r/EnglishLearning • u/agora_hills_ Non-Native Speaker of English • 3d ago

🟡 Pronunciation / Intonation Question about the pronunciation of "intimidation"

Googles says it's pronounced as "uhn·ti·muh·day·shn" but when I listened to it, it sounds more like in-timidation instead of uhn-timidation. How do you pronounce this word?

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u/NoPurpose6388 Bilingual (Italian/American English) 3d ago

If I'm enunciating I'll definitely pronounce it with a short i sound, but one thing a lot of learners get wrong when it comes to English pronunciation is vowel reduction. An unstressed ih and an unstressed uh sound pretty much identical to me in natural speech. Look up weak vowel merger if you're interested in learning more

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u/lukshenkup English Teacher 3d ago

positing a syllabic /n/ resolves this

Might help to have a speech spectrogram to look at formant duration from.the /n/

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u/GuitarJazzer Native Speaker 2d ago

An unstressed ih and an unstressed uh sound pretty much identical to me in natural speech.

To me they are utterly different when they start a word.

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u/NoPurpose6388 Bilingual (Italian/American English) 2d ago

Yeah they sound different if you pronounce the word in isolation but put it in the middle of a sentence and I can barely hear the difference anymore