The Importance of Pausing to Mark the Boundary Between Phrases or Thought Groups

Teacher: Welcome to daily tips on learning English. Today's tip is on the importance of pausing to mark the boundary between phrases or thought groups.

Teacher: In the previous tip, I mentioned how in long sentences, it's necessary to pause between thought groups. However, relatively short sentences may also require pauses to help the listeners organize the string of sounds correctly.

Teacher: Let's look at some examples, in the question "what time do you come in, in the morning", it's necessary to pause between the two prepositions in. If you pause after the word come, "what time do you come, in in the morning", then the listener would be confused. Because "come in" and "in the morning" are two separate thought groups.

Teacher: Here is another similar example, "look your papers over, over the weekend". You need to pause between the two overs to help your listeners organize your words. If you pause somewhere else like "look your papers, over over the weekend", nobody will understand you. Sometimes pausing in the wrong place would change the meaning of what you say.

Teacher: For example, let's lake two sentences. Sentence one: I usually eat sushi for lunch. Sentence two: I ate noodles today. When you put the two sentences together and speech you must pause slightly between them. "I usually eat sushi for lunch, I ate noodles today." If you pause after the word sushi, the meaning changes. "I usually eat sushi, for lunch I ate noodles today."

Teacher: So remember to use pauses to group ideas together. If you pause in the middle of ideas or group pieces of different ideas together, your listeners will have a hard time understanding you.

Teacher: This has been today's tip on learning English. Tune in tomorrow for another tip on learning English.