In this video, we'll look at the words PAL, POL, PAWL, POOL, and PULL. We'll help you pronounce these words easily and correctly, hear the difference between them, and understand these vowels and dark L sounds. So first of all, looking at the word PAL, we have the A vowel.

That's the most typical vowel that you'll hear for letter A in American English. It's not an

AH vowel, so we don't have a word with AL that has the AH, no PAL in American English.

So this is a more forward vowel, PAL. What I like to do is pair another word to help you match the vowel. So it might be challenging because of that L. In PAL, you can think about the man's name Al, but for many people that's not very helpful. It might be easier to think about a word like that. So try that pal or cat pal, my cat pal, to keep that AH vowel the same.

Then when we go to POL, letter O in this word does say the O diphthong. Make sure you hold your O long enough. POL, POL. And what you'll notice is that in PAL, PAL, I don't really have to have much of a dark L in that word. It is a final L, it's probably dark, but I'm not doing a much schwa.

I'm just going right from the AH to the O, PAL. But in POL, because I have the rounded vowel,

I have my dark, my schwa positioned for my dark L. So that means the front of my tongue lifts and the back of my tongue stays down. Because I'm moving from that round O to the schwa,

OL, OL, it almost sounds like POL, POL. So there's a little glide of a W between my O and my schwa sound. POL. So using our matching, you can try something like a cold POL. I'll write POL this way because we also have the North Pole, which is a cold POL. This kind of POL is a survey.

Or no pole, being able to match that vowel. So we have that pal, no pole. Then for PAWL, this is a less commonly used word, but for many of you, the AWL words like tall, call, and pawl are more challenging. We have the AWL vowel. So trying just the first part of the word like PAW might help you get PAWL, PAWL. This PAWL is also the same as the man's name, PAWL.

So thinking about tall PAWL, or tall may also be challenging for you, so you can try something like um, an awesome PAWL, um, or saw the PAWL. Then when we move to POOL, again we have another rounded vowel, so our OO vowel. Letters OO often say the OO sound in English. Sometimes they say the UH sound, but just on a few words. In the word POOL, we have a true tense OO sound, and because again, we're going from that rounded POOL, we might think of it as having that W glide when we're moving from the OO to the schwa before the L, pool. Again, words like cool might also be, or school might be challenging for you still, so you can think of perhaps a new pool, or if new is hard for you, watch out that you don't want to say new with a glide, you just want again new, that OO vowel, or another OO word for pool, how about blue, blue might be easier, a blue pool. Then when we move to PULL, here's where we have our UH vowel, that's in words like push and could, so you can remember push and pull, or could pull, the spelling of the UH vowel is often letter U or letters OU, and it's a rounded vowel too, pull, pull, but it's higher and less tense than the OO, so I don't have so much of a glide W sound, just pull, not pool, no W gliding there. Okay, so quite a few different words, quite a bit of challenge here with these different vowel sounds and combining them with that dark L. I do have some other videos talking more about how to do that dark L, and of course how to do these different vowel sounds, but using the matching for with a word that has the vowel that's easier for you to say is a great way to be able to make these contrasts and be able to say these words. You can find out more about all of these vowel sounds and all of the consonant sounds in our Sounds of English course on speechmodification.com. If you have a suggestion you'd like to see me cover in our Word of the

Day series, feel free to leave that in the comments for this video or any of my videos.

You can also attend our Friday live question and answer classes, those are at 12 noon on Fridays,

Seattle time, three o'clock Eastern time, and you put your questions in the chat, I'll answer them for you live, and we can talk about words that you'd like help pronouncing, sounds, American accent, and more. I hope to see you there. I'm Christine Dunbar from speechmodification.com.

Remember, if you want to sound like a native speaker, you can do it. Speechmodification.com.

Bye everyone, hope to see you again soon.