Hello everyone.

It's jennifer from Charles speech with your question of the week.

The question today is what's the difference between the short E.

Sound in the word met and in the word gut and the long A sound A in the word mate and gate.

So let's take a look at some of these words and listen to the differences.

So we have over here lot get bet met and wet.

We're going to contrast that with the long A.

In late gate bait mate.

And wait.

So what's the difference between these two sounds?

Let's start with the short E.

The A.

Sound to make this sound.

Your mouth is going to be slightly open.

You will be able to see your tongue between the top and the bottom teeth in your mouth is slightly open.

Uh Uh huh.

Uh huh.

My tongue is relatively flat in my mouth, the back is slightly pulled up.

But overall I think of it as more being a little bit flat.

Uh uh Yeah for the a.

You can see my mouth opens more, the tip of my tongue points down in the back of my tongue, pulls up a little bit more A.

A.

My mouth closes slightly to move to more of a smiling mouth.

And my tongue just kind of goes along for the ride.

My tongue is going to go from low in the front to a little bit higher.

A and the reason it gets higher is because I'm closing my mouth.

So again the tongue just kind of moves along so let's look at the difference again we have the short E.

Uh huh.

Uh uh Again my mouth is relatively static.

It's not moving.

My mouth is slightly open.

And you can see the tip of my tongue between the top and the bottom teeth.

Uh For the long a my mouth opens pretty wide tip of my tongue is down.

Um And then it is going to move up as I close my mouth.

A.

A.

A skin we have.

Uh huh.

A So let's give that a try.

And some words, let's start with the short E.

In the So we have let get bet met wet in the long a late gate bait mate.

And wait and let's contrast these.

And I'm actually going to fix this.

I erased my last word here.

Okay so we have let late.

Yeah.

Get gate bet bait.

Met mate.

Wet.

Wait, let's give those all a try again.

Let late get gate bet bait.

Met mate.

Wet.

And wait now if this is difficult, you can kind of break that word apart and try the sounds separately.

Mm.

Uh Let and let's break this one apart.

Who Eight.

Mhm.

Eight late.

So when you break those sounds apart.

You can really feel how much your tongue needs to move for those vowel sounds.

So one more practice.

Try here.

Let late.

Get gate bet bait met mate.

Wet weight.

So give it a try.

I know people are going to notice the difference.

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