TRANSCRIPT OF THE ABOVE VIDEO: 'How To Pronounce The E Sound In English - Improve Your Pronunciation and Speak More Clearly'

Hi everyone, its Nicole here. And I've had a great question about pronunciation that I thought that I'd share with all of you, because, you know, we're all here to learn and to improve all areas of the English language, but pronunciation is always a big one on the list that everyone is worried about, and everyone wants help with.

So, one particular question that I had was the pronunciation of the ‘e’ sound like bread or head etc. So, how to pronounce that ‘e’ sound, so few quick tips.

Number one, the ‘e’ is a very short sound. In English, we've got short sounds and we've got long sounds, so the ‘e’ is a very short sound, like, like a second, like that, no longer, ok. And the important thing here is to remember that the vowel sounds are all about how wide you open your mouth.

So, to do the ‘e’ sound, basically what you're doing is you've got your mouth in resting position like this, and then what you want to do is you just want to open your teeth a little bit, open your mouth, so pretend that you're shocked or surprised by something, and that's the perfect position for your mouth. Then, all you want to do is to push the air out from your stomach quite far ‘e’ ‘e’ ‘e’ ‘e’ can you see how I'm pushing it out with my voice, it's quite fast, it's like I've got the hiccups, I suppose, so ‘e’ ‘e’ ‘e’ ‘e’ can you see my mouth how it's open, its resting, but it's open, and I'm pushing that sound out.

So, most people make the mistake of making this sound too long. If we go ‘ehhh’ it's a completely different sound, and completely different words. So again, we want it to be quite short, any, red, bread, head, whatever.

So, there's a few situations there, the ‘e’ sound can be the a at the beginning of a word like any, can be an e in the middle of the word like red, or an ea like the -ead combination, so bread, it can also be the -ue, like a guess, I suppose, so there’s a few examples.

I just wanted to keep this really brief and really short, I do have an amazing pronunciation course where I go into great detail about every single sound, but I thought I'd introduce you to that because that's always a question that is asked.

So, anyway, my suggestion would be to write down a list of words that have the ‘e’ sound, and then just to practise saying them out loud. It's a really good way to practise.

Anyway, I hope that helped. I will come back with another pronunciation question/answer session really soon. Bye!