درسنامه اصلی

Okay, hello, I’m AJ, welcome to Unit 5. Now we have some specific sounds coming soon in the course. I know what you’re waiting for, I know what you want. You want those specific sounds like R and L and TH, they’re coming soon. But you have to get these big parts of English first.

You have to practice the rhythm, the music of English first. Master that, improve that, and your pronunciation will fairly quickly sound much better. Then we’ll focus on all those little small sounds. So they’re coming soon, don’t worry, but this, this unit, we’re still going to do something very big. And this unit is focused on vibration.

So vibration is just the shaking, right, it’s something that, that moves back and forth. This is a very, very important part of, of singing and of pronunciation. You have to get the vibration correct, to sound like a native speaker. To sound like you’ve got really good accent, like you’re pronunciation is good. What am I talking about? Wha-, what, what is vibration? How do we use it when we speak English? Well there are three main areas of your body where sound will vibrate, right? There’s your chest, right, kind of in your lungs, your chest, it’s down low. If you make some sounds of ehhh, the vibration happens most strongly down in your chest. You can even put your hands here, you can feel the sounds moving and vibrating here.

The second area that sounds will vibrate in when we speak, the throat, right, right in the throat here. And again, you can put your fingers there and speak, and you’ll feel the vibration. Your vocal chords, your throat, vibrating, s-. And then finally the third area is the nose, it’s this whole area here, right? Up in the nose, and if you speak with kind of a nose accent, a nasal accent, then the vibration up here will be stronger. So why is this important? Well for two reasons.

Reason number one, some sounds in English will vibrate in a specific area. Now all sounds will vibrate everywhere, okay? So there’s always going to be some vibration in your chest, there’ll always be some in your throat, and there’ll always, or almost always, be some in your nose. But what’s important is where is the strongest vibration. And for some sounds, it’s stronger in one area. For example, the NG sound, like ING.

Like the end of the word running, running, running, that NG is, is kind of a nose vibration sound that ING, ING, you just say that, ING.

Put your fingers here on the nose, ING. At the end of that sound, you should feel some vibration in your nose, ING, ING, ING.

I feel that right now, ING, ING, ING.

It’s not ING, it’s not down in the chest, it’s up in the nose, ING, ING, ING. So to make that sound correctly, you need to get that nose vibration.

Now another reason the vibration’s important, is for pitch. Remember we talked about, a couple of units ago, that as we go, go up sometimes in English, and we go down sometimes in English. Generally in English, if you speak with a lower voice, and you go down, you sound stronger. It sounds like you’re more confident, it sounds like you’re more commanding. And when you go up, you sound less sure, you sound unsure like you are questioning, it sounds a little bit weaker. If you’re a singer, you probably already know that as you go up and down, the vibration in your body changes. Generally as you go up, the vibrations will become more strong up in your head and nose area. When you’re speaking in kind of a middle tone like I am now, you’ll feel the strongest vibration in your throat. And when you really get your voice down low, the vibration will drop down more into your chest.

So by training for vibration, you will become better at the music of English. So that’s why in this unit, you’re going to focus on vibration. When you can master the vibration, when you can make the vibration happen where you want it, the chest, throat or nose, you’ll be ready to focus on those difficult individual sounds. So, in some ways this is going to feel a little like singing, you’re gonna feel the vibration go up into your nose and your head. And then you can drop it down more into your throat, and then you can drop it down into your chest. And I recommend, when you practice with the training audio in this unit, actually use your fingers. Put them on your throat, put them on your nose, put your fingers here on your chest, the upper chest, and feel the vibrations, and feel how they change.

This will be a fun unit, and it will be a very training unit, just relax and enjoy, because those specific sounds are coming soon.

See you in the audio training.