© Paul Smit 2006-2020
Koreans, some North Chinese, speakers of Shanghainese and related dialects.
Note: This is not generally a problem for learners from Canton or other parts of Southern China, who are more likely to drop the final consonant.
Some languages do not have final consonant endings (e.g.in Mandarin all the finals are all nasals or vowels such as -eng, -ang, -ou, -ao). As a result, learners find pronouncing English words with hard consonants ending difficult and unconsciously add an /ə/ sound at the end. Listen to the pairs to hear them contrasted. Being able to distinguish sounds is the first step to being able to produce them correctly.
Exercise 1: Contrasting the pairs
- Listen to the word pairs and repeat.
- Focus on not adding an /ə/ sound to the end of the second word in each pair.
| + /ə/ | ||
| butter | but | |
| faster | fast | |
| quicker | quick | |
| thinker | think | |
| bigger | big | |
| blogger | blog | |
| slower | slow | |
| stopper | stop | |
| copper | cop | |
| customer | custom | |
| pasta | past | |
| could a * (= could have) | could | |
| would a * (= would have) | would | |
| should a * (= should have) | should |
* In connected speech, these words are reduced in a “weak form” and the resulting word sounds like the modal verb (i.e. could, would and should) with a /ə/ sound at the end. That is could have is sometimes reduced to ‘coulda‘ /kʊdə/ in informal connected speech. When speaker mispronounces could as /kʊdə/, there is a possibility that their intended meaning of possibility/ability in the future is understood to mean a possible action in the past that was not done.
© Paul Smit 2006-2020