Today we are going to learn how and when to use long vowel sounds in English, and we are
going to learn right now!
Hi my name's Joe, welcome to my channel. If
you want to improve your spoken English make sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell
so you don't miss anything. So what is a vowel?
Well, we have A E I O U, and the letter Y can also act as a vowel, but we'll save that
for another lesson. When to use a long vowel sound?
Well. if we have a short word that only contains one vowel sound, normally that will be a short
vowel sound. But if we have a word that contains two vowel sounds, the first vowel will be
long and the second vowel will be silent. Let's look at some examples. The word sit
has one vowel, the letter I, which is a short vowel. But the word seat contains two vowel
sounds. So the first vowel E is a long vowel, and the second vowel A is silent.
But how do we make these long vowel sounds? It's actually quite simple. We need to lengthen
the pitch, and to do this we simply use the alphabet name of these vowels. A E I O U.
Now let's look at some examples for each vowel sound. So let's look at the A vowel, a word
like ran. In this word the A is a short vowel. But then a word like rain, the A becomes a
long vowel, and the I is silent. So it's rain. Next up we have the E vowel, a word like bet.
This time the E is a short vowel. Bet. But if we look at a word like Beat. This time
the E becomes a long vowel, and the A is silent. So it's beat. Beet. Now the I vowel. A word
like Bit. The I is short. Bit. But if we add an E to the end, it becomes a silent E but
we lengthen the I vowel. So we have Bite. Bite. So now the O vowel. So now the O vowel.
A word like Hop. This time the vowel is short. Hop. But if we add an E to it, to the end.
Again, it becomes a silent E, and we lengthen that O. So it's hope. Hope. So finally the
U vowel. A word like Cub is a short U sound. Cub. But if we put an E at the end of the
word, we now have Cube. Which means the U becomes a long vowel, and the E is silent.
Cube. Cube. What we have learnt today is a general rule,
but there will be some exceptions, as there always are in English. If you would like to
see some more videos like this, don't forget to subscribe by hitting the button here. And
hopefully I'll see you in the next lesson.
