if you haven't seen the previous lesson you must start there that lesson described all of the basic settings for the mouth posture that must be maintained at all times everything in this lesson is based on that information now I already have a full pronunciation course that covers all of the sounds but those lessons don't include any mouth posture information because I didn't know about mouth posture at that time so here we are now this video will include any relevant details from those lessons but the main focus is on the posture and holding it as you do those sounds there are also some bonus details that are not mentioned in those original lessons so make sure you don't miss anything now lastly keep in mind that this is based on how things feel in my mouth as a native speaker with a neutral accent not all native speakers with neutral accents will do things exactly as I described them to the Last Detail and that's fine there's always a range of possible articulation within reason for every sound before we look at the soundss elves there's one very important key idea that you should keep in mind throughout this entire lesson and throughout the entire rest of the course and that is instead of very tightly and rigidly trying to keep every little piece of the posture in place there is some wiggle room as you move from sound to sound and word to word but the settings don't break think of jello it's flexible or Wiggly but it's also stable and firm it provides boundary lines that you can move around within but if you push any of the settings too far and you get outside of those boundaries you end up breaking it for example the center of gravity doesn't change it's not going to move to some other part of the mouth but like a buoy on the surface of the ocean it can Bob around or slant a little forward slant a little backward As you move from sound to sound but it's generally Anchored In place on that spot of the tongue similarly you must keep that hinge contact on the fourth tooth at all times or keep it lined up for sounds that break it like ah but you will often feel a bit of sliding on that tooth in the direction of whatever sound is being made for example e is up here you might feel a bit of a pull o is back here so you might feel a bit of a pull this way but at no point will this hinge suddenly land on the third tooth or completely move onto that fifth tooth you can touch the fifth tooth you can sometimes touch the back of the third tooth but you're going to be centered around that fourth tooth again it's like the surface of the ocean now this idea of wiggle room is extra important for the space in the middle that we've talked a lot about it is possible to delete some of that space especially if we're speaking more quickly or lazily however you cannot shallow out that basic shape to the point where you start breaking the settings lastly to help clear up a little bit of confusion this line here on the map is the body of the tongue not the sides that touch the hinge this map shows approximately where the sides are based on how it feels in my mouth our first stop is going to be the consonant sounds and this is because the consonant sounds actually make or come close to making physical contact with some part of the vocal tract and we're going to start with the lips F and V FV the only difference between these two is one is voiced one is voiceless the posture everything else is going to be the same now one important thing is to make sure that your jaw setting is open enough because otherwise you probably won't have enough space for the sound to be clear inside the mouth we simply have our uh default sound position posture we're just doing uh underneath now there is a range of exactly how to do this it's not always one pinpoint exact thing and I discussed a lot of those details of forming the sound in the main lesson now as I may have described elsewhere before the bottom lip can pull inward it can come upward a bit or it can do both and instead of the jaw closing up which is possible if you have the default setting then you can actually close up a little bit from that setting but if it doesn't just another thing that can happen then it's actually the chin that's going to help support the lip lifting up you can place the you're trying to hit the teeth here could be here could be a little inside can actually get a little bit more inside the lip the thing that I realize that is actually maybe a little more important than exactly where you are is the tightness right so if you have those more relaxed lips your cheeks are a little more relaxed okay and then f f you can actually get pretty low for what for what for what that can help us maybe speak a little more lazier a little bit more quickly but again we have to have all of our posture in place we have to have enough space with the jaw etc etc etc for that to be able to work if any of your settings are off especially the jaw height or the tension here then it's probably going to cause a problem if you're too low now the corners of course they are in their normal neutral position they might get just a tiny tiny tiny bit of tension to support this movement here the top lip can also become a little tense it's not going to move around or anything but it can become a little tense just to again kind of stabilize the lips again make sure we're not holding the corners pinched f f if I do a v v VV or if I my mouth is too closed and I'm way down here V so you want to keep things generally more relaxed try to focus on just using that bottom lip I'm going to addition to all that make sure that you don't push really hard into the teeth we don't want it to be super super super light like a Japanese F it's not that's there's way too much space there but we also don't want it to be so tight that it sounds like the air is struggling to push out we don't want see there's also way too much tightness here because I'm really trying to hold it up into that you want just enough before we move on there are a couple of special exercises for each sound that will help you to not only get the sounds better but to hold the posture underneath and to be able to get in and out of those sounds while still maintaining that posture this will be the first step in building toward getting syllables getting words getting sentences and eventually holding it in your speech because this lesson is already quite long and it would be nice to be able to reference this lesson while doing the practice I've decided to put those exercises for all the sounds in this this lesson into the next lesson remember this lesson is just a reference lesson to give you all of the information that you need next we're going to look at PBM all three sounds share the same basic formation of course there's a little bit of a difference between them so the P obviously is voiceless where we push it out the b is voiced where we push it out and then the m is closing the lips and letting it go through the nose but what you might not know is that the way that they that the lips close is very important and the way that the lips open is equally as important now this information I'm pretty sure was not in the main lessons remember that the lips are front biased what we're going to be doing is you're going to try to imagine the top middle of your lip bottom middle of your lip I've seen some people talk about um how it's like it's all just the bottom lip or all just the top lip it could be a little bit of both but that doesn't necessarily matter what matters is that we're going to bring these two point points together now that will naturally as a byproduct close the rest of the lips so you're not trying to close the lips from here to here like you're trying to close the lips from here to here okay now that might not seem like it makes too much of a difference but it is an important Point especially when we release it of course when you do that you're not trying to just hold your lips like this and then let sound come out here okay so don't let that happen right that would be the weird thing to do but by focusing on closing from here it allows us to make sure that the corners stay pretty relaxed you can get a tiny bit of extra tension here to kind of support holding the lips closed and making sure that the air doesn't blow through the sides here not clamping down really tight like this now there's a little bit of a range of articulation with how the lips can come together so you can actually have them be come like out and down a little bit just a little out as they come down you can have them come straight to each other right or you can actually sort of pull them back into the mouth a little bit as they come together it doesn't necessarily matter what you don't want to do is overdo this way you're not trying to say like oh or oh right that's not right and you're not trying to curl the lips like mm we don't want that we can when we're doing an m a p orb especially an m and we're emphasizing or we're playing with the language we can curl like that and you will sometimes see that but that's not the normal way that we form the sound I will say however that many of the people that I've worked with when we talk about you know how to actually close the lips having the lips come out just a little bit almost like you're trying to get them around the teeth has proven very useful for many students especially when it comes to releasing that P and B note that like the F and the V I still have my hinge I still have my posture down and back relaxed in the middle tongue is low front of the tongue is low I'm not sitting up here while my lips are Clos closed into that M position so you should still have tons of space inside the mouth even though the lips are closed you should still have the exact same amount of space as if you're doing uh you just bring the lips together so if I say um um the jaw can close just very slightly you probably need to get your jaw more open to begin with so I would recommend trying not to let the jaw close just bring those lips together um um um one common problem that a lot of students have for the MP andb as they try to close into it is number one they'll maybe let their jaw close up too much and or number two as they're closing up here their tongue will actually shift back towards their um either their normal center of gravity or their normal posture so they end up getting this weird thing or sometimes the back of the tongue will end up tensing because it's not really sure what to do is the lips are closing so you can get all kinds of weird things that try to happen inside the mouth but nothing should change inside the mouth we also need to mention that in addition to the lips maybe adding just a little tension they're you they're mostly relaxed like like normal the cheeks when you are doing these sounds especially the p and the B your cheeks can get a little bit of extra tension normally the cheeks need to be very relaxed okay cheeks are relaxed sides of the corners are relaxed you get a little bit of tension even just in the cheeks and the corners here it starts to kind of throw things off uh uh but if I'm doing an m a p or a B because a little tension comes in here because the lips are closed you can get a little tension in here P part of the reason why we have that is because as we're going to see with the p and the B when we release that air we don't want it to come out through the cheeks we don't want it to we don't want the lips to to bend or bubble like this so that a little bit here a little bit of tension helps keep the lips in place and then a little bit of tension here helps keep the air from pushing out this way it helps force that air which is going to be very important in a second so when we push the air out in the M it just goes through the nose so we don't have to worry too much about all this stuff here because the sound is just going to go through the nose what is important is again you keep your tongue low you keep the right posture because if your tongue is too high or to some extent if your settings are pushed forward or or whatever it can alter the exact quality of that nasal M sound so if I do a regular M I have lots of space in my mouth back of my tongue is low now if I just try to raise the back of my tongue that's all I'm going to [Music] change it's very clearly a different M sound and all I did was raise the back of my tongue so make sure the inside is set correct we're just doing that uh underneath the M now for the p and the B we talked about how the lips will come together from the front points right we're going to close from there we need to reverse that for the p and the B we're going to bring the lips together here I'm going to have a little tension here to make sure it stays closed a little tension here make sure the air doesn't push out this way you're trying to direct the air to that single point small little tiny hole and if you look if I release this slowly so it starts coming through here first this little hole and then everything else opens so the little tension in the cheeks the little tension in the corners the little tension as we're sort of trying to hold that air in keep the lips closed let the air build up behind it that helps us direct that air to a single point and then we push it through that point and then let the let the lips open this is not as important for the weak version right if I say happy happy be P it's still there the same mechanics are there but the the weak one doesn't have a lot of that extra air that we hear like an H sound after the p and so because it doesn't get pushed out as much we don't need as much tension to hold it and Etc ET so it's like a reduced version of of what we just talked about and again this is part of why for many students closing instead of like this or like this closing almost like you're trying to ra reach around the teeth a little bit just a little bit it can get you into this little bit of a better position to create that hole and when you release it you just go right back to your normal relaxed uh lips you don't want to be doing p p if you see your lips are like this your Corners are tight when you release it you're going back to your normal posture so you want to let the Air Force the lips open from their front biest position straight through a hole also make sure that you don't curl the lips outward when you're releasing any of these sounds one important detail for the p and the b as you hold that air if you're going slow okay if you're just normally speaking you probably won't feel this but if you're going slow and trying to make sure you get that little pinpoint release you'll probably feel that like on the top of the throat back of the tongue maybe even the middle of the tongue that you'll feel that air pressure pushing in on those pieces you're not trying to tense those pieces you're not trying to move those pieces but if you feel the air pressure push into them without changing anything that's fine that's normal now for both the FV and the PBM even though we're just using the lips here remember the inside settings are going to be pretty much what they are for that basic posture and so we're going to be low we're going to be back with the tongue we're going to see this a lot with the vowels but the front tongue here not the tip but the sort of tip blade area the sort of front of the front or front half of the front this area needs to be lined up with the bump of the alular ridge it doesn't have to be perfectly right under it but you don't want to be too far back you don't want to be way up here on the teeth or on the line of the teeth so when I'm doing F and V the front of my tongue here is just right under that bump it's not up here because my tongue is back when I do PB front of the tongue is lined up under that bump this is going to help you keep that posture as we'll see later there is a way where you can actually kind of anchor here and still do a lot of the sounds but that requires stretching the front forward it's a little bit more of an advanced thing and I do not recommend that you do that until you get control over the basic posture before we start looking at sounds that actually use