Intonation practice

I explain a little more about using intonation in English Hello everybody I thought that today you might be interested in listening to English intonation. English has two main "tones": a "rising" tone for questions, and a "falling" tone for statements and commands. Father: "Are you not going to play with your friends today?" Son: "No, I'm not" (slight falling sound on "not") Father: "Why not?" Son: "Because I feel ill" Father: "Oh dear! what is wrong? Son: "I fell over and banged my head and I have a headache!" Father: "Ok, I think you need to rest!..." question sound: "today?" statement: "I'm not" question: why not? (sympathetically) statement "I feel ill" question: "what is wrong?" statement: "I have a headache" command: "you need to rest!" This dialogue shows how we use the falling and rising tones for conversation a bit clearer.

You can listen to Intonation practice online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Intonation practice is an episode from Alan Palmer's Language Chat podcasts.

This episode is 1:58 long.

This episode was published on Oct 7, 2008.

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