One of the things that makes English difficult to understand for foreign
students is its particular rhythm. Many languages are syllabic, that means that
every syllable takes the same amount of time to pronounce. In some languages stressed
syllables take longer than unstressed syllables, but still, the pronunciation
unit is the syllable.
English is different, we don't care about syllables, we don't even care about
words, it's all about beats (sound units). Every beat takes the same amount of
time to pronounce. A beat may have one syllable, ten syllables, one word or five
words, but it still takes the same amount of time (more or less). At normal speed, every
beat takes about half a second or one second to pronounce, and it doesn't matter
how many things are in that beat. That means that the more syllables we have in
a beat, the faster we have to pronounce them, because the global time is not
going to change.
But not all words are affected in the same way. There are two different kinds of
words in English (as in most languages):
1- Content words
the words with meaning (
nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs)
2- Grammatical words
words with no meaning, but they build the grammatical structure of the sentence
(
prepositions, articles, verb particles, pronouns, etc.)
Every sound unit (beat) has a content word, which is the most important part of
it. You can also have more than one content word, for instance, a noun with an
adjective. Then, optionally, we may have one or more grammatical words
(structure words). But we always have about one or half a second to pronounce it
all, so, obviously, we give more time to the important things (content words)
and less time to the grammatical words. So in English, grammatical words are
usually pronounced very fast and very weakly (they are often pronounced with a
schwa, as in the article in "
the cat":
); so weak that foreign students
often can't hear them because they are not used to this particular rhythm of the
English language, but if you pay attention, they're all there, just get used to
it!
Here's an example:
Hi, What were you doing when I rang an hour ago?
Content words
hi, doing, rang, hour
Structure words
what, were, you, when, I, an, ago
4 Beats (stress marked in capital letters)
HI / what were you
DOing
/ when i
RANG / an
HOUR ago
So in normal conversation, to pronounce the first beat (
hi), we take more or less the same amount
of time as to pronounce any other beat, for example the second one:
Hi (1 second) =
what were you doing (1 second)
The important thing is not how fast you speak,
the important thing is that every beat takes the same amount of time, so if you
take 3 seconds to say "hi", then you should take about 3 seconds to say "what were you
doing". Well, at least you must try. To practise, you can mark the rhythm with
your hand or foot as you read, making sure you keep the rhythm, as if you were
singing. Rap music is just that, speaking with rhythm (but a bit more
exaggerated). So if you want to speak good English, rap it!
The other important thing is that in English, stressed syllables are pronounced
strongly, and unstressed syllables are pronounced weakly (grammatical words are
even weaker), so if your listening is not very good yet, maybe the only parts
you can hear clearly are the stressed syllables in the key words (see
Weak and Strong Forms). But don't
worry, the more you listen to English, the more your ear will get used to this
English rhythm. There are no magic recipes, only practise. Listen, listen,
listen and listen; your brain will do the rest.
Now, this other video has a more general approach and specially focus on the
stress to define beats. They talk about "American English" but what they say is
also good for Brithish English.
