تدريب Shadowing: American English Pronunciation: Intonation - تعلم التحدث بالإنجليزية عبر الفيديو

Today I'm going to talk about intonation.

I've touched on this subject in various other videos without ever explicitly defining it, and today that's what we're going to do.

But I'm also going to reference these other videos, and I really encourage you to go watch those as well.

If you've seen my videos on word stress, then you've already heard me talk a little bit about pitch.

Stressed syllables will be higher in pitch, and often a little longer and a little louder than unstressed syllables.

And there are certain words that will have a stress within a sentence.

Content words.

And certain words that will generally be unstressed, and those are function words.

For more information on that, I invite you to watch those videos those.

Intonation is the idea that these different pitches across a phrase form a pattern, and that those patterns characterize speech.

In American English, statements tend to start higher in pitch and end lower in pitch.

You know this if you've seen my video, Questions Versus Statements.

In that video, we learned that statements, me, go down in pitch, and questions, me?

Go up and pitch at the end.

So these pitch patterns across a phrase that characterize a language are little melodies.

And the melodies of American English will be very different than, for example, the melodies of Chinese.

If you haven't already seen the blog I did on the podcast Musical Language, I encourage you to take a look at that.

It It talks about the melody of speech.

Understanding and using correct intonation is a very important part to sounding natural.

Even if you're making the correct sounds of American English, but you're speaking in the speech patterns or the intonation of another language,

it will still sound very foreign.

Intonation can also convey meaning or an opinion, an attitude.

Let's take, for example, the statement, I'm dropping out of school, and the response, are you serious?

Are you serious?

A question going up in pitch, conveys perhaps an open attitude, concern for the person.

Are you serious?

But, are you serious?

Down in pitch, more which you would expect of a statement.

Are you serious?

The same words, but when and it is intoned this way.

It is conveying a judgement.

Are you serious?

A negative one.

I don't agree that you should be dropping out of school.

I'm dropping out of school.

Are you serious?

I'm dropping out of school.

Are you serious?

With the same words, very different meanings can be conveyed.

So intonation is the stress pattern, the pitch pattern of speech.

The melody of speech.

If you've read my bio on my website, you know that melody is something I'm especially keen on as I studied music through the master's level.

Yes, that was yours truly, thinking a lot about melody.

Now you know that in American English, statements will tend to go down in pitch.

Let's look at some examples.

Here Here we see two short sentences.

Today it's sunny.

I wish I'd been there.

And you can see for both of them that the pitch goes down throughout the sentence.

Here we have two longer sentences, and though there is some up and down throughout the sentences, for both sentences the lowest point is at the end.

I'm going to France next month to visit at a friend who's studying there.

It's finally starting to feel like spring in New York.

The software I used to look at the pitch of those sentences is called Pratt, and there's a link in the footer of my website.

So it's at the very bottom of every page.

I hope you're getting a feel for how important intonation is to sounding natural and native in American English.

I hope you'll listen for this as you listen to native speakers, and that if you haven't already done so, that you'll go to my website and do some of those imitation exercises

which loop patterns of speech

so you hear them several times to get the melody in your ear before you're asked to repeat.

That's it, and thanks so much for using Rachel's English.

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التظليل الصوتي (Shadowing) تقنية تعلم لغة مدعومة علمياً، طُورت أصلاً لتدريب المترجمين الفوريين المحترفين. الطريقة بسيطة لكنها قوية: تستمع لصوت إنجليزي أصلي وتكرره فوراً بصوت عالٍ — كظل يتبع المتحدث بتأخير 1-2 ثانية. تُظهر الأبحاث تحسناً كبيراً في دقة النطق والتنغيم والإيقاع وربط الأصوات والاستماع والطلاقة.

تدريب Shadowing: American English Pronunciation: Intonation - تعلم التحدث بالإنجليزية عبر الفيديو

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