Pronunciation of -ED Endings

Objectives of today’s lesson:

In this lesson, Learn English with Julia presents to you “Pronunciation of -ED Endings”, in order for you to:

  • feel more confident using the regular past tenses
  • perfect your pronunciation

Video Script:

Welcome to this video dedicated to the pronunciation of the -ED ending!

Now how do I pronounce my past participle? How do I pronounce by simple past if it is regular? Well all these verbs end in “-ED”. So it’s just figuring out whether or not the -ED is pronounced /d/ /t/ or /ɪd/. It’s based on sound, not on spelling. That is how we’re going to work out which pronunciation works with what sounds.

Now let’s start off with the column in the middle, the second column, with /t/.

So I pronounce my “-ED” ending: /t/ when I have a strong sound just before the “-ED”.

(Examples) /k/, /f/, /s/, /ʃ/, /ʧ/, /p/: they’re strong sounds.

So in order to distinguish my simple past, let’s say to distinguish it from a simple present or an infinitive, I need a strong sound to actually hear the “-ED”. I can’t hear my -ED so I need a strong sound (/t/). (Examples) So with a strong sound we pronounce “-ED”: /t/. All the other sounds are in this column here.

They mean that my “-ED” will be pronounced /d/

(Examples) So you just really need to remember these strong sounds go with /t/.

If not you can use /d/.

However we have 2 little exceptions: if my bare infinitive, if the last sound before the “-ED” is a /d/ or /t/ which are already taken here, we need to add a vowel to hear the ending /ɪd/. (Examples)

That’s all we need to know!

Here we’ve put a few examples between brackets.

If you use adjectives which end in “-ED” they are generally pronounced /ɪd/. (Examples) If you were to use those words as simple pasts, for example, they would be pronounced based on these rules.

So you would say… (Examples)

That’s all for today!

Thanks for watching!

Practice Quiz:

Keywords listed in English:

  • simple past or past simple
  • past participle
  • regular verbs
  • phonetics
  • phonemes


Back to the Course Index

Learn English with Julia

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *