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Reduction Tips |
Audio Program
(Beginner - Listening)
Wanna, Gonna, Hafta: Getting Relaxed With Reduced Forms
of Speech - A five minute audio program of the written script below. The English is spoken at 75% of normal
speed. |
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on
Wordmaster: reduced forms in spoken American English.
RS: We're talking about forms like whaddaya -- meaning "what do
you," as in "whaddaya say?" "Whaddaya Say?" is also the title of a
popular teaching book on reduced forms by Nina Weinstein.
AA: She did extensive research on the subject as a graduate student
at the University of California, Los Angeles, and as a teaching
fellow at Harvard.
NINA WEINSTEIN: "There were a lot of assumptions. People felt that
maybe it was a sort of uneducated kind of speech or maybe it was
caused by informality or things like this. So my master's thesis is
actually on what causes reduced forms.
"And what I found was speed of speech was statistically significant
as a cause for reduced forms, not informality. Though in informal
speech we tend to speak more quickly, and so we think it's the
informality, but actually it's the speed of speech."
RS: "What do you find? Do you find certain patterns of reductions?
Is there a way in which you can almost predict, if you are a speaker
of English as a foreign language, that you can almost predict when
or how it's going to happen?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Yes, yes -- in fact, you can learn the reduced
forms before. There are fifty to seventy common reduced forms that
everyone should know from a listening point of view. Sometimes, I
think, teachers feel that students will just pick this up. And they
do pick up some, but they don't pick up all of them."
AA: "Can you give us a few of the most common reduced forms?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "The three most common reduced forms are wanna,
which is the spoken form of 'want to'; gonna, which is the spoken
form of 'going to' plus a verb; and hafta, which is the spoken form
of 'have to.' And one of these forms will occur about every two
minutes."
AA: "On average in a conversation?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Yes, in unscripted spoken English."
AA: "That's amazing. And we're talking about common, everyday
speech. And yet I could see maybe some students who are learning
English who want to maybe apply for a job or meet with an employer
or someone, a professor, and maybe they're afraid that they're going
to sound uneducated or that they're too informal. What do you say
about that?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Informality -- informality actually is a very, very
large part of American English. And as I tell my students, the
majority of English is informal, though we do have situations that
call for formality. I don't think that students should worry about
their own use of the reduced forms because non-native speakers
generally don't reach the speed of speech to have reductions. And so
their speech will not reduce naturally.
"I don't advise students unnaturally adapting these forms because,
as I said, they're a natural flow of spoken English. But what I do
suggest that they do is, if they want to sound more natural,
regardless of whether it's an interview situation or just in
everyday speech, they could adopt the three most common reduced
forms in their speech because these are almost like vocabulary
items. They're that common.
"As far as the job interview goes, as I said, I don't think students
should adopt the fifty to seventy common reduced forms in their own
speech. But they need to understand the interviewer, who will be
using reduced forms."
RS: "Now beyond these top three, is there a top ten?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "I wouldn't say there's a top ten. If I were to just
give you some really common ones, one of the more common question
forms would be 'what do you/what are you' changing to whaddaya. You
can put that together with want to -- 'what do you want to' would be
naturally pronounced as whaddaya wanna: 'Whaddaya wanna do?' 'Whaddaya
wanna have?' Of course, we talked about gonna, which is 'going to'
plus verb.
"We've got gotta, which is 'have got to': 'I've got to do this.'
'I've got to go there.' I think those are common, but I think the
ones that are represented in 'Whaddya Say?' are really the most
common. And I can't cut it off at ten, because actually in my
research I found three hundred and five reduced forms."
A: Nina Weinstein, the author of "Whaddaya Say? Guided Practice in
Relaxed Speech," speaking with us from VOA's Los Angeles bureau.
RS: And we gotta go. That's Wordmaster for this week. To learn more
about American English, visit our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster.
AA: And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Rosanne Skirble,
I'm Avi Arditti. |
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Audio Program
(Beginner - Listening)
To Master Rhythms of English, You Really Hafta Learn
Reductions - A five minute audio program of the written script below. The English is spoken at 75% of normal
speed. |
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: expanding
on reductions. When speakers compress a phrase like "going to" into "gonna," or
"what do you" into "whaddaya," that's a reduction. We mentioned their importance
when we talked last week about the natural rhythms of spoken American English.
