Accent's Way Magazine

#79

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Lunch or Launch?

This week’s request was received by an old friend that is having a hard time understanding one of his colleagues every time they approach a new launch… 🙂

TRANSCRIPT

Hey guys, it’s Hadar. And this is the Accent’s Way. Ron asked me to talk about the important difference between ‘lunch’ and ‘launch’. ‘Lunch’ as in ‘Let’s have lunch one day. And ‘launch’ as in ‘I’m launching my product today’.

Okay. So the difference is in the middle vowel, okay? Lunch and launch. The word ‘lunch’ has a neutral ‘uh’ sound that exists in many different languages. Lunch. So, you can also call it a stressed schwa. It’s a CUP sound: ‘luh’, ‘luhnch’. So the tongue is in the middle, the mouth is relaxed: ‘luhnch’. Pretty simple.

The word ‘launch’ has the ‘aa’ as in ‘father’ or the ‘aw’ as in ‘daughter’. Either one is great, but just make sure that you position the sound in the back part of your mouth, and pull the tongue back a bit. ‘laanch’. Okay? So you can drop your jaw, round the lips just a bit, or relax your lips completely. ‘laanch’. But it has to have that dark quality in it. Otherwise it’s gonna have a neutral quality, central quality – ‘luhnch’, and then it’s kind of flat sounding like the word ‘lunch’. ‘laanch’.

Notice it is not ‘lounch’. Although there is AU here, it’s not a diphthong. It’s not ‘auw’, ‘lauw’, cuz then it’s gonna sound like ‘lounge’. ‘Let’s chill in the lounge’. Launch. ‘We’re launching our product today’. And, ‘We’re planning a nice lunch’. Launch – lunch.

All right, that’s it. Thank you for watching. Please share this video with your friends, if you liked it. And let me know in the comments below, if you have any questions about this pair or about any other word that gives you a hard time.

Also, I’m inviting you to come and check out my website because I have a lot of useful and free stuff for you over there. All right. Have a great week. Thank you for watching again. And I’ll see you next week in the next video. Bye.

‘Let’s launch after lunch’. ‘Let’s have lunch after launch’.


The InFluency Podcast
The InFluency Podcast
236. How to pronounce Lunch vs. Launch
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