Ghost English

Hello. In this lesson, we are going to look at English Feature Creature number three, and that is ghost English. Ghost English is a big problem in English for learners of English because what you see is not what you hear, and what you hear is not what you see. Kind of like a ghost, right? So it's just not there. Nothing is there. You see one thing, but it's different than what you hear, and you hear one thing, but it's different than what you see.

There are many problems or there are many factors to this. And the first one is just that in English, the most common sound, schwa, we don't even have a letter for in the alphabet. So we don't have a letter for the schwa sound. Now, sometimes you'll see it as the upside down e, but it's actually not in the alphabet when we teach children the alphabet. It's a really common sound, and it's this sound: ǝ. That's it. You can hear it whenever we don't stress a vowel. An easy example is the word banana. In the word banana, the schwa sound is heard twice. The A sound, ah, is only actually heard once. So bǝ-na-nǝ, banana. This happens often in English, actually almost every time there is a two syllable word, one of the syllables uses the schwa sound.

So, this is really important, so we need to master the schwa sound because the schwa sound helps with intonation and catching reductions. Now a really common word that always uses the schwa sound or often uses the schwa sound is the word to. The word to, T-O, we say as "tǝ". So for example,

I have tǝ meet ǝ friend

or

I want tǝ go tǝ Spain.
I have tǝ meet ǝ friend.
I want tǝ go tǝ Spain.

In both cases, we're saying "tǝ" instead of to.

Another problem we have in English is linking. We take a bunch of words and we push them together to make one sound like one word. For example,

put it on,
pick it up,
take it out.

So put it on is put it on, as in put it on your head. Now, we cannot say put ... it ... on, word for word, we can only say put it on.

Or how about pick it up? As in pick it up off the floor, so we can only say pick it up. We can't say pick ... it ... up. 

We even take it a step further, we say
pick it up off
pick it up off
pick it up off the floor.

What we're doing is each time a word ends in a consonant sound and the next word is a vowel sound, we take the last consonant sound and we link it to the next word, the next vowel sound.

Pick it up off,
pick it up off the floor.

Now here's another example,

take it out of the oven,
take it out of the oven,
take it out of the oven,
so take ... it ... out ... of ... the ... oven,
take it out of the oven.

We need to train our ear to hear words spoken quickly and linked together as one sound. 

Another problem we have is sometimes we remove sounds. We don't say them because we think that it's not important, we don't have to say it clearly. For example,

drinking hot chocolate,
drinking hot chocolate.

When I say drinking hot chocolate. I remove three sounds. First I remove the g, drinkin'. Then I remove the t in hot, drinking ho' chocolate. And I also remove the C-O, so it's just choclate, or the o. So drinking hot chocolate becomes drinkin' hochoclate.

An easier one might be want to do, want to do. "So, what do you want to do?"

So, what do you want to do?

The T is in two words. It's in "want" and it's in "to", but I remove both and I just say "wannǝ". Want to becomes wannǝ. What do you wannǝ do?

Now here's one of the trickiest ones of all. Let's see if you can hear it.

Imǝnǝ
Imǝnǝ
Imǝnǝ go,
Imǝnǝ do that.
Imǝnǝ call you.
Imǝnǝ tell mom.

So here, "Imǝnǝ " means "I am going to",

and we remove a lot of sounds. First we remove the T and the G at the end of "going to", so "going to" becomes gonna. That's very common. I'm gonna, I'm gonna is a very common reduction, but then we can even remove the first g in "going to'.

Imǝnǝ,
Imǝnǝ,
Imǝnǝ,

So this one's quite tricky, right? So "Imǝnǝ" is a perfect example of when we remove sounds and when we speak English quickly, you can't even hear the sounds. 

Of course, we also have blends. It's very similar to the linking and the elision. In blending, what we do is we take a bunch of words and we completely change the sound of it. So for example,

Whatchǝ
Whatchǝ doin'?
Whatchǝ doin'?

So "whatcha doin'" is what are you doing? "What are you" becomes "whatchǝ". Whatchǝ doin'? Or haftǝ. I hafta go. So I have to go, so we don't say the V sound, we say the F sound instead. I haftǝ go. Then of course we had, as previously mentioned, "I'm going to go." 

That's it. So as you can see, ghost English is a big problem in English. So how do we fight this? How do we improve our English so ghost English is not a big obstacle for us learning a language or learning English? Well, you just need to listen a lot, actually. So 'ello is a good place to start, because on 'ello, especially if you go to the interviews and views, the people often speak quickly, they speak naturally, and you can hear these reductions. Also, when you listen, I highly recommend you often listen without reading the transcripts. Because when you read the transcripts, you are not training your ear to hear the sounds. You should practice just doing the videos or the audio with no transcript. Then of course, you can go back and read the transcript and check, but always do each activity one time with no transcript. So you need to listen without reading. 

That's it. That's how to defeat ghost English. I hope this helps. All of the three feature creatures have their own problems, the speed demon, the word wizard, and of course, ghost English. But remember, they all have the same solution. The more you listen, the better you'll get. These monsters will go away. Good luck and talk to you soon.