In this video we are going to look at weak forms. You learn what weak forms are compared to full forms and why they occur in English. You might have asked yourself why it is sometimes so difficult to understand spoken English because words all seem to run together into one long word – other words seem to become very short or disappear.

This is because English is a stress-timed language, and it is therefore full of weak forms when we speak naturally! Those weak forms are reduced versions of grammatical words. They can sound very different when they are said in isolation compared to in a sentence. We will go over some common weak forms, and you will see what an important role the schwa sound plays in weak forms.