the tongue instead of just the lips I do need to mention one very important thing to avoid a lot of confusion that many of you will probably have and that's about the maps whether we're talking about the basic map or any of the maps for a particular sound these maps are approximate they emphasize the settings and particularly how those settings feel inside my mouth especially for the pressure of the center of gravity looking at many other resources online which don't include posture or center of gravity details looking at some of the ways that the tongue tends to be shaped for certain sounds can actually be kind of misleading even though they do often make sense to me when I see them so some of what you see in my maps will not exactly match what you see in other resources but remember that sound is King use the maps in this lesson as a guide to help you get the right quality of each sound but even if you do something different than what I describe as long as you sound good that is all that matters now because these Maps generally emphasize the posture and the feeling of that center of gravity I am going to include alternate simpler maps that might be more like what you would see for other resources but include where the the center of gravity would be placed because in reality when we're forming a sound that's not uh although we do have our core shape and our core alignment and posture and all that that sound takes over most of the formation and creates what we hear but that Center gravity pressure becomes like a secondary pressure underneath the main pressure of the sound wherever you place that sound so it doesn't tend to show up as much on like ultrasound resources or or other basic maps that you've seen people draw let's move on to the next Group which is the T D and the N now all three of these are placed in the same spot on the bump of the Alvar Ridge you can be a little bit in front of the bump that's okay but do not touch your front teeth also make sure that your tongue is not too sharp not too flat I tried to go over those details as best I could in the tdnn lessons so you can learn more there remember if our posture is low back they have a hinge okay the front of your tongue should generally be lined up with that bump if you were to lift straight up you should be touching right on that bump now if you try to lift the front of your tongue up and you end up touching the teeth or on the line with the teeth or maybe you end up back here behind the bump then you're either trying to form the sound incorrectly by maybe curling the tongue um or you're too far forward right there something that's off either with the creation of the sound itself or with your posture it's not just about the bump we still have our middle sides raised the middle body is lower okay all of that is still in place and we're just manipulating that front of the tongue it is possible for a couple sounds mainly the TD andn that when you close up into that position you might feel the inside back part of the third tooth it is not required to do that if you feel feel the inside front of the third tooth you are too far forward or you are stretching your tongue this way and and you're not forming the sound correctly for the end specifically we're also going to talk about the tnd D you want to make sure that the back of your tongue again is low now you would might think well why is this important if I'm just trying to raise and close here well just like we saw when we do an M if I have that back of my tongue raised inside my mouth it creates a different quality to that sound when you if you try to do an n and the back of your tongue is too High even if it's not closed it's just too high it is very likely and I've had students with this problem you will end up producing more of an NG sound the sound because as the sound comes up even though it's getting redirected through the nose I could be closed into an m and if I bring the back of my tongue all the way up into an NG still sounds like an NG because that's the where it gets redirected from it it's sort of in order NM so if you're doing an M or an n and the back of the tongue is too high or closed then it's going to redirect there instead of where you want it to redirect from if that makes sense [Music] not now we talked about with the p and the B how we our front bias and we close and we try to push the air through a little hole there turns out this is also important for the T the D the K and the g CGA because we're actually going to do the same thing this is what helps give the T and the D their quality especially the T sound and almost make it makes it sound kind of like it's like a TS I've seen it described like that it's definitely not a TS that that would be like s that's not the T sound that's a TS that you're trying to do a TN and S at the same time but when we close up right now the exact shape and tension of the front of your tongue and again as I said the angle and all that will play a role in exactly how that t or d comes out and a lot of that is just the formation of the sound not the posture again I talked about that in the main lessons what we're going to focus on here provided everything else is good you want to try to let the air get trapped behind the tongue okay so you should feel pressure especially here at like the base of the front of the tongue you should feel the air pressure pushing into your tongue like it wants to push the tongue open and then when you start to release it you should release it from here first okay it's not the whole tongue that just like opens at once you're going to release it through this little pinpoint at the tip first and then the rest will open up you can maybe hear it a little Point that's what gives it that little bit of almost like an s-like sound makes it very crisp and you also want to let the air open the tongue let the breath open that thing you're not not trying to use the tongue muscle to move the tongue out of that spot you have to let the air force that tongue to to open and then you just let it release and go back down to its resting position you should be back in uh unless you're going into some other sound so if I just say t now just like with the P&B also this is much more important for the strong versions the weak versions are same basic mechanics again you're going to do everything pretty much the same but there's not as much force of breath so it just won't be as strong so just like with the N don't let the back of your tongue come up don't have this forward a common problem is when you release you let your tongue do this okay you don't want to go like that you should stay on your hinge the whole time if you release the T and you come off the hinge this way or this way that's a mistake the hinge should not break at all it's t t have the next sound is like a or something and yes obviously as you release you're going to break it vertically as you go into the a the T itself for the D itself doesn't break the hinge what you should not feel even if you feel that your tongue is still low and back and all this stuff a very common problem is as you close into that position or as you're coming out of that position that you end up getting a lot of extra tension here and so you end up like say if you go from uh into T you'll maybe be clear until you get close and you'll sound something like uh see that back of the tongue is coming up with the front of the tongue and we don't want that you got to keep this in place uh see how it's nice and clear the whole way there's no extra tension from the back also make sure you don't flatten out the center of gravity now just like with the PBM when we saw we closed our lips that doesn't mean that we delete the space by closing the jaw a lot or by removing the space with the tongue setting still need lots of space in the mouth this is equally true for essentially all of the sounds so when you're doing your TD your n right we get up here you don't want your tongue to be more like this either because your jaw is more closed or because you're just not holding as much space with the tongue setting right we keep everything low and open and so the difference between closing this up and where the middle and back of your tongue is there should be lots and lots of space now the lips for the TDN they're not used at all depending on the next sound that you're getting prepared to go into you might have some sort of Engagement for that sound now before we leave this group we do have to talk about the flapped D so the TDN you will fully close there's a buildup of of air or in the case of n it'll go through the nose and then it releases but the hinge stays in place the whole time now the flap D does this too we still have our hinge in place we're not going to break it or anything like that we're going to come up on the bump now depending on the next sound you might tap and push you might tap and pull going into an r that we'll talk about later you have to actually maybe modify the exact place where you tap those are little details we're just talking about the basics here okay so you're going to tap pretty much on the bump okay so you shouldn't be tapping up here if you're used to doing like a Trill to R up here or something but instead of getting there letting the air build up and then pushing it out you're literally just tapping or flapping right that's why it's called a tap to D or a flap to D remember we're breathing through this we have a continuous more or less continuous air flow so you're not just trying to Flap your tongue up there okay you're trying to still breathe through it it's just that there's no chance for the air to get caught because as soon as it touches it flaps back down like it gets swatted and doesn't have a chance to stick up there what if what if you can hear I'm I'm breathing through as the tongue gets close and it does this the air immediately flaps it open instead of me holding it for a second and letting it push through probably the single biggest reason if not the reason why so many English Learners struggle with getting the flap D because your posture is off you're literally not in the position to be able to do it correctly now as a little teaser of what's coming up in the r colored section it actually turns out that the r can color or control consonants as well to some extent and there's actually an R colored flat D it can affect the S like in Street to become more of sh sound street because the r can sort of take over mostly take over the center of gravity so again we're going to get into that a little later make sure you don't miss that if we take a quick look at a more standard or normal map that you might find for the TDN it would probably look a little something like this again that center of gravity is going to be there that fourth tooth hinge contact is there and the tongue of course is set low and back although this image doesn't really seem to show much of that next we have the pair S and z now like all other voiced voiceless pairs the only difference between these two is that the Z adds voice where the S is voiceless everything else about the posture and the formation of the sound is the same now there's a certain shape that you have to make more or less which I've talked about in the main lesson for these sounds but the main thing that causes the sound is you get the front of the tongue up near the top of the mouth close enough in a particular shape way where it will create this little bit of a whistle if it's voiceless or if it's voiced we will be talking a little bit about the postural and sound details between the Z and the the but we'll talk about that in the th section for now just make sure that your tongue is roughly under the bump that's the key for snz we're not going to be way up here by the teeth okay remember our posture is low and back we have our hinge all this is in place as as usual do not let the back of the tongue come up with the front of the tongue just like we talked about with TDN don't want to be necessarily back here now like with the E and the TDN because we are lifting High it is possible that maybe you might feel the inside back of that third tooth now your center of gravity of course must also be present underneath remember we're not shallowing out the middle and bringing this up as we bring the front up we're not bringing the back up we're keeping this in place we're just moving off of that hinge and shaping the tongue in a certain way for that sound it is possible to slightly push around the hinge area okay maybe just a little bit into the hinge not the whole tongue out just around that hinge area get a little bit of tension so that this can work better the lips of course are not used in the SC sound depending on the neck sound you can start to engage the lips and shape them for that sound while you're doing that SZ more standard or normal Gra graphic for the S and z sound would probably look something a bit like this again center of gravity is in place hinges in place tongue alignment is in place interestingly you can actually do the s a bit more like this however this gets close to part of the variation for doing the sh sound which we'll see in a moment so I strongly recommend that you try to avoid this type of shape for the S but I will say that if you do it this way you are in very big danger of messing up some of the settings but it can work wait wait wait hold on didn't you tell us that we have to keep that shape at all times where the body is lower than the sides yes however for a few sounds things can get a little bit more complicated let me explain no matter what you do you will still have that hinge centered on the fourth tooth no matter what you do you will keep your tongue in its proper setting low and back and anything that fills up that space is going to be coming from that lower setting that's an important point it turns out that for some sounds and usually it's not even a required thing to do it's just one way that you can articulate those sounds it is possible for the middle body to come up usually it's going to be the front half of the middle body and it will kind of delete some or even maybe all of this space here but the back of the tongue when that happens will generally remain low and this is really why the proper center of gravity is so important remember that center of gravity is actually why we end up with this core shape in the first place even though on an image or even an ultrasound you might see that the tongue seems to kind of come up and delete the space what you don't see but what I can definitely feel is that there is still a difference between the sides and the middle I still have that Center gravity pressure and I'm still trying to kind of maintain that shape just by having that center of gravity there I'm not allowing the sides and the middle to completely flatten out and be even there's still a difference in that tension through the middle and that's the key if you don't have that especially if if you have a higher back of tongue setting in addition it's going to throw everything off and you're going to sound different as a side note interestingly this does in some way seem to match up with resources that say the American English resonance is more from the back of the mouth mouth but that's a different topic and we're not going to talk about that here next we have the sh and J pair which again the only difference is voiced or voiceless now in the main lesson for this pair I said how the sh and J is going to be maybe a little further back than the S and Z that is definitely possible there's a range of articulation here but the main difference is actually the shape you can have the sh or zh be in the same place as the s or Z see but the way that you shape and let that air flow through is going to give us a different type of sound now there are actually two maps I'm going to show you for the sh one matches a little more closely to what you might see in other resources but the first one we're going to look at emphasizes the front part of the tongue because as I said that is actually the main difference between the sh and the now if you place the sh a little bit further