To explain more, we found a segment we did with Slangman David Burke where he
talked about reductions.
DAVID BURKE: "One of them is 'you.' Instead of saying you, we just say ya.
Instead of saying `How are you?' [we say] `How are ya?' If I were to say to you
'Didja eat yet?' and you replied `No, didju?' we would understand that. 'Didja
eat yet?' Did you eat yet?
"We talked about ya which is a reduction of you, but after the letter d the you
or the ya becomes a 'ja' sound always after the letter d. `Would you like to
come to the movies?' `Wouldja like to come to the movies?' `Did you eat?' `Didja
eat?' And, for some reason after the letter t the ya becomes 'cha' -- `I'll let
you come with me.' `I'll letcha come with me.' `What's that you have in your
hand?' `Whatcha have in your hand?' So, we have about four different ways of
saying `you' which is 'ya,' 'ja,' 'cha' and even 'ju.'"
AA: "This is spoken English, right? Now if you were writing a report or
something for work, you would want to be more careful about using the formal
non-reduced forms."
DAVID BURKE: "Absolutely. But, I would have to say yes and no, because
reductions are used typically in speaking; however, a lot of times when we are
writing to friends or especially in comic books we'll see the reduced form.
"True, in a formal report, you do not want to use reductions, but when we are
writing a letter to somebody we might say in the beginning of the letter `How
are ya?' and spell y-a for ya. That's pretty common."
AA: "Also on the most-often-heard reduction list are the reduced forms of going
to and want to. They become gonna, g-o-n-n-a, and wanna, w-a-n-n-a."
RS: "As in 'I'm gonna be late,' or 'Do you wanna go with me?'"
DAVID BURKE: "And what's a little bit difficult to understand about `gonna' [is
that] `gonna' is the reduction of `going to' only when it is something that is
happening in the future.
"But when it indicates going from one place to another you cannot reduce it. For
example, `I'm going to the movies tonight.' You can't say `I'm gonna the movies
tonight.' Or `Are you going to the market?' You can't say 'Are you gonna the
market?' So, it's only used to indicate the future, and it's really popular."
AA: "Sometimes, when reduction takes place, two different words are reduced to
the same sound."
RS: "That happens with 'and' and 'in'."
DAVID BURKE: "'And' is pronounced 'n': `Rosanne n Avi.' The word `in' -- 'Let's
go inside' -- it's pronounced absolutely the same. `Put the pencil 'n' the box.'
It sounds like `Put the pencil and the box.'"
AA: "So someone coming to this country who is not used to the fast-speaking ways
of your average American is going to be confused by these `wannas, gonnas -- "
RS: "Can't ya, don'tcha."
DAVID BURKE: "Absolutely. In fact just now you said a very common reduction,
`used to' - `usta' means to be accustomed to, to be acclimated to. I'm usta
getting up early. He usta be my best friend. We would never say `used to.'"
RS: "The question I have for you is that given the fact that Americans speak
with reductions, how do people who speak English as a foreign language learn to
tell the difference? How do they learn these reductions?"
DAVID BURKE: "The only way they can learn is to live in this country, and of
course when they arrive they will be absolutely shocked and all of a sudden
someone comes up and says, `How do ya do?' not `How do you do?' They are
stunned."
AA: Slangman David Burke, talking about reductions in a segment from two
thousand. You can learn about his language teaching materials at slangman.com.
And that's WORDMASTER for this week. Archives are at voanews.com/wordmaster. And
our e-mail is word@voanews.com. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.
MUSIC: "Whatcha Gonna Do With A Cowboy?" / Chris LeDoux/Garth Brooks |
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 Reduced
Forms
Broadcast on "Coast to Coast": January 16, 2003
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble and this week on Wordmaster, English
teacher Lida Baker explains some of the shortcuts that work their way into
conversational American speech.
RS: They're called reduced forms, or reductions. And, since it was noon when we
spoke to Lida, she served up the perfect lunchtime example:
BAKER: "So tell me, jeet yet?"
RS: "No we haven't eaten yet (laughter)."
