English for Beginners: APOSTROPHES for missing letters & contractions

Apostrophes are used for many purposes in English writing. Today, I will talk about two ways we use apostrophes to show missing letters: for informal speech and for writing accepted contractions. English is confusing enough when we can read all the letters! When letters are removed and replaced with apostrophes, how do you know how to say these words? I’ll teach you how to pronounce common contractions so there’s no confusion, and then we’ll practice together with some example sentences.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hmm. A license to print money. [Laughs] I wish. Hey, E. How ya doin'? Hi. James from engVid. I was reading an interesting book on making money, but I noticed E's up to something. He's praying... He's playing detective, as you can see - Sherlock E. And I want to know: What's he up to? And he says: "How you doin'?" And I noticed that he's looking at this strange thing, it's called an "apostrophe". Why don't we find out what he's doing, and what is the case of the missing letters? And before I even go there, I would like to say: Thank you to Francisco from Paraguay-yay!-for this brilliant shirt. Thank you. And Paraguay, thank you for watching. Okay?

Anyway, let's go to the case for the missing letters. We're going to talk about apostrophes. Now, apostrophes are part of our... Well, we have... Sorry. Periods, question marks, exclamation marks - these are all markings we put in our language to tell us that something is interesting about that sentence or something is missing in the sentence. In this particular case, we're talking about the apostrophe. There are a couple of other things it's used for, but right now I wanted to talk about missing letters. You know? Like: "Has anybody seen my letter? My letter 'g' - it's missing since this morning at 9am." You go: "What are you talking about?"

Well, let's start here. Missing letters. Sometimes at the end of a present continuous verb... And, you know, verbs are: "run", "do", "go", "stop". Okay? And the continuous form would be: "running", "doing", "going", "stopping". Okay? The letter "g" is dropped. Now, this isn't necessarily in writing; it's in spoken English, so I want to make sure you understand that. You may see it in, you know, like songs' lyrics or modern works of literature, you know, or in conversation when they're writing, you know, paragraphs, like: "What are you doin', Johnny?" But it's not supposed to be written in formal language.

So, if you're doing an essay or a government document, please do not use these forms that I'm about to teach you. Okay? Understand them when you read them and when someone is speaking, and you can understand why they're saying: "What are you doin'?" instead of "doing". That it's the same word, same meaning, but just a different pronunciation. Okay? And this is what we said here, right? The "g" is dropped, causing a change in the pronunciation. The meaning of the verb, however, stays the same. I can say: "How are you doing?" and "How you doin'?" Same word, same meaning, different pronunciation. Just... We call it colloquial usage.

Here are some examples. "Are you goin' to the party? Are you going to the party? Are you goin' to the party?" Okay? There you go. The dropping the "g" is shown by the apostrophe. And sometimes when you read a comic book, or a book, or a novel, you know, a romance novel, and they're saying: "He's goin' to help us." That's what this is. So you don't have to go: "What is this new word in English I've never seen before?"

"What is she sayin'? What is she sayin'?" Instead of: "What is she saying? What is she saying?" where our tongue drops to the bottom of our mouth. "What is she saying? Saying", tongue down here. "Sayin'", tongue goes to the top of the mouth. "n" sound is at the top; "ing" sound is at the bottom.

"He is doin' it for you." Sorry. "He is doin' it now for you. He is doin' it". I have a hard time saying these things. Okay? This is... So, it's not in my language. It's not in my vernacular. Not in my vocabulary, so for me to say it, I actually have to think about it. So I really do when you understand when you have a problem with it. Okay? So: "He is doin' it now for you."

And to be honest, this is not even right. This is an incorrect sentence. Nobody who would say this would say "for you". He would say: "He is doin' now for ya. He's doin' it now for ya, and that's how it's going to go." So, if you don't like it, I'm like: I'm sorry, but this is how you would normally speak with that. This kind of contraction will lead to this kind of English, and "ya" means "you", and that's why I have a hard time saying it… […]