back instead of being right under the bump you're going to maybe if you close up you should touch maybe about that Ridge where right before you start going up you don't want to sort of try to curl it and get it like see I'm kind of trying to get it like up here you don't want to do that so not not too far back but you can definitely be behind the bump that's fine and again the main difference is the shape you can also for both the S and the sh you can actually get a little lower sort of a lazier slightly more open less fully formed version so there's a bit of a range of articulation here for the SN Z as well as for the sh and the Z more for the sh and Z because we can also move it further back but that is optional now of course remember we're just manipulating the front of the tongue so when I go from an S to an sh my middle is the same my back is the same my throat is the same nothing changes I'm just manipulating that front of the tongue if we take a look at the second map we can see that actually the middle of the tongue can get involved especially the front of the middle or the front half of the middle and I've seen some resources where it's actually shaped a little bit more like this and again it's not the way that you have to do it that will still work as long as you keep that pressure for the center of gravity where it is in the back middle again this is why some of these other resources can maybe be a little misleading because they don't have the posture or center of gravity information if we look at the Orange Line here that would be where the sides of the tongue are so we can see that actually as the middle front body sort of gets up high towards the top of the mouth to create some of that friction it will actually come up above the sides regardless the most important thing is that I'm still on my hinge I do not have to shift or move from that uh position on the hinge I can just feel the middle body sort of coming up and I still have contact in addition as I said I still have that Center gravity pressure right on the back middle and it can actually even maybe push in a little bit it's probably maybe be a little bit this way as that shape sort of takes over a bit but we are not bringing the whole tongue up we're not removing our center of gravity or Shifting the center of gravity to a different part of the tongue the basic structure and contact points and the alignment all are still in place you could even do something kind kind of like this which still more or less matches what I feel in my mouth as long as we keep that center of gravity pressure to keep a bit of that basic shape we're perfectly fine if it seems easier for you to do the first map version then I strongly recommend that you just do that as long as you can get a good quality sound that's all that matters what happens if I delete too much space keeping the tongue too high doesn't sound as clear sh sh for some of you guys out there we've seen with the T with the S with the the sh and for many of these sounds just by not having enough space that could be the thing that is making you sound a little off now for the lips the lips do engage in the sh and Z Sounds however like with pretty much everything else they are optional they're not required to make the sound but they are very commonly used the way that they're used is going to be something that we're going to see in some of the vowels okay it's it's a basic underlying structure of this front biased formation that we have so we saw in the PB and M how that front biased meant we're really trying to bring these two together and we're pushing out from that point when we're doing the sh the CH okay the CH when we're doing the r the start of O the start of O what front bias means in those cases is really that the Corners again they're not going to be tight okay we never want to pinch down the corners here but you will get some engagement you'll also probably feel a little tension around the corners in this muscle here and you're going to sort of just push forward a bit okay you will get a little bit of tightness but not like this okay you're going to push forward and this is to support the lips to sort of come up and forward a bit so again we're still operating from the front here it's like you're trying to take this point and this point push it out and then separate a bit okay when I say up and out the front goes up but the bottom goes down right so they're sort of separating and now it can also just be maybe a little bit forward a little bit up there's a whole range here don't worry about that right now but again it's not required uh or I can do uh next up is the CH and J sound so here we are blending for the CH which is voiceless we have the T and Sh which are both voiceless and the J of course we have the D and J which are both voiced first we see that the CH J those lips again from that sh and Z where we will engage the lips again not required but it's very common to engage those lips up a bit push out from the corners a bit that is also part of these sounds nothing changes in the posture we're just kind of releasing from that t blending into that sh okay now you're not trying to do like okay you can't release the T and then do n you have to release the T into nsh which means that you have to already be moving into that sh sound in addition to the regular T TTT I do feel a little extra tightness on the the ceiling part of the front of the tongue here as it starts to sort of shape toward the sh like it's sort of preloading that sh the point here is that you have to have good control over that front of the tongue and be able to manipulate it without breaking the hinge without messing anything else up now for the th sounds and this is actually once you get the posture the th sounds become a lot simpler now as I talked about in the main lesson you do not I repeat you do not have to push your tongue through the teeth to do the th sound it is not required to do the sound you can do it like that but we tend to do that more in enunciation exaggeration sometimes it might just happen to come out that way and that's fine as well but usually we're actually going to be either right behind okay just inside the top te there or you can be anywhere along here I've talked about this in the main lessons for the th on how you can form it important thing we want to talk about here is if our tongue is low and back how can we reach all the way up to the front teeth because normally we're not near the front teeth well that is where the front of the tongue stretching comes into play you're not pushing your whole tongue forward to try to reach that point I have my hinge you have to have your hinge for the th once I have my hinge there I'm down and back I have my center of gravity I have everything the center of gravity stays where it is okay I'm going to stretch that front of the tongue forward to where it gets close to here now if you're trying to get all the way between the teeth again I can do that f f when I do that I will actually feel along the sides of my front of my tongue I'm not trying to raise them or bend them or anything but I will feel all the teeth very very lightly but if I don't push between the teeth like this then I can still feel very very even more lightly these teeth now some of you have trouble between the th and the Z or the th and the S sometimes get up here but notice I have this angle okay I'm not doing this that's like the front of my tongue or the front and the middle are really squished up you're not trying to do it like that if you get way up here which can be useful for certain combinations but if you get it up here you want to still make sure that you have your space here make sure that you have still have some space in the front area and then it's really just this front part that's getting there so again we're trying to avoid raising the whole tongue or holding this part of the tongue too high remember we talked about with the the n and the how if I close from here that takes priority so it's the same thing with the Z and the th the th is way up here but the Z is here because it's further back if you have this part of your tongue too high and particularly in maybe an unfavorable shape then even if your th is good that air is going to hit that Z first and it's just going to sound more like a z so if I do Z Z it's like is that a th is that a z I think maybe it's more of a z I don't know now the lips of course we do not engage unless it's maybe part of the next sound just like we saw for the T or the S or whatever now related to the th as I've talked about a couple times before I have a whole lesson about this the dental T deer and it doesn't have to actually be Dental it just has to be flatter but I have a lesson called the full range of the th sound which you can go and look at the basic idea is that for the voiceless th it' be a dental t for the voiced th it would be a dental D where we will either go flat on the teeth okay or we could be in a regular TD position but do it really flatly du du du du okay and you can see as I flatten my whole tongue forward you can see that front of the tongue right it really just gets flat along all these teeth here remember I'm just using the front of the tongue I'm not pushing my whole tongue forward I have my hinge I push forward and flatten that front of the tongue along the teeth th th th the the when I open up you can still hear uh du du lips of course are not needed for this variation either a quick look at a more normal or standard map for the th might look something like this again remember we're coming from that low setting which you probably won't see on a map like this at all we do have our fourth tooth hinge contact and of course our center of gravity let's move on to the CG and group now just like the PB d m is up here with the lips the TDN is right here with the front of the tongue around the bump the K uses the back of the tongue we're going to come up touch the top of the mouth a couple very important details and some common mistakes here now first remember the whole tongue is low and back so while we're using the back of the tongue what happens with the front it stays low you should not have the front of your tongue up here as you bring the tongue up you should not bring the whole tongue up as you're trying to close into the K that's a common mistake okay because your normal posture settings are again it depends on your language but many languages are they hold the tongue higher than American English if your tongue setting does that when you bring this up your brain is used to doing that CG or the CG if you don't have the from this higher position and so what your brain might do is like oh I'm in my right setting for American English and then I got to do a k you won't even notice that the rest of your tongue comes up with it so you have to pay very close attention when you're first starting to do this makinging sure that this stays down low in place you're just using the back of the tongue you you got to have the hinge if for nothing else and a bit of stabilization but also remember the middle don't flatten out the middle our sides are still lifted and raised we have our hinge middle is relaxed it's just that back that's going to come up don't let this flatten out or push forward as you do the K that's another common problem now in order to get that back of the tongue up like we saw with the ooh like we saw with the w okay the back the top of the throat can sort of maybe tense a little bit push up a little bit to help get that tongue up there that is okay you don't want to break the basic setting don't pinch don't push really hard like another very important detail so there's where exactly the sound is placed on the back of the tongue so there's like the front back the middle back the back back okay and then there's exactly where you touch on the top of the mouth these are two very very important details that also affect the quality even if everything else is in place and I tried to cover those basic B details in the main lesson but I have a couple extra details here for you that might help if you're still struggling now the K has a bit of a range of possible articulation and you can very easily destroy certain parts of the posture especially the tongue height and the tongue backness so first I'm going to give you a simple basic K now we're going to talk a little bit about the range of articulation and some other details the simplest basic K is to focus on the middle of the back of the tongue you don't want to be on the front of the back you don't want to be on the back of the back that can definitely cause extra problems now remember our tongue setting is low and back which means that if you're trying to take the back of your tongue up to the top in order to make the k sound you will be lined up already with a certain part of the top of the mouth if you're pushed forward forward you're probably going to end up touching onto the hard palette which for the basic K we do not want make sure your tongue is low and back take the middle of the back of your tongue go roughly approximately straight up and you should land about on the beginning of the soft pallet you don't want to go into the soft pallet back up pushing here which will come back to in a second now this basic K is what I recommend that you practice as you build in the posture that being said let's take a look at some of the variation and range here number one as you bring the tongue up you're still focusing on that middle of the back but you can go ahead and push the back of the tongue forward only the back not the whole tongue the front of your tongue should stay where it is the middle might get squished a little it's okay and you're going to land more on that hard pallet kind of everything else stays in place the second option is instead of trying to place it on the middle of the back and have that be the part that touches you can actually go to the front of the back bring that straight up we're not going to push the tongue forward here anymore just going to bring that straight up but now of course because you're going straight up instead of touching that start of the soft pallette you're going to be touching more a bit on the hard palet remember the center of gravity pressure is always there we still have our contact on our fourth tooth you are not going to do this when you do a k so if you try to push the back of the tongue forward a bit and you feel sliding like this on the hinge you're not doing it right I can easily c c c my hinge isn't even sliding it's just right there where it is now depending on what's after the K yes you might get a little sliding but if you're doing the K itself no matter how you're doing it you should not feel any movement on the hinge at all no matter what you're doing you have your hinge you have your center of gravity and you fully release the k back to that low setting which not doing that is a very common mistake now there's this soft pallet area back here you do not want to push into the soft palette okay that's one of the big mistakes even if you're doing the NG now this is easiest to test with the NG if I push into that soft pallet instead [Music] of so you should hear there's a bit of a different quality difference there now again for the strong version we need that extra force of breath to come out we're also trying to pinpoint that Middle Point okay so when we first release it that should open first so I'm not letting the whole tongue come down at one time I'm trying to pinpoint it through that little hole first so it'll open there and then the rest will come down you'll have to slow it down to notice that but then when you do it more quickly it it it should sound pretty good I'm feeling a little bit of extra air pressure build up in the throat it's being blocked at the back so you'll feel maybe a little bit of extra air build up here you're not trying to tighten the throat you're not trying to push the throat out it's just that air pressure that's being stopped you probably only notice it if you're really going slow again for the weak versions the mechanics are the same like the weak