1. ANY WRITTEN VOWEL CAN BE A SPOKEN SCHWA A schwa is the 'uh' sound found in an unstressed syllable. For example, the first syllable in amazing (ǝ-MA-zing), the first syllable in tenacious (tǝ ...

But if you say it faster, that middle, unstressed vowel will start to get less distinct: "pro-buh-blee." No point in being extra careful: it's not like there are lots of other words that start ...

In unstressed syllables (particularly in American English, where the stress on some syllables is less pronounced than in other languages), the apostrophe can represent the unstressed vowel, as in ...

In unstressed syllables Any vowel letter can be pronounced as schwa and the pronunciation of a vowel letter can change depending on whether the syllable in which it occurs is stressed or not.

In this Teacher Talk, Mr McPartlin shares some more examples of silent letters and unstressed vowels. Listen carefully and join in with the activities. You’ll need a pen or pencil and some paper.

Reducing unstressed vowels to schwa is something that English does and most languages don’t. 5. Pronounce the r like a tap, instead of like English r.

This happens because the first syllable in “police”, etc, is unstressed, and in English the vowel in an unstressed syllable is reduced to what is known in phonetics as “schwa”.

The Bee competitors often worry about "the dreaded schwa." When there's an unstressed vowel in a word that they haven't studied, they might not know whether it's spelled with an a, e, i, o, or u.