How to Pronounce Blood Love Tough

Learning English pronunciation can certainly be a challenge. You need to contend with both how to say and how to spell vowel sounds. Do you know how to pronounce blood love tough?

Here’s the Video:

The Problem with Spelling and Pronouncing English Vowels

Today we are just looking at the vowel sounds rather than any of the consonant sounds. Did you know that these words all contain the same vowel sound? The English alphabet is not large enough to represent all of its sounds. This means you need to learn the different ways we spell our wide ranging vowel sounds. The phoneme common to all of these words is /ʌ/. If I hear a new word with the /ʌ/ sound most of the time I assume I can spell with a ‘u’. However, there is a pretty decent chance of me being wrong. We cannot always say the letter ‘u’ is pronounced with the /ʌ/ sound.  Likewise, the ‘u’ is not the only way to spell the the /ʌ/ sound.

Different Ways You Can Spell the /ʌ/ Sound

When you learn English pronunciation you may be surprised that we pronounce ‘son’ in exactly the same way as ‘sun’. The infographic below illustrates a few of the most common words with the /ʌ/ sound which you need to learn individually. Blood and flood are a couple of exceptions as ‘oo’ cannot be used to pronounce /ʌ/ any other time. I could have added more ‘ou’ words like country and couple to this list. So now you know how to pronounce blood love tough can you think of any more words like money in which we pronounce  the ‘o’ as /ʌ/?

The answer is not obvious unless you happen to know it. Both ‘hush’ and ‘mushroom’ have the same thing in common: the ‘u’ is pronounced /ʌ/, so they are pronounced /hʌʃ/ and /mʌʃrʊm/. Of course, both ‘push’ and ‘hush’ are spelt the same way apart from the first letter, and the first letter has no reason to affect the pronunciation of the rest of the word in both cases. But ‘push’ is indeed pronounced /pʊʃ/. It’s just one of those things about the English language and why it is so difficult to learn English pronunciation.