K you just don't push out as much but everything else is is still formed the same the posture is the same you're not trying to bring the jaw up the jaw is going to stay pretty much where it is there's a little wiggle room but it's going to stay pretty open for our basic setting lips are not part of the K but again we can overlap with other sounds let's shift our Focus to the vowel sounds we're also including the semivowels Y and W as well as the H sound which I like to call the voiceless vowel sound one very important thing to keep in mind throughout this entire section because the vowels tend to be more open they tend to have more space compared to the consonants there is a bit more room for variation in the details of articulation but the settings for the posture will stay pretty consistent we're going to start with the E vowel sound for the E there are multiple ways to do the E and we're actually going to look at several different Maps the main one I'm going to recommend is the first one because it most emphasizes the posture and the center of gravity based on people that I work with the first map will usually provide the best results the front of the tongue will raise from that low position that we start in it will get the shape of the e in the front like I've talked about in the main lesson for the E you may also feel a little pull on the hinge as the front of the tongue stretches forward a little bit it's not absolutely required especially in the lazier version yes the E can stretch forward a little bit but you don't want it to be way up here super close to the teeth now remember the tongue setting is low and back so when you do the e a very common problem is that you're going to flatten out and say something like e e e e sounds very thin e e we have more space it sounds rounder it sounds Fuller again our postural elements are in place we have our hinge the sides of the middle are still higher than the middle body all of that is still in place we're just manipulating the front of the tongue and remember this does come with that little bit of a forward slanted tension in the center of gravity but we're not actually moving that center of gravity you can experience a little bit of extra tension around that hinge that's okay and because it's so high if you feel the inside back side of your third tooth the sharp one that is okay for the e sound that you should not feel the inside of the front of that tooth now the back of the tongue can also be engaged when producing the e sound in fact you can apparently do it just from the back of the tongue without even raising the front you can even actually let some of that space get deleted bring the whole tongue up a little bit but two important things number one even if you do once you release the sound you have to get it back to where it was second thing as I said earlier the most important key detail that basic shape will be maintained if you bring up the middle and you lose the shape too much or you let your center of gravity move it's going to ruin it now of course the es between languages sound very similar but it will affect your quality getting in and out of the e as you move move into other sounds if we look at the full range of this sound we can see starting from the neutral uh position we will go ahead and pull those lips back towards a smile like many teachers tell you now the lips are not required at all they are a commonly used feature and regardless of how lazy or enunciated we are speaking there will usually be a little bit of pulling the lips for this sound but also notice that the corners are not tight we do not do this e e they still remain pretty Loose as they get pulled back e e if we look at a more normal map that you might find elsewhere the E is probably going to look something like this but as long as you have that center of gravity in place you generally keep that shape in the middle of the mouth you keep your hinge you keep your tongue lined up then this can also produce a perfectly fine e sound or believe it or not even something like this however as we'll see in a moment this is actually much closer to how I would describe the Y sound or the Y sound so I wouldn't recommend this version if you're trying to do an E however it is perfectly possible I can do it myself e now this might seem counter to what I said about keeping that space but remember a couple things number one we're still coming from a low setting if you're coming from a higher setting then the total space in the mouth is going going to be much more cramped so that can be a little deceiving number two I can feel the back of my tongue is very relaxed and I'm very open back here number three I still feel that center of gravity pressure and a little bit of that shape I still have my hinge most of the basic structure is still intact next we're going to look at the Y sound ye now the Y sound is a semivowel technically speaking vowels tend to be a little bit more open there's a bit more space between the T and other parts of the vocal tract even the E which is very high and close but it's not so close necessarily that it causes any sort of restriction the Y can get a little bit closer to the top of the mouth almost to where you're touching so if I do an E and then I go I keep in the same spot I just go maybe a little higher e e e e now there's actually a whole range of how you can produce this more y like sound and very common way I believe this is how I described it in the Y lesson is you're going to come a little further back from the e might change the shape a little bit but it's going to be very very similar so we go e ye e ye now the rest of the tongue uh especially in the back can come up as well just like for the E we still have our shape okay we have our hinge in place we're just manipulating the front of the tongue that shape is very very important for all sounds but the interesting thing is I can even do a y if I get farther away so if I do e e how am I doing that well one you can use a bit of the back of the tongue like we talked about the E can also use the back of the tongue but I can also just sort of add a little extra tension that soft pallet essentially the key difference between e and Y is that in some way in some part of the vocal tracks whether that's the soft pallet the back of the tongue or the front of the tongue you are getting more more tension more restriction usually because you're getting closer to the top of the mouth now if that in itself doesn't quite do it for you you might want to take a another look at your posture uh maybe slightly manipulate the shape on the front of the tongue see if that gets any closer but that should generally give you the difference between the two sounds I don't know what posture you're coming from and the way that you make the e sound so that could be a factor in why you might not get the right result the lips are not used for the why but they can overlap with other sounds like we saw for E you can also do something that looks kind of like this as long as you keep the center of gravity tension the hinge and the tongue settings and remember like we've seen before when a sound can come up and delete some of this middle space or pretty much all of this middle space the back middle and especially the back of the tongue as well as that throat setting being lower and more open allows us to maintain enough space in the mouth the range for the the E and the Y sound is actually quite flexible in this position we would just need to add a little bit more restriction either by adding some tension or by getting that area of the tongue just a tiny bit closer to the top of the mouth compared to the E now I recommend that you don't even try to do the e or the Y this way especially because you can easily break multiple settings but this does show us that you have some flexibility here next we have the sound I as an for those of you who are still struggling with this sound I have a very special tip that is going to probably fix this for you I'd be really surprised if it doesn't so we will most likely remove that little bit of a curve shape from the e you actually don't even have to do that you don't have to lower the tongue you don't have to uh have the tongue be a little further back or anything like that like you might see on the B chart it is common that that will happen but actually the key big difference between e and I right behind where that shape is so like the back half of the front of the tongue we have our hinge here and then we have this spot right in front of it and kind of a little bit right under it this area here if you just push down there this is also again if you had other parts higher you're going to have to open up just a little bit you can have different shapes for the a doesn't necessarily matter but if you push down there you should produce an e sound down and back and the middle the sides are still higher and touching the teeth compared to the middle body now make sure be very careful that you don't lose your center of gravity and you will feel again maybe a little bit of forward tension because the sound is up here but you're going to feel most of the tension right in here like with the E and the Y sound the Y sound the back of the tongue and a little bit with the middle can be a little bit higher that's fine usually people that I work with they sound a lot clearer when they get that back of the tongue lower also going to feel as if this space sort of right under the hinge and a little in front of the hinge also sort of opens up a bit one important detail here this is going to affect the I a lot more than the e or even the e sound if your center of gravity is farther forward whether that's the front middle like Russian or right on the front of the tongue like in Spanish or I believe Japanese is also up there many languages seem to be more up this way that means that your center of gravity you're going to be holding your tension here remember we have to let go of that center of gravity for American English but it can be really hard to do that especially in the beginning so you want to make extra certain if you're trying to do I that you release your center of gravity tension whether that's here or here because that will likely cause interference with number one holding that here because we need our center of gravity here and we need our shape there but also getting this down in the right spot for the articulation of the sound if you're holding your Center center of gravity up here and you try to do it there's going to be way too much tension up here and you'll probably get something like see I'm trying I'm pushing down there like I described trying to do I but I'm also tensing the front of my tongue a lot and it's causing Distortion with the sound it's not coming out right as we can see as we go from that neutral uh into the I sound the lips on the side can pull back a little bit like the e but not quite as much again the corners are still very relaxed but the lips are not at all required for this sound a normal or standard map for the E might look something a little more like this but again as always I have my hinge I have my center of gravity my back is very low and open my throat is very open and the interesting thing is that it can just be a little bit more open version of the previous one we saw for E this is actually going to be an interesting theme that we'll see as we look at the remaining front vowels there's a sort of interesting complex of connections here just like with the E I can also do the E like this as well e keep in mind that between the E and the E like we saw pushing down on that spot you can actually do something very similar here as part of getting that little bit of extra space so if this works a little better for you and you can create a good quality sound in American English then feel free to use this one but remember this does bring in some danger of breaking the posture so make sure you keep those elements interestingly as we'll see we can actually go from the Y sound to the e sound to the e a by just increasing that pressure on that point so I can go [Music] ye a okay now there might be a couple little subtle differences between those sounds of different things that can happen but the key between all of those is that point right there and increasing the pressure in fact this is why the lazy a can be produced from the same position as e you just have to add that pressure there pushing down a little [Music] more now the E and the I are generally quite high as we'll see there's a weight that can do it without lifting them way up here but the the Y the E the I they tend to be above this line of the teeth here where the E and the a tend to be a bit lower so also if in your native posture you're used to holding the tongue way up here for the I sound that should be fine but you don't want to be holding any extra tension there you're just lifting it up now in addition to pushing down on that point between the Y and all the way down to the a there's a certain space just under and a little behind the hinge what we can maybe consider this front middle area what's going to happen is in addition to that point being pushed down remember the back is going to pretty much stay in place the middle is pretty much going to stay in place we have our center of gravity in place we have our shape we have our hinge and so what you'll actually feel right under the hinge is maybe a little bit of bracing of that section so we have like our sort of bll shape back here but as we open from e to it to a to a I can feel similar type of bull shape here in the front middle Center gravity still stays here we don't shift the center of gravity but it's like an additional effect so I feel almost like the the sides of a boat just like right under that hinge next is the sound e now this sound has a little bit of a range and a little bit of a shape range as well among Natives and that's okay it can sound a little bit different but it's going to still sound like the e sound remember like we saw between e and I if we further push down on that point we will get into e now of course there's some other things that can happen that we're going to talk about but don't forget that spot on the tongue again e is going to stay lined up under that bump in the front area there make sure that you're not touching your teeth now where e and I are above these bottom teeth here the E is going to be no higher than these bottom teeth so you don't want to be up here and this is where some of you are going to start having problems remember normally by default our whole tongue is low and back so if we're not using the front of the tongue it tends to just kind of relax down here if I'm doing an E I need the front of the tongue if I'm doing an E I need the front of the tongue if I'm doing an E I still need the front of the tongue but it can't be too high because then I start getting like e e e may he starts moving towards the start of a a little bit e is roughly going to be right in front of the uh so where the U is on the middle of the tongue the E is on the front of the tongue we still have our hinge we're not breaking it but it can become a little looser you might also feel a little bit of a pull forward we don't have to but that can happen but the number one most important thing especially if you want to avoid your accent as you shift the sound up here you cannot let that middle part flatten out and push forward so instead of H if we get e e H see it's already maybe starting to sound like I have like a Spanish accent or something there's different little ways that you can do it it will maybe make you sound more like your language now the E can push between the teeth a little bit we're not going to push way out but they can get a little bit loose a little bit pushed towards the teeth we're still going to be lined up with the hinge we're not going to you know push all the way through here now the jaw for E can slightly open a little bit more but it is absolutely not required to make the sound this is going to be much more common in the more enunciated or exaggerated version of the sound as we can see here