How to pronounce the er? like water, border
By comparing my own recording with the audio sample from BBC learning English website, I found myself awkward in pronouncing the “er” in words like water，border. My pronunciation sounds quite different from BBC's sample.
After searching the archive of antimoon, I found some posts about how to pronounce er, but I am still bewildered about the right position of the tongue and how to pronounce the consonant (t, d) and the vowel (er) simultaneously so that I can sound as BBC's standard English.
Can anyone enlighten me on this? Thanks in advance!
Don't focus so much on the tongue, just try to imitate it. Eventually you'll begin to sound like 'BBC' (if that's what you want) and the tongue will follow.
They say WAH-tuh, don't they?
In the word water the first part is pronounced like you were saying war as in the word war.. but the r is very very soft.. then the second part is just a T but pronounced strongly so if writing it as pronounced it would be like wart , try it .. wart or first war then t war t ..
It would help to know what your mother tongue is, or what other languages you speak well in order to give you better advice.
If you're going after BBC English, for the /t/ you need to make sure to establish a firm contact with the alveolar ridge (that area just behind the front teeth) and produce a voiceless sound. In many cases, you can have some degree of aspiration in non-stressed syllables as in "water". /d/ is, of course, a voiced sound.
As for the "er" sequence, BBC English (RP) is a non-rhotic accent. That means that at the end of those words (pronounced in isolation) there is no /r/ sound. It's only a vowel sound, and it's a neutral vowel at that: /@/, or schwa. This is a (sort of) unusual vowel, halfway between close and open, halfway between front and back. Listen to the sound an English speaking person makes when they hesitate (regularly transcribed as "uhm" or "erm").
I hope this helps.
Well, for starters, here in the UK the "t" in "water" is definitely pronounced just as a "t" should be and NOT as a "d". That applies to all the accents and dialects of this accent and dialect rich country of ours, this precious stone set in a silver sea.
Depending on where you live in on this precious stone the "r" is glided over and not enunciated - for instance, in lovely leafy Surrey it comes out as, phonetically, "WAR-tuh", with absolutely no rhoticising or voicing of the "r" as I said.
The same applies to the word "border" - but up here in Scotland we tend to roll the first "r".
Anyway, there is not so much of a standard "BBC" English any more - many of the announcers on the main national BBC channels (both radio abd TV) sport a variety of toned down regional accents....a good example of this is the intensely irritating Victoria Derbyshire, on the BBC Radio Five Live channel. In spite of her name she does not come from Derbyshire - she hails from Liverpool (as does the even more irritating afore-mentioned Anne Robinson, who now has a "posh" plum in her vicious gob anyway, since left Liverpool very, very many, many, many, many, many years ago.
Derbyshire still has traces of Scouse in her ever so annoying high pitched, shrill, shrieking voice - it makes you want to switch over channels in a trice but somehow you resist the temptation to do so if only to have a bloody good laugh at all her verbal cock-ups and regular indiscretions.
She once had a fit of the giggles when talking about a bloke with a somewhat delicate medical condition in a somewhat delicate part of his male anatomy but which was very serious and incurable. How professional is that?