I'm going to say this sentence in two completely different ways listen to the first time the boy and the girl ran to school the boy and the girl ran to school now the second way the boy and the girl ran to school the boy and the girl ran to school now which was the English way of saying the sentence you see there are two patterns of Rhythm in World languages there are languages that are syllable timed and languages that are stressed timed and English only includes one of these let's first of all look at syllable Tim syllable timed is when every syllable is given an equal amount of time and this was like the first example listen again the boy and the girl ran to school the boy and the girl ran to school every single sound had the same amount of time and the gaps between the sounds were all the same as well and many world languages follow this type of pattern other world languages are stress timed with stress timed languages there is an equal time between the stressed sounds and this was like the second example the boy and the girl ran to school the boy and the girl ran to school did you notice how the underline sounds were emphasized boy girl ran School these are the stressed sounds in stress timed languages we stress certain sounds which means we emphasize them more so we say them more loudly more clearly and then we make sure there's an equal amount of of time between these stressed sounds and it doesn't matter how many words are between the two stressed sounds we keep the same amount of time in order to create a rhythm like this the boy and the girl ran to school the boy and the girl ran to school did you notice how it didn't matter how many words were between the stressed sounds we still kept that Rhythm so the gap between boy and girl was the same in length as the gap between girl and ran even though there were no words between girl and ran and there were two words between boy and girl and English is this type of language English is a stress timed language which means we emphasize certain sounds and we have equal gaps between those stressed sounds so we create an equal amount of time between the sounds that are Str stressed and these are usually content words in other words words with real meaning if a word has real meaning we will emphasize a sound in that word so boy girl ran and school they're all things that you can think of they're all real but the and the and two don't have real meaning you can't think of what they are you can't imagine them you can't see them you can't feel them you can't hear them they're not real words they're just grammar words and these are the words that we squash between the stressed sounds in order to keep our Rhythm let's practice with a couple more examples listen to these then try saying them with the correct Rhythm zoos are places where animals live in cages zoos are places where animals live in cages listen to the next one the hills and the mountains were covered in flowers the hills and the mountains were covered in flowers did you hear that rhythm in the first one we stressed these sounds zoos are places where animals live in cages let's try it together zoos are places where animals live in cages should we try it with a clap to keep the Rhythm zoos are places where animals live in cages did you notice in places there were two sounds places but we only stress the play in Words with more than one sound so more than one syllable we usually only stress one of the sounds sometimes it's the start of the word but not always so places animals the other sounds are not stressed let's study the final example the hills and the mountains were covered in flowers here mountains has two sounds but the stress sound is the first one and it was the same with covered and with flowers and again all of the sounds between the stresses got squashed together so we could keep our Rhythm shall we try one more time 1 2 3 the hills and the mountains were covered in flowers well done and if you want to go into more detail with this issue to do with English which is to do with keeping Rhythm and all of these other important features of English speaking and pronunciation try my course there's a link in the description below and that will give you more details