going from that neutral uh into the E we can see that the mouth might open a little bit the lips might pull to the side a little bit they're not actually required now as we'll see later and although the exact placement may vary many languages have either this sound like we have in bed and or just the sound that we have at the start of a now especially if your language only has the second one You definitely want to make sure that you have the proper tongue setting in terms of both the the lowness the height level and the backs forwardness as we can see on the V chart for American English that start of the a dip thong is really kind of between the i and e that we have in American English and so it can be very easy whether you're trying to do I or E to accidentally make that e sound that you have in your native language having that lower and farther back setting is one of the details that can help make sure you don't accidentally form that sound when trying to do e as in bed take a look at some more normal or standard planer maps that you might see we're actually going to see a few different ones here first is this one then you have one that maybe looks a little bit more like this bit of a different shape on the front of the tongue and then of course we have this one where again we're using a bit more of the middle of the tongue like we saw with E and I again you can push further down on that point as you open up a bit more space there but in all of these especially the last one the key is having that right center of gravity and the right settings it's very very easy especially on that last one that you might accidentally be pushed too far forward or you're going to push the the whole tongue forward or the whole middle forward when really you have to keep that Center gravity pressure here again these Maps can be misleading they're not necessarily wrong but they don't contain this critical information that we need about the posture plus remember it's the posture itself that allows such flexibility and Variety in the articulation of the sounds next we have the sound a now this of course is one of the single most difficult sounds for English Learners to get we're focus more on the full version here there's actually a range of possible details with maybe like pushing forward not pushing forward raising the back not raising the back and so we're also going to explore those as well just like we saw for all the other front valves again remember our tongue setting as farther back we generally want to be lined up under that bump with this front part of the tongue notice that the tip of my tongue is low below the line of the teeth there having it above that is a very common mistake it is technically possible to do the sound with the tip of the tongue higher but this can easily trigger problems with your posture and with the formation of the sound so I recommend you don't do that like we saw with i and e of course we push down more on that point to get into a like e the sides can go ahead and push through the teeth we do come off of the hinge vertically it will break vertically that's fine if you're anchored all the way back like we talked about last time it will feel sort of like a zipper but we will definitely break the hinge vertically now this is a danger area because because if you break this way you might also push forward you don't want to do that okay you should stay lined up under the hinge because when you release that a and you go into pretty much any other sound like say you're going to say cat or back okay that hinge needs to be in place so when we open up for the a we break it and then we go right back where it was and then do the next sound so at at of course all the space and everything else in the middle is still there the sides even though you break this way the sides of the middle still need to be higher than the middle body that's what helps create that little dip that you see in native's mouths now one big common mistake with the a this applies to every sound in the language you cannot over tense the sound we have the tension in the placement of the sound where it is we have that secondary tension for the center of gravity we have our settings held in place which may require just a tiny bit of tension to hold them there instead of saying ah if you say ah ah ah see I'm I'm trying to just add some more tension here I'm actually getting more tension throughout even though I'm just trying to tense here it will make the sound horrible even if you're in place now ah has some details with a bit of a range okay it can be a bit of a complicated sound you can slightly push the tongue forward Ward for the a however this is a very dangerous point we are not pushing the tongue so far forward that we break the posture we're still lined up with the hinge so it opens it breaks I'm not doing this right where all of a sudden maybe now I'm like this or I would be you know if I close back up now I'm lined up with the third tooth no it stays lined up with that fourth tooth approximately if the hinge were closed it would feel just like a pull without actually leaving that fourth tooth and again that center of gravity is still there right so we're not really losing that we still have our shape as I said even if you do get that tongue pushed a little bit forward that shape is going to help keep that right quality the right center of gravity just don't break the posture now if you do push the tongue forward slightly yes you can push into the teeth you actually don't have to do that we have quite a bit of space up here and we're going to talk about anchoring to this point for all that vowels in a second that's a more advanced variation and if you do push forward especially pushing into the teeth again we don't want to overdo this do this super hard but if you do do that you'll probably end up getting a bit of a curve in the tongue like I discussed in the main lesson for a but that is actually not the a shape remember we talked about this pressure and pushing down on this point that is essentially where the sound is located on the front of the tongue if you don't have the center of gravity then even if you have the right point in everything else you won't have the right quality you might sound more British if you have the center of gravity but you don't push down on that point you might get close you might get to what we would consider the right sound more or less but there going to be something missing in it so you have to get the center of gravity and you have to get this point down even if you push the tongue forward or even if you don't push the tongue forward now what about raising the back of the tongue this is possible but not required and it also provides a very big D danger for breaking the posture especially if you don't release it with the rest of the sound just like we saw for the C again you don't want it to come way up super high to where you break your setting okay but if the back of the tongue comes up a bit more the throat maybe kind of supports it just a little bit tiny tiny bit that is okay as long as you avoid extra tension and restriction back there so we can see that you can get a little push forward it's not required you can get a bit of raising it's not required you can get bit of both it's not required our center of gravity and our low open throat and tongue setting helps keep enough space back here remember this is a front vowel personally I think that the reason why we have so much variability with what the tongue can do for a is because it's sort of an extreme shape and an extreme angle down here depending on what we need to get into after or depending on what we're coming out of going into the a having this bit of wiggle room and exactly what the tongue can do is a byproduct of the natural flow of speech so it's not necessarily a question of what's right or wrong should you push should you not push as long as you don't break the basic settings you're fine let it move around a little but I do recommend that when practicing the basic a and trying to get that core sound that you don't push forward you don't raise you just try to keep everything nice and simple lined up I can do the a sound without any pushing forward without any raising so you should be able to as well now even if you don't have any push forward or any raising what you will probably feel regardless is a little extra tension just a little bit a little extra tension on the back of the tongue this is to help stabilize that back of the tongue and help to stabilize the position up here for the a now as far as the lips starting from the neutral uh sound we're going to open that mouth up now for the lazier version you only have to open the mouth a little bit if at all just like with e i and e we can get a bit of a pull here that's fine the jaw will open the mouth will open ah so we get this sort of maybe wider smile do not try to over exaggerate that it's not ah a okay it's way too much if you're emphasizing or you're really exaggerating something you can maybe get something similar to that but don't overdo it okay in fact the lips are not required for this sound just like it's not required for the other sounds a ah it's exactly the same sound but when you don't want to do just like with all the other sounds you don't want to hold tension here because then ah ah ah that makes it just by trying to hold tension there it makes it so much harder for me to even hold my tongue in the right place and to shape the sound correctly that's probably one of the reasons why it's so difficult for English learners to get the sound cuz you got to make sure your lips are not tight also keep in mind yes the jaw can open quite a bit for this sound but the amount that you have to open actually isn't that much this goes back again to the range from lazy to fully enunciated the minimal amount we need is about the same openness as e which e doesn't really even have to open that much in the first place but of course your jaw setting and your tensional on the lips and cheeks needs to be set correctly first to make sure that we have the proper amount of space here make sure that you're low in the back to make sure that you're not blocking that space there this allows you to do the sound more easily without having to fully open into that full sound in reality at any given time we use the sound it's going to be anywhere from the lazy version to the fully formed version but we're probably going to be somewhere in between if we look at a more normal or simpler map it might look something like this of course this does not show anything about that center of gravity it doesn't show anything about the hinge or the space in the back or our low tongue setting regardless of the exact way that we make this we can also maybe show it a bit like this we can see that this can actually be a bit of a continuation from that e e using a bit more of the middle of the tongue and this brings me to one more important Point remember earlier I said that we need the center of gravity we need to sort of push down here there is a little bit of a range of where you can push down so for example instead of pushing down here I can maybe push down here a [Music] bit Ah Ah again the posture is very important for that that posture helps give us some wiggle room but you can actually do the E the I the E the a a bit further back now I don't recommend that if it works for you great for Simplicity I recommend that you just follow the basic structures focusing more on the front of the tongue that I've talked about for each of those sounds but there is wiggle room now one quick side note about a before n or M as well as partially nasiz vowels I have lessons on both of those the main reason that the a before a Nas will sound like and or M will sound different is because the soft pallet will actually slightly push forward and or tense a bit allowing a little bit more of that air to go through the nose rather than the mouth so it almost sounds like a different sound if I do Ah Ah that's normal I let a little bit more go through the nose not fully nasal just a little bit more man the important Point here is that we do have a little bit of a postural change in this back area to allow a little bit more more to go through the nose but that's not the only thing here as I discussed before when I didn't know about the posture other teachers seem to say that part of the a like in man the reason why it's a little different is because it's actually like an a combination like ah and although that can maybe stand out a little bit more in this sort of combination going into this these nasalized sounds all we're really hearing there is is that center of gravity when we're doing a and we release that a it can stand out a little bit more than in many of the other sounds especially when we go from this sort of a little bit more nasalization to closing that back off into the normal position to where we don't have that extra air going through the nose then that uh transition can actually sound even stronger but it is not a plus uh it's just a a is ah now quick side note about the four front vves before we move on to the next sound there is an alternate way to do these sounds that's based more on jaw opening and tongue shape so tongue shape is generally going to be important but usually you'll see okay the E the tongue lifts up here the is here the is here the as lower okay and that's generally true we also know that the basic settings generally is that the front of the tongue is pulled back from the bottom teeth in here and lined up with that bump of the alveol ridge however there is an alternative thing that we can do I can take the front of my tongue and pin it right in here it could be here here here it doesn't really matter where it is I can just pin it right there keep it where it is but I have to keep everything else in place which means that in order to do that I have to stretch the front of the tongue forward to Anchor it there because I can't Disturb This I can't break my hinge now if I want to do an E my jaw is going to be not super closed when you still need enough space and I'm going to shape that e while anchored here e e e still have my space here still have everything in place then if I just keep it there I don't have to move this at all if I lower it and change that shape to the I shape e e e keeping the front exactly in the same spot go down to e e e e e e a e e e a by shaping the front of that tongue right and opening the jaw a little bit more a little bit more for each sound we actually can get those same four sounds but the key is that that posture is still in place behind and underneath everything if you let the whole tongue come forward when you do that now you have a key feature as far as I'm aware of French posture and if I just do that okay so if I try to push my whole tongue forward I'm not trying to sound French French but it immediately starts making me sound more French it was was coming off a little bit but I was trying to push my whole tongue forward into these bottom teeth and immediately I sounded more French without trying to really sound very French we will now leave the front of the mouth and go to the back of the mouth with the a sound now of course the way that the a or whatever is standardly taught is it's more maybe on the middle of the tongue and then you also have that backward C symbol a with the lips rounded that is not what I teach that's not how I speak I speak with the cot cot merger I teach the cot cot merger I've talked about that before you will still sound Perfectly Natural and neutral in fact it's something that has been gradually over many decades taking over the American English accent if you want to use the unmerged sounds either because you like that version of the neutral accent in American English or because that's what you originally learned you will have to figure out how to maintain the posture with those two sounds what I'm going to teach you is just the one merged sound which is on the back of the tongue which makes everything so much easier like we've seen for several sounds so far the a also has a bit of a range of possible