Name: Pray or Play? Rain or Lane? American English Pronunciation
Uploaded: 2017-03-16T18:01:06.000Z
Duration: 7 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In this video we’ll compare two consonant sounds:

as in the words “pray” and “play”.

In our previous videos, we learned how to make them.

The /r/ and the /l/ may not sound similar,

Both of them are made with air passing through the mouth

This is why they’re called the “liquid” consonants.

Foreign speakers who don’t have these sounds in their native language

often can’t distinguish between the /r/ and the /l/

and may involuntarily distort or swap them in words.

A great way to practice the pronunciation of these two sounds

is to practice them in contrasting word pairs.

let’s check how well you can differentiate between the /r/ and the /l/ sounds.

You’ll see a pair of words on the screen and hear only one of them pronounced.

Don’t get discouraged if you didn’t get all the words right.

You’ll improve after doing some pronunciation exercises

Here are two key distinctions between the /r/ and the /l/:

look at the position of the tip of the tongue.

the tip of the tongue is raised toward the alveolar ridge,

the tip of the tongue touches the alveolar ridge

Let’s pronounce these sounds one after the other:

Now that you’ve reviewed how to make these consonants,

let’s practice pronouncing these sounds in some words.

This is the most important part of your training,

so try to go through as many words as possible.

You’ll see a word on the screen and hear its pronunciation.

After that you’ll have a few seconds to pronounce the word.

the first word will have the /r/ consonant sound,

and the second will have the /l/ consonant sound.

To check how much you’ve improved, you can do the word pairs test again.

Click this link to go back and compare the results.

You’ve just practiced two essential American sounds.

you’ll be able to take the next steps towards improving your American accent.

You can start working on the r-colored vowels,

without first learning to pronounce the American /r/ consonant sound.

You’ll also find it easier to master the dark /l/,

which is a variation of the /l/ consonant sound

Let us know what you think in the comments!

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