BAKER: "See, you understood what I said, 'jeet.' Now if we were to pronounce
that the way it's written, we would say 'did you eat yet?' But in rapid, spoken
English, the 'did you' gets reduced. Do you see how the nature of the consonants
changes, it's not 'did you,' it's 'juh' Let's suppose that you had already eaten
lunch, so I could ask you 'hoodjeet with with?'"
RS: "Who did you eat with?"
BAKER: "That's right. Whadja eet?"
RS: "'What did you eat?' to translate."
BAKER: "Right. The reductions occur in words that are not stressed. So going
back over those three examples, which admittedly are rather extreme -- and we'll
go back and look at a few cases that are less extreme -- notice that it's the
auxiliary verb, which is 'did,' and the pronoun 'you' gets reduced, and the word
'eat,' which is the verb in this sentence, is the stressed word. The word 'yet'
is unstressed; it's an adverb. So it comes out 'jeet yet?'
Now let me give you some examples of reductions that occur frequently, or even
all the time. One example would be the preposition 'to,' which we normally in
spoken language pronounce 'ta,' 'I hafta go,' 'I hafta,' right? Haf-ta. It's not
'to.' Same thing with the word 'you.' How does that get reduced?"
RS: "Ya."
BAKER: "That's right, it becomes 'ya.' So instead of 'how are you doing,' we say
'how ya doin'?"
AA: "You drop the g on doing."
BAKER: "We drop the g. So that would be -- remember, there are two changes that
occur in pronunciation when forms are reduced. One is that consonants change or
disappear, and other one is that there's a change in the vowel quality. So 'how
ya doin',' the word 'are' disappeared all together, the 'you' changed to 'ya'
and on the word 'doing' the g dropped."
RS: "It would sound really strange if I would say in casual conversation, 'how
are you doing?'"
AA: "Unless you're talking to someone who's hard of hearing or you know doesn't
understand the language very well."
BAKER: "Yeah, it would be very unnatural. Think of other forms like 'gotta.' 'I
gotta go.' We don't say 'I have got to go.' The word 'have' drops, 'got to'
becomes 'gotta.' Notice 'got to,' when we pronounce them together, the 't' in
American English changes to a ‘d.’ So there's a example of where, as I said
before, consonant quality changes."
RS: "And we see this with 'going to,' 'I'm gonna go.'"
BAKER: "And very interesting, because most of my students, even at a low
intermediate level, are familiar with 'gonna.' They've heard it so many times in
movies and in songs and so on, so much so that I'll receive essays where the
students have written g-o-n-n-a. But what I'm teaching people is academic
English, and so I have to teach them that it's not OK to write reduced forms.
It's OK to say them, but you shouldn't write them."
AA: "So is any of this related to social class or to education?"
BAKER: "I think the use of reduced forms is tied more to the situation. You'll
find that when people are talking with their friends in a more casual situation,
where we're feeling more relaxed, we tend to use more reduced forms -- because,
one of the reasons that we do reduce forms, that we do have so many reductions
in our speech, is that it's just much easier to pronounce words. Whenever we
pronounce consonants, the mouth has to be in a certain position, and to move
from one position to another requires a certain amount of muscular effort."
RS: Lida Baker teaches at the American Language Center of the University of
California at Los Angeles. She also writes textbooks for English learners.
AA: You'll find our previous Wordmaster segments with Lida on our Web site,
voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. Or write us
at VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi
Arditti.
MUSIC: "What You Gonna Do"/The Jeanette Williams Band |
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Pronunciation Tips |
Are You How You Talk?
(Beginner - Listening,
reading)
A video lesson to
help with your understanding of American dialects.
The English is
spoken at 75% of normal speed.
Click here to visit the lesson page. |
Are You How You Talk?
(Beginner - Listening)
An audio lesson to
help with your understanding of American dialects. The English is
spoken at 75% of normal speed.
Click here to visit the lesson page with the written script for this
audio program. |
Improve Your Pronunciation by Training Your
Ears
(Beginner - Listening)
An audio lesson to
help with your
pronunciation and English language
reductions. The English is
spoken at 75% of normal speed. Great English pronunciation tips.
Click here to visit the lesson page with the written script for this
audio program. |
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