articulation we're actually going to be looking at two different Maps the sound is on the back of the tongue so front of the tongue stays low there's a little wiggle room but if you lift it up too high it will cause Distortion with this sound this front of the front area is going to generally be lined up under that bump of the alol ridge we're going to do middle back you do not want to be back in the throat a it's too far back okay if it sounds like it's stuck in your throat you're placing it too far back we also don't want it to be on the the front of the back of the tongue like ah ah sounds like this a little push forward the sides are higher the middle body is lower and relaxed this section is also part of that relaxation is that retraction where it's sort of falling into the back of the tongue all that stays in place in the middle okay you can't break that you can't let it flatten out you can't let it flatten up upward or anything that and then you place a sound on the back ah ah if I get rid of my center of gravity and I let that not be retracted it starts moving maybe towards that like the ah sound in Spanish Japanese Russian whatever lazy a doesn't have to open very much a ah but there will usually be some amount of jaw opening and when we do that of course we will break the hinge but as usual a common mistake is that when the hinge breaks you end up pushing your tongue forward because that's what your normal posture does in your native language so you don't want to do that in fact if anything you should feel a little bit of a backwards pull that doesn't have to happen you can come straight down just like with a you don't have to push forward with a but there's a little wiggle room there as you sort of set into that a sound especially if you're doing map one now because we're placed right on that back of the tongue and because we're lowering down especially if we don't open the Jaws more as much and we're using more of a lazy version of the awe the top of the throat can come down a little bit you're not trying to tense it or force it down but it can sort of get out of the way a little bit so that back of the tongue can lower I only mentioned that if you're still having trouble getting the right sound you can maybe try to let that top of the throat move out of the way a bit so it sort of come down with the back of the tongue don't do a where you're getting an artificially deep voice like we talked about in previous phases at map two we can actually see that instead of the back of the tongue being very low it can actually be higher than the middle kind of maybe more where we might place that unmerged a sound or even just a little bit higher than that and I think that this is possible because remember with a we don't round the lips and so as sort of a leftover remnant of that a placement it actually opens up a wider range for the a to be pronounced so I can do ah ah ah ah ah as long as you're anywhere within that range and all the other pieces are in place you'll sound fine but there's actually a little bit more to the range for the a sound in map one we saw that it could come down in map two we saw that you can actually have it a little bit higher you can also not for map two but for map one you can also come back a little bit now this seems weird because we're already so far back that we don't have a lot of space there before we start falling into the throat and blocking the throat so it's a very tricky thing but there is still a little bit of wiggle room to move a little bit F farther back my recommendation would be to just kind of avoid that but this could also help to be a good compensation mechanism if your tongue tends to be high and forward in your native posture and you're still struggling to get the a sound remember we don't want to go in the throat and have it be a it's not supposed to be throaty needs to be on the tongue but going back a little bit in addition to maybe going down can help you to correct into the right range there and lastly for the lips on a the lips are not part of the a sound in any way the mouth will open and we're just ah ah let's move on to the uh sound this is another back tongue sound so what do we do with the front of the tongue it stays very low sides in my middle are still raised the body is still lower we're going to be on the back of the tongue kind of more on the front of the back of the tongue a little bit of a push forward now we're not pushing the whole tongue forward we're not trying to break the posture you have to keep your hinge in place you have to keep that center of gravity in place and that space in place that retraction okay if you have all that in place and you get a little forward tension on the back of your tongue remember I call this the high schwa even though it's not actually awwa because it feels like the uh is kind of like right around here and if I sort of go up and back onto the front of that back of the tongue remember think of it more sort of like this where we have that forward tension on that front back of the tongue for the placement of the sound but then the center of gravity because it needs to be maintained right it doesn't want to be pushed away it's going to sort of almost push back into it right so the middle pushes a little into the back the back pushes forward and you have to find the balance there but that is how we maintain that center of gravity in the uh sound otherwise everything would want to come forward and we'd be like uh now as we see with these back of tongue sounds we tend to get a little bit of support from the throat whether that's getting out of the way like if we're going to do sort of a lower a type sound or maybe sort of not pinching but maybe tightening a little pushing up a little just a little bit not enough to break the posture not enough to add extra tension but to support and help push up that back of the tongue depending on what sound we're trying to make uh in order to help support that you can it's not necessarily required but you can get a little bit of actually pushing out from the top of the throat not just pushing up but actually a little pushing out right under here right above where the atam Apple would be and then also a little bit of upward tension to sort of support that but again don't let the back of the tongue come too high because then you're going to lose the space and it's not going to sound clear also don't tense too much because then you're also not going to sound clear we're going to get like uh uh if you're doing a lazier version that probably won't come in at all uh uh uh uh I can feel maybe just a little bit of movement in here but nowhere near as much as if I do uh there is one special detail to mention here about the front of the tongue and this will be shared by the ooh sound and the W sound and that is that in the front it's not really that it moves there's a little wiggle room in exactly where it can be but you will likely feel some tension through the front of the tongue and even a little extra tension around the hinge again this is a back of tongue tongue sound so just like with the front of tongue sounds we can feel a little bit of maybe a forward pull on the hinge with the back sounds we can feel maybe a little bit of a backward pull on the hinge again it's not required even though the lips are not required for the sound if you do use them to whatever degree they're going to work exactly the same as the sh uh sh so if I say should should see it's held through both of those sounds now for the more normal looking Maps we're going to look at a few different ones here first this is my original uh map that I made a long time ago we can see of course it's missing the key details of the posture because I didn't know about that number two might look something a little bit more like this and then number three might look something a bit more like this and this is one of the interesting things for this sound it does potentially have a bit of a range of articulation when I try to form the sound in my mouth specifically it feels exactly like I described it to you it doesn't really feel like it comes super far up or it moves back in any way but if I try to mimic what I see here and I say uh uh uh instead of uh uh see it should sound exactly or almost the same I still have the same tension Dynamics I'm still placing in the same spot I'm still pushing with the center of gravity but instead of it being where it is it's just kind of coming up a little bit higher and a little bit farther back I strongly recommend that you don't try to do it that way because you can very easily enter a different sound trigger your native posture etc etc etc but you do have some wiggle room here again sound is King so as long as you sound good you're fine but be careful with that moving on to ooh we are going to look at two maps the first one looks a bit extreme but just stay with it for a second so like the E the O is placed very high but on the back of the tongue not the front of the tongue this means we still have our posture we still have our shape okay but remember we're coming from a low setting so the front of our tongue is low the middle of our tongue is low back of our tongue is going to raise top of the throat again can sort of push up and tighten a little bit just a little bit to help support that back of the tongue as it comes up but with the throat remember we're coming from we're starting from that low tongue low throat very open and relaxed we're not going to be super super super super high and really close like okay something like that we need enough space there but we're going to not move the whole tongue up we're going to lift that back of the tongue now when we do that you don't want to flatten out the middle you don't want to push forward on the middle you still have to keep the sides of the middle higher and touching the the teeth touching that hinge where the middle body will be down retracted back lower it's just the back of the tongue that comes up doesn't have to be quite as steep as it looks in the map which I would also add that this middle section I can feel that it can be quite that steep how it feels in my mouth or I can actually let that middle sort of come up a little bit have it be a bit more of an angle and that still works as well but I still have my center of gravity pressure I still have that core basic shape feeling it's not completely flat but just like we saw with a and uh because it's a back sound you can get a little bit of a pull or a slide this way but we're still going to be centered on that fourth tooth in addition this is not required the pull is not required either but in addition you can also either come loose on the hinge or even slightly break the hinge not going to be like this for like a or a or something like that now you can get a little bit of attention through here just a little bit and even a little bit of a support here the soft pallet can actually kind of get out of the way since that back of the tongue is already so high now with the ooh sound there's a little bit of a weird thing that can happen it's not required completely but I do notice that it wants to kind of naturally happen in my mouth where I feel the whole side all the way through the front of the tongue going to the tip can sort of tense a little bit and that probably helps just to support that back shape and height another tip here just like we've seen how I recommend that if you're not using the back of the tongue that we tend to try to keep it a little bit lower and in place for the ooh the front of the tongue coming up a bit is not a problem it will not ruin the sound as long as you don't bring it like way crazy up towards top of the mouth like but for consistency and you know to make sure that you keep that General posture I do recommend recommend that you try to keep that front of the tongue low unless you need to start raising it for the next sound like if it's U into T of course you know we're going to flow up into that t and that's fine we're just talking about the basics here as usual of course that front part of the front of the tongue is going to stay pretty much lined up under the bump of the alular ridge but in the oo the front in addition to getting that little bit of extra tension can also retract a little bit as we get up into that oo on the back it's optional but if you feel a little bit of a pull back on the front that is okay and that being said our ooh sounds like it moves and inside the mouth you don't have to move it there can be a little bit where we kind of start a little bit more towards the uh and then just slightly move fully into the U there's also a little bit of a range of articulation here that I want to mention this is an alternative map image that we can use so instead of placing it more on the middle of the back you can actually kind of like how we did with a in the front you can actually maybe push the back of the tongue forward just a little bit and or get the placement of the sound bit more towards the front of the back again make sure you're high enough not so super high but high enough that you're not actually in the uh sound but this is optional okay so anywhere in that range you should sound fine as long as you have your posture you have the mechanics moving you have the lips going gives you a little bit of wiggle room there now you can do an oo without the lips if you have perfect control over the tongue and the center of gravity but even if we have a little bit of movement in here we will almost always have some sort of even just a little bit of movement with the lips now the O motion for the lips how the lips work is built on the same motion for uh and we're not tense here but we're going to sort of push forward a bit we're going to bring the front of the lips up and out we're forward biased we're trying to use these part of the lips not the corners and then in addition to that they're going to come around now how much they come around is going to depend on if you're doing a a nice good full clear version maybe a really exaggerated version o you okay normally we won't do it that much but that is part of the full range usually we're going to say more like ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh there's a little bit of that basic motion a little bit up a little bit out a little bit of around now if we look at some more normal standard Maps first we can look at my old oo map of course the postra elements are there as usual just not shown or you might see some something kind of more in this direction which seems pretty extreme to me I would never think to show it quite this way but I can feel if I try to not quite that far but kind of get something of a shape in that direction like that I can still do a pretty good ooh sound ooh ooh we can maybe consider this part of the range but I definitely wouldn't try to go this extreme especially because you have a danger of maybe accidentally doing the W sound so there's a couple key differences between the U and the W next we're going to look at the W sound and I've noticed that there's actually definitely some wiggle room on the exact details of what can happen with the sides and what can happen with the back and how tension can shift around but I'm going to give you a little bit of a a description here that might help and again some of these details are not in the original W lesson now there's something that's going to happen inside the mouth and then there's something that happens comes with the lips now we know that they're going to round forward that's the first most obvious thing we see and they're going to round usually more forward than U or o if you're getting lazy with the w you don't have to go quite all the way to this small little hole here you can get more like like again we're not pinched here not that if you if you're too tight here it won't allow you to round properly so you have to relax the sides we're going to push them forward not tighten them like just push them this way and then get those the front lips again we're front bias so we're trying to bring the top lip and the bottom lip together but not like an m not where we're