Hello once again and welcome to the final episode of week three’s blogcast!
This week you extended your knowledge of present perfect simple and future forms. By now you already know that these are all essential things for you to know so that you can communicate effectively in English. What I want to focus on in this blogcast is the pronunciation of the -ED sounds which you hear on the end of verbs and adjectives.
Pronunciation can be tricky in English – did you know that there are 44 sounds in the English language? These individual sounds are called phonemes and as you have seen English is not phonetic, like many other languages, the spelling and pronunciation are often completely different!
So for your understanding and comprehension it is essential that you do a little bit of work on pronunciation.
Let’s take a look at words that end in ED..
We never pronounce the ED on the end of word which end in ED. We have 3 different sounds that we use instead (1) /id/ (2) /t/ (3) /d/. Let me show you some examples.
(1) /id/ wanted, needed
So we can say that when words end in a /t/ or /d/ sound we need to pronounced the ED like/id/
(2) /t/ helped, looked, watched, fixed, danced
Here the ED sounds like T – so when a word ends in a /p/, /k/, /sh/, /ch/, /gh/, /th/, /ss/, /c/, /x/ sound we need to pronounce the ED like /t/. These are also called voiceless sounds, that means if you put your hand on your throat you can’t or you shouldn’t feel anything. Try it! (If you can feel something then you are pronouncing that sounds wrong!)
(3) /d/ called, cleaned, offered, loved, used, enjoyed, amazed – so when words in a /l/, /n/, /r/, /g/, /v/, /s/, /w/, /y/, /z/ sound then we need to pronounce the ED like D. These are called voiced sounds, that means if you put your hand on your throat you can your vocal cords vibrating – try it!
Now I am going to pronounce some more ED ending words – think about which of the 3 rules they fall under and pronounce them correctly after me! Painted, walked, dived, frightened, tired, excited, annoyed, disappointed, disgusted, realized, brushed, stuffed
I hope that will help you sound like a true English speaker!
Have a great weekend and see you next week!
