Can and Can't

Hello!

Today I started class with a bit of silliness. I said, "I can raise one eyebrow at a time. Can you?" I said, "My mother can wiggle her ears. Can you?" I said, "My friend can touch his tongue to his nose. Can you?"

We found out that Federico can touch his nose with his tongue.

Today's lesson was about the pronunciation of can and can't. Yesterday we learned about when function words can be stressed. When a function word is stressed, we call that its strong form. When we reduce it, which we do in normal speech, that is called its weak form.

Together we built the table of strong and weak forms for can, will, have, he and some other function words.

We practiced saying some sentences with can and can't. We said that can't is always stressed. Why? I heard two people say, "because it's negative." That's right. Negatives are content words. We said that can is usually reduced, but not always. When do we use the strong form of can? We will see if you know the answer to that tomorrow when we take up the homework!

Next we did a listening exercise. You were to circle the word you heard me say: can or can't. We took those up, then you practiced choosing one or the other to see if the rest of the class and I could tell which one you were saying. There were many things we needed to do to make ourselves clearly understood:

1. Except at the end of a sentence, can needs to be short with a schwa sound.
2. With regard to rhythm, can doesn't get a full beat.
3. When you say can't, I need to hear a nice clear vowel sound.
4. Can't does get a full beat.
5. Also, Federico noticed that you can often hear a little pause at the end of the word can't. That's the unreleased /t/. He has a good ear!

Next we practiced those with our partners.

Finally we played a little game. It was a contest. Each person had to come up with five things they can do and five they can't do. Points were awarded for anything you came up with that you could do but nobody else in the class could do. Points were also awarded for anything you could NOT do that everyone else in the class could do. Bashar got a point for being able to play the guitar, Florin got a point for being able to drive a boat, Ina got a point for being able to speak Russian, Tania got a point for being able to play the flute, Federico got a point for being able to extract a molar, and I got a point for being able to speak some Japanese.

I wish we'd had time to play all the rounds of that game, but we ran out of time.

For homework, I gave you a challenging word game and gap-fill. You have nine words to unscramble. Those words go in the blanks in the paragraph. The paragraph is about the rules of pronouncing can and can't. Also, some of the squares where you will write the unscrambled words have little numbers on them. I showed you how to build a phrase at the bottom of the page using the numbered letters in unscrambled words.

Good luck with that. I can't wait to take it up tomorrow!