Video transcription...

Hi and welcome to my video on daily exercises for better articulation. My name's Darren, and I'm the founder of vocabilities.com. These five exercises that you can practice daily, I designed to work the articulators and the muscles of your mouth. So over a period of time, you can brighten and tighten up those muscles and make things sound sharper and clearer when you speak. Not only are they great for working and building on those muscles, but they're also really good as a warmup. So if you were going into a voiceover studio, if you're in a play, and you need to warm up your voice, these can be added into your routine to help sharpen up the articulation. Okay? So the first one is so easy. You do it all the time yourself, it's yawning. That's right. I want you to yawn.

You don't have to pull a stupid face when you do it, but it helps when you take in the air with a yawn, you open up all the spaces from your lips right down to your diaphragm. And because you're letting in so much air things have to create space. This is exercising loads of muscles on the way down so just enjoy it. Whether it comes naturally, or you have to fake it, it doesn't matter. It's really good exercise. 10 of those to start your warmups. And as time goes on, you might want to start doing more, maybe 15. Do 10 for the first 10 days, and then do 15 for the next 15 days then 20 for the 20 days after that and see how you feel. And because you'll be doing these exercises daily, you'll start to notice a difference and you might want to do more. Cause you might see the benefits and just want to get that much better. Okay. Number two is going to be lip trills. Now singers use these quite a lot. Anyone who's done any singing out there or actors that have done voice work or had to do warmups for their shows will have done these. Basically it's using air to vibrate your lips, like this.

Now you can choose one tone and stay on that. Or you can go up and down the scale of notes. Note, it's not a singing exercise for us as such, but it's handy. If you do want to move up and down through notes, cause it also warms up other parts, which when you're speaking will be useful.

You don't want your lips to be too tight and you don't want them to be too loose. Try to find a balance in the middle, and you want to hear the sound coming through as well. So you're engaging your vocal, folds and noise is coming through. It's not just air, not just hear the difference. If you find it difficult to do this on its own, you can put your fingers and hold the soft part of your cheeks up like that, which will help just to keep the lips in the right position. So you can make the sound. And after doing it for a while, you can then take your hands away and do the same thing. And as you progress, I want you to do this exercise for longer and longer in one breath. So if you take a breath as full as you can,
Count yourself doing that for 20 seconds to begin with. If you can do 20 seconds and then go to 30 seconds, if you can do 30 seconds easy, why not try for a minute? And if you can get a minute, why not try for two minutes? The idea is is wherever you are at the moment, wherever you're starting out from do it, as long as you can time yourself. And then the next day, try and do a few seconds longer or a little bit longer. And again, in a few weeks, you'll be able to keep your breath for that much longer. And the lips will be doing lots of work and the muscles will start to work for you in a better way. Again, this is also very good for a warmup. If you're going to be doing voiceover work or on the stage, the next exercise is going to be tongue trills.

And this is really similar to the literals we just did. But just with your tongue. So rather than using your lips to you can use your tongue and make that other sound. This is really difficult for some people. A lot of people don't use their tongue in a robotic way and have a curl up my accent. I'm from London. So I generally don't curl my eyes and I have found this difficult to begin with. So with a bit of practice, you'll get there. It's really good at warming up another muscle. And the tongue is such a large muscle that goes right the way down here, your tongue plays such an important part of forming words. So these tongue trills are going to help with that. Here's how it should go.

You might find, after the first few times of doing these exercises, that you have find a little bit of aching in your mouth or on at the bottom of your tongue. That's good. It means it's working. It means you're exercising, no pain, no gain. Okay. For the next two exercises, I'm going to need the board. These next two exercises are almost like tongue twisters. They will promote the idea of getting your muscles to learn, to think faster. First, it will be a brain and then the mouth and tongue and lips will catch up. They're very simple words, but when put together, they can become slightly difficult to say, but [inaudible] board or gore port or gore boudou GU B D G P D G B D gay payday gay. That is all one round. Okay. So [inaudible] beta gay, petty gay. That's a good speed to start off with. I know these, so it's a little bit easier for me. So you want to try and make them sound as clear as possible, as well as building up the speed of how fast you can say them. Try and do as many as you can in one breath. So breathe in. But I got pad of [inaudible].

What happens is quite often, people think too much about how they're breathing. I want you to concentrate more on what you're reading and getting that correct and forget about the breathing, because what will happen is the breathing will come. What's more important is that you get these right. There's a lot of training videos out there for breathing. Quite often, I find that when people start thinking about the breathing, they get too conscious about what they're doing. So I want you to, for now to concentrate on these. And if you do want to have some breathing exercises, there's a video below that has those on there for you. Once you are able to say these faster, and you are able to say more on a single breath, you'll discover that your articulation will naturally start to become better in general, everyday life speech. And as I said before, these are great as a warmup just before you need to speak. The next exercise is very similar to this.
It's another set of words, but this time are using different consonant sounds. So we have Martin, [inaudible] more Northern law law, Warsaw moon, new Lulu Boozoo meaning neatly VVC may leave
ABC. I find these ones very difficult. You might find these easier Manila [inaudible] leave easy. Mainly they was a, here we go, Manila lovers. [inaudible]. So again, these ones are going to help tighten up as articulate is. And within a few weeks, you're going to notice that you can do them much easier and better, and all these exercises done daily are really going to help you Become A Better Speaker, Whether It's Just In Your Social Life Or For Work. If You Visit My Website@Wwwdotfreeandeasyspeech.Com, there's a free printout of these exercises and others that you can look at to help remind yourself of what you need to do. So  Keep practicing, keep speaking. And until next time, bye