Prep for Bhante Sujato's course by starting Warder

I can hear you saying the vowel sounds very clearly.

I like what you’ve done with the places of articulation; nice and easy for beginners to get a handle on.

But I suggest that you reconsider the aspirated sounds. These are all the sounds (phonemes) written with an h in Pali. Pali doesn’t pronounce th and ph as they’re pronounced in English.

In all the Pali sounds (phonemes) written with two letters for one sound (digraphs) the h indicates that the sound is produced with a lot of breath: so that kh sounds different from k etc You might want to describe these sounds as ‘breathy’.

Anyway, the thing to be aware of is that no sound in your matrix sounds the same as another. (This becomes really important later when we want to tell the difference between very short words.)

First practice saying each of the consonants with and without breath. This is difficult for English speakers but not for speakers of many other languages. There are no real English equivalents for the Pali aspirated phonemes but it helps to consider how Anandajoti has given a best shot in this regard here The Pronunciation of Pali
Here’s one example:

I’ll see if I can get someone who can pronounce these really clearly to let me record them doing so.

Keep up your good work. :grinning:

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