
What Are Common Consonant Clusters Problems? You’ll practise consonant clusters further down the page – make sure you don’t miss it! You’ll practice consonant clusters below! To improve consonant clusters you need to listen carefully and feel each consonant in the cluster. This means that pronouncing consonant clusters and blends clearly is very important for speaking clear English that other people can understand easily. You can see that consonant clusters are very common in English words. Maybe you got the obvious ones but not some of the less obvious ones. Would you have missed any of those out? Are they easy for you to make? So there are 8 consonant clusters in that sentence. How many consonant clusters can you find in the sentence above?Ĭonsonant Clusters That Are Obvious: /bl/ in blocked, /fr/ in from, /tr/ in traffic, /st/ in yesterday, /nt/ in accident.Ĭonsonant Clusters That Are Less Obvious: /ks/ in access, /kt/ in blocked, /ks/ in accident. “Access to the road was blocked from traffic yesterday because of the accident”. To give you an idea of how common consonant clusters are, t ake a look at this sentence. Pronouncing consonant clusters clearly is very important for pronouncing English clearly. Leaving the /s/ sound off when there is more than one of something, such as ‘I have 3 meeting’ which should be ‘I have 3 meetings’ or ‘The client are waiting ‘ instead of ‘The clients are waiting’. This is confusing to listeners and can be an obvious grammar mistake. Important grammatical markers such as past tense endings and plurals require the pronunciation of consonant clusters.įor example, if a speaker leaves the /t/ sound off the end of ‘helped’ it becomes ‘help’ which means the listener doesn’t know that it happened in the past. Consonant Clusters Are Needed For GrammarĬorrect consonant clusters are essential for pronouncing grammar markers in English. As you can see consonant clusters are essential in telling one word from another in English.

If you leave the /r/ out in ‘free’ it’s ‘fee’ and ‘trip’ it becomes ‘trip’. For example, if you leave the /l/ out in ‘black’ it sounds like ‘back’ and ‘click’ becomes ‘kick’. The second reason is that if you mispronounce a consonant cluster, it can mean another word, and this is confusing to listeners. Consonant Clusters Distinguish Between Words If you mispronounce them, you’ll be mispronouncing many, many words in English.Ģ. The first reason is simply that consonant clusters are in so many English words. There are a 3 main reasons why pronouncing consonant clusters correctly is so important for speaking clear English that people can understand easily. Why Is Correct Consonant Clusters Important For Clear English? You’ll see video and there are some consonant clusters exercises with audio to do to improve your pronunciation of consonant clusters too. In this post we’ll cover why pronouncing consonant clusters clearly is important for speaking clear English, we’ll talk about which consonant clusters are difficult for non-native English speakers and ESL students and how you can improve your consonant clusters. Examples of clusters with 4 consonant sounds in a row are /ksts/ in ‘ texts’ and /mpst/ in ‘glimpsed’.

Examples of clusters with 3 consonant sounds are /str/ in ‘string’, /sks/ in ‘tasks’ and the /kst/ in ‘sixty’. Examples of consonants clusters with 2 consonant sounds are /bl/ in ‘black’, /sk/ in ‘desk’ and the /pt/ at the end of ‘helped’. What is a Consonant Cluster in English? A consonant cluster is 2, 3 or 4 consonant sounds in a row. Some are obvious and some are hidden, that’s one of the reasons why consonant clusters are challenging for non-native speakers of English. There are SO MANY consonant clusters in English.
#Consonant clusters examples how to#
How To Pronounce Consonant Clusters In English – The Ultimate Guide Record & Practice Your Consonant Clusters On This Page!