closing we're trying to round them into this little tight circle of course one very important thing with the lips is you do not want this bottom lip to be anywhere near these top teeth because then you get like v v v a little bit more of a v or a weird like WV type sound so you to make sure there's lots of space between that and that and that's part of this front bias because we're bringing them together but we have that space here we're not tight our Jaws a little bit more open helps give us that space between the lips and the teeth inside the mouth remember our jaw tends to be maybe a little bit more open tends to be set a little bit more open than many other languages so we need enough space in the mouth from the Jaw opening then the tongue inside is set low and back from our basic posture so that also helps create lots of space inside so even though the lips come forward and are closed like this and it seems like there's not a lot of space inside the mouth we still have a ton of space still have the hinge on the hinge and anchored all the way back as I am I will feel when I do the W that I will get a little extra tension like I'm kind of pushing just a little bit more but you don't want to flatten out the middle okay you want to keep the middle more where it is and then you're instead of trying to sort of like do this to like flatten out the middle a bit you're just kind of you're not even really pushing into the sides you're just kind of tightening the sides a little but adding a little extra tension to them instead of pushing now you don't necessarily absolutely have to have that again there's a range here there's different things that you can do you can also feel a little bit of a pull on the hinge here for the W front of the tongue low W is actually more of a back of tongue sound it's going to be placed very similarly to the U it does seem to me that for U and for w the soft palette will actually maybe get a little bit out of the way because these are sort of up high taking up some of the space here top of the throat of course can tighten a little bit to support the back of the tongue for the W now the main difference between the W and the U we saw with the E and the Y sound that they're kind of basically the same sound almost there can be a little bit of a shape difference a little bit of a placement difference but really the main difference between them that is required is an extra tension or more restriction W and U work very very similarly the key difference between them is that extra tension or restriction now what this means number one in this area up here so instead of doing the O where the O is you can get a little bit closer make it a little more restricted ooh so we start to hear that air flowing a little bit more tightly however going along with that one other detail that is optional it doesn't have to happen um it does seem like it wants to naturally happen when I fully enunciate the W but in addition to getting that a little bit higher and closer to the top of the mouth I will feel extra tension along the sides of the tongue so not just on the hinge area but the whole sides going all the way up you also might have started to notice a little bit of a pattern remember when we talked about the uh we said that you might feel a little bit of tension along the sides of the tongue all the way up into the the front area and we saw with the O we can get a similar thing there's actually going to be maybe a little more tension in the ooh than there is in the uh o is also a little higher than the uh and then we get even higher than that and we get even more tension as we shape that back of the tongue and get it higher and further back for the articulation of these sounds the sides of the tongue tend to want to brace and tighten up a bit to support that and that's probably a byproduct of trying to maintain the center of gravity maintain the core shape and maintain the hinge it can actually get quite tight and you don't really want to like push super super hard because you might end up start making an R sound which we're going to talk about later but you can maybe get just a little bit of pushing into the teeth I would recommend just getting a little bit of tension there not really trying to actually p push out it is extra important to keep the right center of gravity to keep the approximate shaping between the sides and the middle body even if it does shallow out a bit it will not be completely flat number one but also if you start to let that middle body come up more that is when we will start to form that er a little bit so there's a very delicate balance between the r and the W through this middle section so if you start hearing a bit of an ER sound in your W then you know that you're messing up the middle also it is possible that you might feel a little extra tension around the hinge maybe even a little bit of a backwards pull because the W sound is back here in fact the W can actually loosen or come a little bit off of the hinge and the front of the tongue can also raise slightly as well like with the ooh there's actually a bit of a range of articulation here in this case it's going to be exactly like the oo so instead of it being more the middle of the back you can actually get maybe a little bit more on the front maybe push that back of the tongue forward just a little bit so as we can see with the w there's actually quite a bit of wiggle room with the different parts but just make sure that you don't break the posture now for the o sound I've talked about before in other lessons how there's multiple ways to do this the standard way it's taught is to do the a into the uh as you bring the lips around but then there are those of us who have the C CAU murder we don't have a you can also use o as a mon ofong and mostly rely on the lips that's what I told you in the main o lesson but there's actually another way that we can do this that actually ties directly into the posture and it's probably going to make a lot of sense for quite a few of you who have maybe noticed that many Americans have almost like awah sound at the start of their o this is because of the posture in the center of gravity and what we can do instead of starting straight in the O and focusing more on the lips we are still going to use the lips but if you start a little bit more towards the uh not fully into that schwas sound that center of gravity but just kind of halfway between uh andever that o would be placed on the back almost kind of like awah uh uh not uh uh uh uh so I'm starting to get a little bit of tension on the back of the tongue I'm starting to just barely leave that schw sound and then we're going to go up kind of like we did with the ooh where we can kind of start a little outside of it and come up into it do the same thing here uh uh uh then the lips will come around so as the tongue is doing this the lips will do this oh oh now the settings are very very important here to get the right quality here we need lots of space if we go ahead and start from an actual full we can see that first we're actually going to open the jaw a little bit to give a little bit more space this is more optional it's not actually required for the sound but it is a very common thing that we'll do this can cause the hinge to either become loose or slightly break again don't let it slide or break this way we want it to just come off like this the action is on the back of the tongue and then as we get up into that o the jaw will start to kind of close up a bit more as the lips come around remember the corners should not be tight we're not saying oh oh nice and relaxed we're front biased we bring those lips up and around like we did with ooh now if we're doing a much faster or lazier version of that O then the lips can be much less involved there will still likely be at least a little tiny bit of involvement but again remember the settings are very important if you're too high or too far forward and you try to do that it's just not going to sound right like we've seen with other back of tongue sounds the top of the throat area can get a little bit engaged to help support the back of the tongue for the O I feel it a lot less than for U or for w and remember there's a difference between tightening and pushing before we look at the dip thongs we're going to take a look at the H sound we're going to see two different ways to do this neither one is the correct way the reality in actual speech is that whichever one happens is what happens the first way we're going to look at is the way that that I described in the main lesson for the h sound and this is why I call it the voiceless vowel consonant because all vowels are voiced but if I use a voiceless version in that same position and shape of that sound we get the H right because it sort of just takes the shape of the vowel sound that's after it he it's like I'm doing a voiceless e and then a regular e and it's just breath ha it's a voiceless a and then a regular a so all that's required to do the H is breath the second way and we're also going to do a little bit of an important detail comparison in a second but the second way is where we will actually get some restriction back here between the back of the tongue and the soft pallet and there will be constriction there so just like when we have a s or a sh you know many of these voiceless or even the voiced consonant sounds where there's some sort of restriction to help produce that sound the H although you can still have that that shape of whatever is the vowel after it the H itself if you were to produce it as a sound would be produced back here now you have to be careful here because some languages are very throaty some languages have actual uses back here like the French R so we're not trying to Flap the uvula the little ball there we're not trying to say okay we never do that we're not trying to make it really harsh or grinding like or something like that's going to sound maybe a little bit more towards Spanish or Arabic or some other language that uses the vocal track that way remember the postural settings the center of gravity we have lots of space we're low and back this helps explain why our H is the way it is why you can't be too tight or too harsh back there because we have a lot of space so I'm not trying to close all of the space get a lot of tension back here and go or something like that there needs to be some restriction but still good air flow just like the s or the sh I'm not trying to say so it's sort of like just a slightly constricted breath we hear that little bit of friction so then if I say he I can say he he if I say ha I can say so the back of my tongue when I do that no matter what sound I'm starting from it does feel like it's a little bit higher maybe a little tense and again that soft pallet maybe it's a little tense so these are kind of closer together creat some of that restriction I really do feel a lot of the air sort of hitting that so the back of that soft pallet and kind of obvious it's not going up through the nose but it's kind of that's seems to be the main friction point now let's talk a little bit about the differences here because there's two key points I want to bring up first point is that when we're doing the actual H that constriction in the back you don't have to actually be in a vow sound shape you can just be slightly out of it halfway into the the Val you could be preloading there's all kinds of things that doesn't really matter for the h because when we hear that that restricted breath we know that it's going to be an h and we don't really care as much what's under it but you could be right in the sound already second point when you are doing the voiceless vowel version if you ever choose to do that or if it happens to come out you won't notice this as much with the open positions like the a the a whatever but if you're doing like an e or an O something that's maybe a little bit closer to the the top here you you will feel and even hear that air in the area of that vowel so when I say he I don't feel or hear the constriction back here this is just normal breath right it's not that's that actual H sound it's up here the it's basically just the breath is flowing over that e position just like it would say an S position or an sh position or whatever and so it sounds like a voiceless e so this would remain very open and clear and you just let that voicelessness hit wherever it hits for the vowel and then you activate the voice for that vowel let's move on to the dip thongs we have the a the I the ow and the oi we're going to first look at the a now as I mentioned in the main lesson for a the starting sound only exists in the thong it's not the e sound it's e which it's kind of hard for me to isolate that because we only use it in the dip thong the good news is that many languages have this sound instead of or sometimes in addition to the American English e sound like in bed but of course you have your own posture and in some languages such as Spanish that sound is actually the center of gravity itself so you have to be able to let go of that and have your center of gravity be over here which is an extra tricky thing to do so while you're doing the a sound you're going to start in that sound that you're used to in your language but your center of gravity should be here and then as you go through the sound you shouldn't be holding that that tightness or that center of gravity there anymore it should just release the a as a whole is a dip thong but if we just compare the starting sound here with the mon thong the individual e as in bed it does feel that right this point we were talking about around here where we can push down between those front valow sounds that is still that can still be part of this but you need to get a little bit of that shape and it also kind of feels like the front of my tongue wants to sort of stretch forward compared to e so it's almost sort of like mixing A and E in a way although the valve chart is approximate we can see that the start of a is placed a little further forward than the I and further forward than the E so you do got to place that sound a little bit further forward on the tongue compared to e that being said as we've seen with many sounds there is a bit of wiggle room in this middle section you can feel maybe a little bit of a forward movement in the middle a little bit of an upward movement in the middle keep most of that space we're definitely going to keep the shape no matter what but if you feel a little bit of of movement here that's okay as long as you don't actually shift the center of gravity Center gravity stays where it is let's go ahead and take a look at the mouth here as we go through the sound so again we start in that a sound we're going to go up into I sounds sort of like e but it ends in I again we have our hinge in place so it's all just in the front none of this moves we have our center of gravity we have our space we're just going to say a a a now the jaw can open a little bit that's okay now there's one detail here and I'm pretty sure I didn't mention this in the main lesson for a or i on the Bell chart according to the IPA and all this stuff we see that the end sound should be I and it doesn't quite sound like that as we've mentioned before it sounds kind of like an e sound if we go all the way into e it's a bit too much that being said the end sound the end position that you wind up in it doesn't have to be exactly I it could maybe be I it's like mostly I but not fully formed or in a slightly different place it could be an e that is lazy not all the way up to like a full exaggerated a that's a bit too much a okay if you're exaggerating the sound like if I say a what's up like maybe I could do that to play with the language but that's not how it would normally be formed that's definitely too far but a lazier e where you don't quite get all the way up into the e a a e e e e see that's where where I landed there is that e that sounds okay especially if you're speaking more quickly so you want to shoot for I to like a lazy e or anywhere in there is fine for the end point just make sure that you don't