A Quick Look at Intonation in American English - Three Tips to Sound Clearer and More Confident

Let's learn some intonation tips. My name is Jennifer Tarl and I'm here with Tarl's Speech and we're going to learn three tips today to sound more confident and clearer when you are speaking American English. All right, so what is intonation? Let's talk about that first. Intonation is the melody and the rhythm of, let's call it, the bigger sentence structure of English. And so that is when you hear the that sort of rising and falling of pitch. You might hear something that goes at the end of a sentence or at the end of a sentence. So, all of those are ways that we are going to change sort of that musicality of speaking. If you were here last week and we talked about stress, that is also playing a part in all of this is the stress patterns. So, when we stress the vowel is longer and it is higher in pitch. The opposite is true when we have something that is unstressed. That is going to be softer. The vowels will be shorter and it is going to be lower in pitch. So, that really has a lot to do with the intonation as well. One other comment that I want to make, it is sort of outside of the scope of this class, and I am thinking about actually doing a lesson on this, is your voice that you use typically when you are speaking. So, what I mean by that is sort of that frequency with which you speak. So, in English, we tend to speak from our chest. The air starts in the lungs, in the diaphragm, even lower down here, and that air is going to continue out, and it is going to be continuously coming out of our mouth or out of our nose, and we are directing that forward. Because we start with this lower point, and then we can have a bigger pitch range than a lot of languages that tend to just speak from here. When you just speak from here, the pitch tends to have a smaller range. So, a tip for really improving your overall ability to hit those higher and lower pitches is to just think about speaking from your diaphragm. I am really making all of this as simple as possible because you have so many things to think about when you are speaking. Of course, your message is always the most important, and this is just going to kind of be the icing on the cake. All right. So, let's go ahead and look at our intonation tips. Tip number one, speak in phrases. So, we are going to link a phrase. That means say words together without a pause between them as if they are one word, and then pause. So, link a phrase, and then pause. I just did it for you there. Link a phrase, and then pause. Let me give you a little visual for this. Link a phrase, and then pause. So, I said link a phrase all together as if that is one word, and then pause as my second phrase, and I had a very long pause in between. If I was speaking a little more naturally while I am teaching a class, I might say speak a phrase, link a phrase, and then pause. My pauses are going to be shorter, but they are still there. So, one of the biggest things you can do to improve your speaking clarity if you do nothing else is to add more pauses. Slowing your rate by adding a pause makes it so much easier to listen to anyone, native speakers included. People need to pause more. A pause is your friend. Silence is okay, so embrace the pause. All right. So, let's go back to the slide, and let's do a little practice here. So, I separated each of the phrases by tabbing down to a new line, okay? So, I'm going to link did you eat, did you eat it on the way to the office, or did you wait until you got there? So, I'm going to try it again. Did you eat it on the way to the office, or did you wait until you got there? Okay. So, I'm going to do this a little bit faster, and then I want you to try it. Did you eat it on the way to the office, or did you wait until you got there? All right. How did you do? All right. Once you kind of get into a rhythm, this will be so much easier. So, you can think of this in a few ways. You can think about it as a phrase. You could think about it as a thought, or you could think about it as like, I'd say, three to four words. That's typically when I pause, okay? So, you will get into a rhythm when you are speaking, and you will know when to pause. If you are new to this, you can read something and really pause at a comma, and then stop at the period at the end of a sentence. That's really, really helpful. I also use this technique when I am teaching my individual students, and I will share my screen, have a paragraph up, and we literally go through it together, and then make a new line, just like I did on the slide, where you are going to pause. That exercise usually really helps people to kind of get into this new rhythm. So, let's try this. One more time. Did you eat it on the way to the office, or did you wait until you got there? Did you eat it on the way to the office, or did you wait until you got there? All right, very good. So, we finished number one, speak in phrases, link a phrase, and then pause. All right. In these phrases, you might be hearing something else, and what is that? It's always kind of elusive to my students who don't use this type of rhythm. What I'm doing is I am picking a focus word. I am picking one word in my phrase, and that one word is going to be my stress word. All of the other words are going to be unstressed. Typically, we are going to choose a word to stress that is something that we can visualize or kind of make a movie of in our head. It is usually a noun, an adjective, a verb, or an adverb. Those are sort of the content