way that you can practice them. But have no fear! I have some fun tools I am going to share with you, that can make learning and practicing English vowel sounds much easier and fun.
The first one is from an organization called fonetiks.org.They offer vowel sounds for 9 varieties of English and also 9 other languages. You can study vowel sounds for American English, British English, Irish English, and several other styles. And the offer the sounds that one vowel make, two vowels together, three vowels together, and several other kinds of sounds that you will encounter in speaking and listening to English, Just follow the link below, and then click on the kind of sounds you want to hear, like American English Single Vowel Sounds or British English Two Vowel Sounds and so on. A new page will open up. just place your cursor over the letters at the left and someone will pronounce the sound. To the right are examples of words with that particular sound.
Now the second tool, and I think it is the best one, is an online dictionary. Actually, it's a lot of things, a full Webster's New World Dictionary, which is one of the best, a full Roget's Thesaurus, plus audio pronunciations for each word you look up in the dictionary. If you look up "dog" there will be a small icon at the top with the shape of a speaker. Click on it and you will hear the word. Also there are many examples of how the word is used. So this is a really useful thing to have and I hope you will use it often.
Just be a bit careful with both of these fun sites, not to have your computer sound up too loud or it might make it so you can't understand the word or the sound. If you experiment a little, you can figure it out! I did!!!!
Ok, that's it for today! Have lots of fun listening to and practicing making the vowel sounds you hear on these two sites and have fun finding new words in your new dictionary!
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