Rachel’s English. Linking: Consonant to Vowel.

This video covers a linking concept: when one work ends with a consonant and the next begins with a vowel or a diphthong, put the ending consonant sounds at the beginning of the next word to help link.

The title of today’s video is wuh tsup. What’s up? This video is about linking: the specific case where you take a word that begins with a vowel or a diphthong and you link it to the word before that ends in a consonant sound. Wuh tsup. I’m sure you are noticing that I’m putting the TS sound, the final consonant sounds of the first word, and I’m attaching it to the second word. Tsup, tsup.

Let’s look at this example, which has two cases where the consonant will link to the next word that begins with a vowel or diphthong. First, hours. It’s spelled with an H, but the first sound is the ‘ow’ as in ‘now’ diphthong. So, if we’re going to take the consonant sound and put it at the beginning of that word, we’re going to be saying ‘nowers’: nowers, nowers. It’s like we’re making a new word. Teh – noters. The next case, a, is going to be the schwa sound. And we’re actually going to take the Z sound from the word before: zuh, zuh, zuh. Teh – nower – zuh – day. Ten hours a day.

So taking the consonant from the end of one word and putting on the next word that begins with a vowel or diphthong, will make your speech sound much more connected, and much better linked.

The T here in ‘what’ comes between two vowel sounds, so we’re going to pronounce it like a D. That’s wuh – dai – thought. Dai — connecting it to the word ‘I’. Wuh – dai. Now let’s reconnect those: what I, what I, what I, but still think of the D as beginning dai, dai. That’s what I thought. This sentence has two words that begin with vowels, and the words before end in consonants, so we’ll be linking. Again, the T is going to be pronounced as a D because it is between two vowel sounds. Wuh – dih – zit. Wuh – dih – zit. What is it, what is it? In this sentence, we’re going to take the Z sound and put it at the beginning of the word anniversary. Zanniversary. It’s hih – zanniversary. It’s his anniversary.

And here, I – mon – the train. I – mon, I’m on, I’m on. I’m on the train. Here, we’ll take the S sound and put it at the beginning of the word ‘is’. Thih – siz – too much. Thih – siz, thih – siz, this is. This is too much. Here, again remember, those T’s between vowel sounds will be pronounced as D’s. Forgeh – dabou – dit. Forget about it. That’s it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.