How to Pronounce North South East and West and Northern Southern Eastern Western

hi there i'm christine dunbar from speechmodification.com and this is my smart american accent training welcome to our word of the day series where i've been taking your requests for words which you would like help pronouncing correctly in american english and i'm happy to be here live today want to talk about four words today they all are related and this was request from one of our viewers if you have request of word that you'd like to see covered in this series or question please feel free to leave it in the comments and will add it to my list of words to cover you can also attend our friday live question and answer classes and hear your question answered live in those classes we talk about pronunciation intonation american accent and generally resources for improving your personal and professional communication in american english we also have member-only classes right now those have been happening on sundays so if you're interested in finding out about those classes and other membership perks you can click the join button and see our membership options so today's words are the directions the ordinal directions north south east and west and so we'll walk you through each of these words and talk little bit about accent air patterns you might want to watch out for and how to practice to change to be able to use these words fluently and easily in your everyday speech so north would say might be the hardest depending on which patterns you have simply because it has the or diphthong which tends to be challenging combination of sounds for many non-native speakers as well as the th sound which is again as you know sometimes challenging sound so what suggest for north is starting with your or sound if you have trouble with your you're going to have trouble with this word and so thinking about first you want to be able to say the sound and then you want to be able to move more into the or sound where it does have an but have more of the shape first so it glides from to we typically do it quickly or so you're not necessarily doing over or you want to go right into that from your shape then so after can do my or and if you need more help for that check out my american playlist have several videos to help you with that then i'm going to say my sound and the reason suggest saying your or first and then your is that if say or nor north i'm more likely to be able to correct have that sound be correct if just start at the beginning with the and my tongue isn't ready for the north it's going to go into whatever accent pattern have so it might end up sounding more like north or north it may be flapped or it may sound like schwa so start with your or and then add your or nor finally add your th north north you might find the earth is quite challenging just go slowly so you can get from the back or tight position to the tongue between the teeth for the th position if you have trouble with that th check out my american th playlist and try simpler words with th first like both that end with the th or think that start with the th then for the word south we have the vowel sound is the diphthong so you don't necessarily have to start with that but just be aware that that's what those letters say in this and the challenge here is that for some speakers doing an and th together is challenging especially if you're japanese speaker for your native language or few other languages tend to have the error pattern is to do an instead of th so your mouth wants to do south or south both the same try working on making sure you go slow enough to say the first south and that you end on the th suggestion there would just be to again build from the vowel try ow auf and finally south then for our east and west these are more straightforward although many people have tendency to have difficulty when there's multiple sounds at the end of the word east has our long vowel so in ipa would look like this this is the symbol for east and thinking of that as being tense high front vowel east and west has my red tent vowel sounds like and again building making sure that don't leave off that with when say east and west typically mark that and release it the other thing wanted to mention for these words is that we also have to do combinations of them so in my area for example most street addresses are something southeast or northwest and so practicing the ones that you have to use frequently especially if you have one of these in your address practice saying first north northeast and then if your dress is 555 second avenue northeast practice it when you in the manner in which you have to say it so that when you get to that point of you're giving someone your address over the phone for example that you're fluent and smooth with saying those sounds you also may want to add and practice words like northern southern eastern and western and again i'm going to follow the same patterns that have for the individual words but i'm adding in that type back finishing with an northern the difference betw with northern and southern is that when say north and south have the voiceless th like and when it goes in the middle northern northern it turns into the voiced th so that's the th sound we have in words like breathe or the and that northern and southern eastern and western are little bit more straightforward as with all of our words of the day do suggest once you have mastered the word by itself try starting to use it in some short phrases again if you have one of these in your address that's great place to start you can also just make up sentence for example like looked at the north star people sometimes travel south in the winter time these the sun rises in the east and sets in the west so hope that helped you with these somewhat challenging words they're basic simple important words that you may have accent patterns on you may struggle with and with little bit of practice and attention to them you should be able to make those corrections and begin to use them easily in your speech also want to mention as part of our new series we have our word of the day series so i'll be back again tomorrow with the next word of the day we also now have started phrase of the week series so so far i've been having the phrase of the week class on sundays and in those classes we're looking at idioms american expressions talking about what they mean talking about why and how americans use them and introducing you to ways to practice to begin to first understand these and second if you like begin to use them in your speech as well so check that out on sunday believe on sunday we're going to be talking about the phrase with flying colors and you can check out the full playlist of our past live streams for phrase of the week on our channel page speech modification seattle we also have coming up next week on tuesday small group class this is mini class that you can join and it's going to be really exciting we're going to just do 45 minute class and the class is going to be about the topics that the people who attend want and choose so it's five dollar class so there is fee for it you can check it out on speechmodification.com and the idea is that you can come and get some feedback ask your questions will talk about some topics and i'm holding survey to find out what topics people want to hear about most so we may talk about some difficult pronunciation but the idea is that it's an opportunity for you to get some specific feedback because we're meeting on google meets so i'll be able to see you and hear you do hope you'll consider joining that it'll be on tuesday october 6th at 11 o'clock seattle time two o'clock easter time it's great way to see if you might be interested in doing more in-depth training or our online classes at speechmodification.com so check that out on the website or on our facebook page and also i'm going to beginning be beginning another small group class so we've been meeting some of us for six week classes and the group size is just four so hope you'll also consider looking into that that next class will be starting on saturday mornings in october on october 10th you can get details for all of that on speechmodification.com okay that's enough about that i'll be back again tomorrow with the next word of the day class and on friday with our live question and answer class look forward to seeing you then i'm christine dunbar from speechmodification.com remember if you want to sound american you can do it speechmodification.com bye guys thank you