What is the most important sound in English? What is the most common sound in English?

The answer to both of these questions is, THE SCHWA sound! The Schwa sound, which looks like this /ə/, is both the most common sound in English, and the most important sound for people who want to learn how to pronounce words correctly and speak fluently and quickly in English.

The Schwa sound is the most common sound in both American and British English, but in British English it is even more common and appears in nearly every single word!

The schwa sound appears in unstressed syllables, which means when you hear a vowel sound and it's not stressed (louder or longer) in any word, then it's probably going to be a Schwa /ə/ sound. For example, in the sentence;
"The internet represents the best of us" there are 6 schwa sounds! Thə intənet reprəsents thə best əf əs. Amazing right? If you use the Schwa sound correctly, it allows you to speak SUPER FAST in English! (Lot's about this in the video!).

My advice is to practice this sound as often as you can until it becomes 'second nature' (that means you don't even have to think about it anymore, it will be natural to you, just like a native speaker). Do this, and I promise everyone you meet will comment about how AMAZING your English pronunciation is and how they wish they could speak as fast as you can in English!

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*PLEASE NOTE*
In the 2nd PRACTICE SENTENCE, which says, "A man was sitting alone at home on a sofa" you might see the video SKIP a little. This is because I accidently said there are 7 schwa sounds (because the sentence I wrote for myself whilst making the video did have 7) but there are actually 6 schwa sounds in this sentence! The video is correct (it shows only 6 schwa sounds) but I say 7 by mistake. Thanks to one of the great students for pointing this out to me! The video has been CUT so that it now skips me saying seven and instead students can count the 6 themselves.

00:00 Introduction
00:42 What is the Schwa sound?
01:50 How to pronounce the Schwa sound!
02:23 5 Vowels can all be SCHWA!
05:19 Articles (A, an, the)
07:50 Amazing
08:00 Unstressed Syllables
10:36 Schwa in the middle of words
10:50 ER, OR, AR endings
11:43 Family Members
12:05 A good way to practice
12:50 Words that end in 'A'
13:20 TEST your Schwa!

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