English Phonetics Diary #1

    As part of the English Phonetics course, I will be posting reflections on my blog about videos I've watched on the topic of pronunciation. The first video I decided to watch was "Silent Letters in English A to Z" by English with Lucy. As the title suggests, the video explained the rules for not pronouncing certain letters in words. It was my first time hearing these explanations, which made for a intriguing experience of relating things that now feel intuitive with strict rules.

    The presenter went through all the letters of the alphabet and enumerated rules, which allow us to know when not to voice certain letters in a word. For example, for the letter 'a' the rule was to not pronounce it when it appears before 'lly,' so examples of words could be 'naturally' or 'artistically.' For the letter 'b' the rule was to not voice it if it appears before a 't' or after an 'm' and the examples were words like 'subtle' or 'comb.' However, here is where it gets interesting, because as with most rules, there are also exceptions to them. The rules for the letter 'b' do not always work as seen with words, such as 'remember' or 'obtain.' This is why I believe actually trying to learn pronunciation through these rules would be very hard and I would not really use it in class with students, especially young ones. I think these rules could be utilized in higher levels of education as 'fun facts' or could be mentioned when students are confused about a word. For example, if a student is confused about why the word 'numb' is pronounced the way it is, the teacher could mention the rule to help the pupil understand or even use the rule with other words. Other than such instances, I am finding it hard to imagine trying to teach pronunciation in this way - imitation might still be the way to go. However, as an university student I found the content really intriguing. It felt surreal to put rules onto something that I had been doing intuitively. The most interesting fact, which I've either never learned or forgot about, was that if the 'h' at the beginning of the word is not voiced, you should use 'an' instead of 'a.' For example, it should be 'an honest man', not 'a honest man.' It does feel natural to use 'an' while speaking, but I feel like I would probably make a mistake when writing such a sentence without saying it. These little tricks, rules, and explanations really do come in handy and make you realize the small mistakes you've been making for years.

    This video was a very concise and easy-to-understand material to make yourself familiar with the rules of the English pronunciation (or the lack of it) with silent letters. I definitely felt a little overwhelmed by the amount of rules and I do not think that this is a resource that could easily teach pronunciation, especially to young learners. However, I do still think that it was a fascinating video that could work as an additional material to boost one's language awareness even further, which is why I would recommend it to my fellow GPTE students.