words. Those are our focus words. The words that more or less give us some grammar, those are called function words, and you can stress those words. You can really stress any word that you want to make a point, and you're going to see that in a minute, but those words are typically unstressed, and so those words are going to be reduced and have the shorter vowels. A great way to think about this is to practice your articles, a, an, and the, with a noun. The noun is typically the stress word, so I don't say the phone. I'm going to say the phone. Phone gets the focus. That gets my stress. It's louder, longer, and higher. The is going to become unstressed, and that is going to be lower, softer, and quicker. Pro tip, usually we use a schwa a lot when we reduce words in a sentence, so I don't say the phone. I can say that, but I most of the time will say the with the schwa, the phone. Same thing if I say a, a cup. That's the schwa. I can't find anything with a vowel that it starts, but if we were going to say an apple, I don't say an apple. I'm going to reduce that an and say an apple, like un-apple, and smoosh those words together. All right, so let's take a look at this. So, I'm giving you a, um, like a little bit of a visual here, so we are going to add a pause just for, you know, our teaching purposes here after I bought, and then our second phrase will be a new jacket. Okay, in each phrase, you need to have a focus word, so your focus word can change depending on the meaning. The word that you focus on will slightly change your intention of what is most important. So, if you say, I bought a new jacket, you're stressing that you bought something. You purchased it, not that you received. You weren't given it. You bought it, and you bought a new jacket. You did not buy new shoes. So, you can see that I can stress words, and it might be helpful if you think about this if someone asks you a question, and they might say, um, what did you buy at the store today? I bought a new jacket. I bought a new jacket. That might be different than if they would say, oh, did you get that new jacket as a present? No, I bought a new jacket. Okay, so those are just some ways to think about this. We can change the stress word to, I bought a new jacket, and this might be in a conversation when someone says, like, oh, Sally bought a new jacket. No, I bought a new jacket, or they might say, oh, Sally bought a used jacket and gave it to you. No, I bought a new jacket. So, you can see that you can change the focus word to help your listener. Think about it as helping your listener. If you choose the correct focus word, this is very, very powerful. Sales people use this. You'll hear this a lot on commercials, on television. Really great speakers do this a lot. They will choose the word that they want you to remember. Another great example that I always say is if you were giving someone a grocery list, you might say, I want you to go to the store, buy a loaf of bread, a stick of butter, and a gallon of milk. That is very different than a slice of bread and a quart of milk and a pound of butter. So, you can see when I help my listener by focusing their attention, you can think of it that way, that is really helpful. So, give a focus word. This is huge. This can really change your rhythm. In fact, I've had a few students that I've worked with that this is all that they needed was learning how to use a pause and a focus word, and that changed their clarity immensely to the point where they were like, I'm good. I don't need to work on anything else. And that's great. That's what I want for every one of you out there is just to feel confident and to be clear. All right. So, let's try this one more time. I see a lot of questions and comments in the chat. I'll get to those at the end. You can keep putting those in there. So, thank you so much. Okay. So, let's just try with the pause. Think about the two phrases. I bought a new jacket. Go ahead and try that. All right. And now, let's use a focus word to change this up a little bit. I bought a new jacket. I bought a new jacket. And let's change it up a little bit. I bought a new jacket. I bought a new jacket. Okay. So, I'm going to say them a little more naturally, and I want you to try to imitate. I bought a new jacket. I bought a new jacket. All right. Very, very good, everybody. All right. Moving right along, we are going to move on to our last tip. Now, our last tip is going to be about pitch falling at the end of the sentence. Pitch can rise or fall at the end of a sentence. I have many of my students that overuse the stress, the pitch rising at the end of a sentence. I think that this is taught in many language programs around the globe to overuse the rising pitch on a question. Do we use rising pitch on a question? Absolutely. But typically, we use rising pitch when we expect a short, quick answer from our listener. So, I could say, what is this with rising pitch? And that means I want a quick answer. I want you to tell me a bummer. That's what I want. I could say, would you like some coffee? That is a yes or no. I want a short, quick, little answer. Or would you like coffee or tea? Or just even if people say coffee, that means do you want a coffee, yes or no? Okay. So, that little rising pitch at the end is really important. You know it's your turn. You know that somebody wants a short, quick answer. However, most of the time, we use falling pitch to let people know that we are finished with our job. This is the biggest pitch pattern in English. It's that falling pitch at the end