lose your hinge you don't lose your posture your shape all the things we keep talking about so this is again another range of possible articulation for in this case the end point of the sound for the lips on a we're going to have some movement in the lips but because the start and end are both front vals and all the front vals tend to use the lips more this way rather than this way we are going to see here that we start maybe a little bit more pulled back for the start of a and you can keep that that same amount of pulling through the whole sound however because the lips are not actually required you can either not use the lips a you can start with the lips and then let them go as you go through the sound a or you can even start without the lips and add them as you go through the sound a that last one probably wouldn't be too common and it would depend mostly on what the next sound is but it is possible now there's actually a little trick here and I'm going to mention this for the a sound but whatever your language is center of gravity is you can try to apply this in a similar type of way so for Spanish and for Japanese the center of gravity as far as I've been able to gather working with people and doing some research is that e sound now I've also noticed um again I don't have this actually pinpoint down for a fact yet but based on my experience based on working with other people it seems that uh Japanese Spanish will actually have a hinge like we do that is anchored on the third tooth instead of the fourth or fifth tooth first to get into the a sound itself and have it sound right with the right American Quality if you're anchored here on the third tooth if you can do that a sound you should feel that it's approximately the same part of the tongue that I've described before for the American English hinge but it's going to be on the third tooth now because your tongue is pushed forward if you can keep that there let the rest of your tongue right the middle of the tongue the back of the tongue let it relax down and back it's going to feel like it's relaxing this way diagonally if you can do that while keeping this in place keeping that third tooth contact that's going to start shifting and opening things up then let that contact on the third tooth just slightly slide just let it shift a little bit onto the fourth tooth so that you no longer feel the third tooth at all no third tooth if you do that right you will very likely be in the right center of gravity there is a little extra to fully get that center of gravity which you have to actually get the tension for the sound uh in in the right place but your posture should be good and if you continue to hold that e sound from your length anguage when you do that shift the quality of that e should become the one that we use in the a dip thong and you should immediately notice that it sounds a little clearer it sounds a little more open it'll probably feel a lot more open from there a a little extra hack here to try to get into the right center of gravity if you can hold that new postural Arrangement and let go of the a sound but instead get a little scoop here for that uh center of gravity sound sound to where you're not holding your center of gravity up here anymore and you fully release that a sound then you're in the American posture we've talked before about how you can approach it from that complete dead tongue and try to build it this way this is actually the opposite way if you anchor up here on the third tooth of trying to back into and relax into that new center of gravity a new posture now like the first sound in a the first sound in I and ow only exists in these dip songs the good news is that it seems many languages have this starting sound in some way but the exact placement may vary and of course the center of gravity will be different so this can actually be a good sound if you just take the starting sound not the whole I or ow and try to relax that middle and get that center of gravity in there while doing the sound in your native language and see if you can make it sound a bit more like an American English quality I strongly recommend that you look up V charts for your language and compare that to the English hacks dip thong V chart so you can get an idea of exactly where yours might be and if it's the exact same sound according to the IPA as we can see if we start in that neutral up position we open up into the start of I if you look in a mirror this is one of the sounds where you should be able to see a little bit of a dip um the sides should still be raised a bit remember we're not pushing the tongue forward we want to stay lined up with that hinge as you open from uh into the start of I make sure that you have that low you have that low tongue setting as we go through the rest of the sound we end up again in the e sound seems like e but it's more I now in the super lazy version of the sound you don't even really have to open the jaw or maybe it'll just open a tiny bit I I and just like we saw before with a the ending for I doesn't have to be exactly the I sound similarly to how ah can have a bit of back of tongue raising I feel not all the time but I do feel sometimes that the back of my tongue might slightly engage and raise a little bit and you can also even get maybe just a little bit of that slanting forward as well similarly to a so both the start of I and a can have similar back of tongue mechanics although it does feel maybe like it's a little less for the start of I than it is for a but again these things on the back of the tongue are optional they're not required for these sounds you want to make sure you don't overdo it if you do use them but that again is part of the possible range in that area of the tongue for these two sounds when I close up from the start of I into the end of I I notice that my tongue wants to do one of two things it could be either one it doesn't matter which one remember we've talked about how there's a little wiggle room with the exact space so as I close up from a into I and very effortlessly do it in a way that matches the maps very very well where it's like ah but of course they blend okay but I just it feels sort of like it's just like this it's mostly movement through here this shape stays in place the space stays in place none of this really moves right but I also can feel sometimes when I do it very naturally that instead of it just doing like that I'll actually feel sort of like it wants to almost close up this way now again my hand is not perfect here okay warning caution I'm not pushing the whole tongue forward through the middle section here especially this front middle I can feel it sort of maybe coming up a bit coming forward a bit I'm still keeping my center of gravity where it is I'm still keeping my shape and my hinge lined up maybe would go a little bit farther almost like it's going to tug a little further forward on the hinge there compared to normal but it's still lined up there it's just through this area here we can kind of get a little up a little forward as we go from the start to the end point Point as long as you keep everything else in place and you keep that shape there so this would be a bit of a range of possible articulation through the middle section as you're going from the start to the end as far as the lips go just like many of the other sounds the lips are not actually required to produce the sound but it is fairly common for us to engage the lips in some way to the sides as we open I I but you don't have to I I next is the sound ow now this has the same starting vowel same starting point it seems different and I've had a lot of people ask me is that really the same vowel yes it is it seems different for a couple reasons mostly because we're going to be going into a different end point and that sort of shifts the tension in what we're preparing to do but that gets into preloading vowels which we will talk about at some point one thing I will add here though on the valve chart we see that the starting sound is the same sound but I don't think that it's necessarily pinpoint in that exact spot there's probably not going to be a whole lot of wiggle room for it but I do notice that I can place the sound maybe just a little bit farther back and when we're doing I we might tend to bias a little bit farther forward for the placement for ow we might bias a little bit farther backward for the placement but I don't think it really matters as long as you're in that area then you should be fine now the only real difference between I and ow is that the I ends in the I sound and the ow ends in the uh sound just like it sounds like a and I end in e it's not quite right it's a little too high I a similarly the ow does not end in ooh if I say ow ow it's a bit too much you actually want to go inside for the uh sound but the lips come around like the ooh sound this is one of the hardest sounds to get while keeping the posture because we have a lot of moving pieces without pushing the whole tongue forward without losing our hinge etc etc etc so you really want to go slow through this as we can see here I'm going to start an uh open up into the start and then move into uh unfortunately you can't see fully everything in my mouth but if we look at this it's going to be something kind of like this again these drawings are approximate but we can get an idea in that process right so the a is kind of like here and then the uh is kind of here and we have to sort of shift between them the center of gravity is going to be there the whole time and you kind of got to like try to scoop around it uh so there's this like one point here that doesn't really seem in my mouth it doesn't really feel like it moves too much remember that uh also we have our closed hinge so as you close up and you're trying to keep that space and get that uh you're going to close into the hinge really this coordinating sort of trying to like shift that ball almost like you're trying to roll the ball in your mouth a bit like we saw with the start of I and with the a sound even with the a sound the back of the tongue can actually sort of raise up a little bit for the start of the a dip thong because again it's that same starting sound I do also feel for ow that especially if I'm exaggerating the sound I can actually feel similarly to with um a I can get a little bit of a forward push here again not enough to break the whole posture um little bit of flattening with the middle but we still keep the basic shape a little bit of forwardness when I do that the middle body can maybe kind of come forward and shallow out a bit but the sides stay where they are and they're still a little bit higher they're still keeping that same basic shape I'm just sort of manipulating the body of the middle a little bit a little bit of a wiggle room for the range of that as well again I'm mentioning all this for completion because number one it gives you a little bit of of wiggle room to play with but number two it also shows the reality that things aren't necessarily so pinpoint static while also showing that that core in shape underneath is the most important thing that must remain at least mostly intact One Last Detail with the lips when we are fully annunciating and saying the sound clearly for the ah part to start right remember we can pull the lips back as we open as we go up into the uh and the jaw closes the lips will come around to more of that rounded ooh position and that would be the full range of the lips however just like we don't have to say I we don't have to say ow so we don't have to pull the lips out like this for the start of it as for the rounding we're probably going to get at least a tiny little bit because remember we're in O we're not trying to say a ow okay that' be kind of weird so we need a little bit of that motion but you don't have to go all the way through if you're doing it in a faster or lazier way ow ow now our last dip song is oi now the way that I teach and pronounce this dip thong is a little bit different than the way it's standardly taught but it's also easier for many people will still sound natural and neutral of course I covered all the details in the main lesson the main important thing to mention here is because I have the cot cot merger and I don't have the a sound I do not start in the a sound but instead we're actually going to use that o as the starting point that's up to you if you have the a sound instead of the way I do the O that's fine you can use that instead I will say however that especially because I don't have the a things are not so pinpointed Point rigid you can actually start a little bit below the O closer to where that a would start but maybe not quite as low you can do it exactly like we described earlier but there's really going to be like we're kind of either already in it or mostly in it however there's one very important special thing about this dip thong which is that the lips will already be engaged when we do o oh oh my lips start off in a neutral position just like an uh however in oi say oi oi as you're moving into the sound from another sound yes you're going to start from probably unengaged lips but the actual sound itself already has those Corners push forward okay already has the rounding now we're not going to come up and around through the sound like we do for o or o or ow okay we're actually going to be out in more of a static way and then we're going to release that as we go forward in the mouth to the E end point O O again it sounds like e but that would be o it's not quite right of course there is that little wiggle room area for the end point and just like the O can start with a bit of a more Open Jaw the oi can also start with a little bit more of an open jaw but then you're going to have to close it back up as you go through the sound the hinge can be a little bit loose or maybe even slightly off when you started that's fine but again we want to get back up into that hinge not going to be a whole lot of change here kind of like with how ow is complicated oi can be kind of complicated because we're going from the back of the mouth all the way up to the front of the mouth and we have to keep the center of gravity keep our hinge keep our tongue low in back and in many ways oi is sort of like the opposite of ow because ow we started here moved here but the lips started here moved here okay so the lips are going this this way tongue is going this way in oi we have the opposite case where the lips are already out and we're going this way oi but the tongue is going from back to front of course the o to I is not as open as the a starting point so we don't have that drastic of a change there so as I go through from the o to the I it kind of feels like I have my center of gravity here sort of like the the ball sort of shifts like this a bit it's kind of weird to to describe how it feels but so it's it's almost like we're rolling under the ball and the ball is sort of like like the ground is Shifting under the ball kind of right but the ball stays in place so hopefully that helps if it's confusing ignore that and like we've seen with many other sounds especially this dip thong because we're going from all the way back here to all the way up here yes this middle area can maybe come up a little bit flatten out slightly maybe get a little bit forward push as we kind of go through the the tongue there again we're trying to emphasize the postural settings in the center of gravity as long as you keep that relative balance between the sides and the middle keep that difference in tension keep your center of gravity tension there and keep the space in the back as you let go of that O then everything will come out fine the same of course applies to a and to I and next time we are going to look at some special exercises after that we will be looking at the ER the all the colored sounds and seeing how the posture applies to all that because again it's a little special make sure you practice this basic stuff first let me know if you have any questions of course and thank you so much for watching another English hack lesson I'll see you in the next one