of a sentence. Working on this for people who have more of a tonal language where you might use rising pitch at the end of the word as a habit because of your native language, working on this, especially for you business people out there, is super powerful. It makes you sound more confident. It makes you sound like you are more of an authority in a certain subject area and that can really go a long way in business. So, really working on this falling pitch is going to be a big one. All right. So, when do I use this? I use it not only on statements, which people typically know. I use falling pitch on statements. I'm going to use this also on WH questions. Yes. I know this is going to blow your mind for some of you. I'm going to use this on WH questions as well. Okay. So, let's talk about falling pitch real quick and then we're going to practice these. So, I'm going to give you a visual. I'm going to start up here and I'm going to fall. I'm going to go up and then go down. Up and down. Up and down. So, you can try that with me. Go up and down. My pitch rises and then it falls. I go up and then down. Some people say jump and then slide. Jump and then slide. You think back to our focus words. You are going to jump up and stress that focus word, which is going to rise the pitch. Then you fall at the end of that. So, if I say I bought, I'm going to fall on bought. A new coat. I'm going to fall on coat. So, where you fall and how quickly you fall can change, but you are going to fall at the end of a sentence and phrases most of the time. All right. So, sorry. I'm trying to change back here and it will not let me show you this. Let's see here. Oh, there we go. All right. So, let's try this. I went to the store. I went to the store. Who went to the store? Who went to the store? What did you buy at the store? When did you go to the store? And then I'm going to have a rising pitch here. Did you go to the store? Let's try this again. Falling. I went to the store. Who went to the store? What did you buy at the store? When did you go to the store? Did you go to the store? Okay, everybody. So, that is it. Let's talk about those three tips again. Okay. Tip number one, link a phrase, pause, and then link the next phrase. Excuse me. Number two, stress a word that is your focus word. And think about this as helping your listener to focus on what is important. And then last, think about mainly using falling pitch. And here's the thing. Even if you just do these more and you don't do it perfectly, perfect doesn't matter, just do it more, this is really, really, really going to help. So, think about pausing more. Think about adding more focus words. And think about using falling pitch more. If you just increase how much you do all of these things, that is going to be super helpful for your listener. They're going to be able to understand you more. And they're going to want to listen more because you are helping them to remember what you are saying, to process what you are saying, and you are giving them a little bit more time to think. And also think about using all of these things as sort of punctuation, a comma or a period while you're speaking, and also of using a highlighter while you're speaking to highlight one of the words. Okay. Awesome. I think we have just a few more minutes since I started a little bit late today. You are all just the sweetest. Thank you so much. I love helping. I am so happy to be here. Oh, and many blessings to all of you. I appreciate it. Everyone is just so kind. I appreciate your kind thoughts and your prayers. It's just so amazing. And all of your, you know, blessings. I just I appreciate it all. Okay. All right. Let me go back here. So I'm not going to get into probability today. Hello. Nice to see you. Yes. I am here in the Keystone State. And that is Pennsylvania for those of you who do not know. So let's talk about saying this word, Keystone State. So I am stressing key in the stone. And then I am stressing Keystone and unstressing state because if you were here last week, you know that's a noun. So Keystone State. I live in the Keystone State in the U.S. Okay. Here's another one. Elegance. Elegance. I hear people say elegance because they're really stressing that last A. We are going to reduce that A and we're going to say a schwa there. Elegance. Elegance. I'm going to touch on this because I get so many questions. I need to do a new class on the schwa. A schwa is just a relaxed unstressed vowel. Most people when they're transcribing will transcribe it as the little upside down E, the schwa, the short U as I teach it. But regionally, and even I do it, you can say F like you hear in pet, IH like you hear in pit, or UH like you hear in putt because it's more about being relaxed and being unstressed. And always remember as well that sounds will impact the other sounds around it. So you have a very open sound first, you might hear a different, a little bit of a difference in the schwa sound as opposed to if you hear a very closed sound before, you might hear a more closed schwa sound. I hope that wasn't too confusing. Okay, great word. Colosseum. So I'm going to call you on the phone, call off and then seum. Colosseum. Colosseum. Colosseum. Okay. Lots of questions for the word exploited. Exploited. Exploited. I am saying did at the end because I am using a flap T there. So my T sounds like a super fast D. Okay, we're gonna end on just this really beautiful comment for today. Thank you so much, everyone for being here. Have an amazing day, everyone. Thank you for being here. Take care.