Second Verse Same as the First

November 12th, 2001

In the last installment, I gave you a list of phrases to repeat at a pretty
full volume for four repetitions. Thus:
Guddah-Buddah (say: guddah-buddah, guddah-buddah, guddah-buddah,
guddah-buddah)

After you have gone through that list both forward and backward (ie: both
guddah-buddah AND buddah-guddah), try this additional variation: do three
sets going both forward and backward, thus:

Guddah-buddah - buddah gudda, guddah-buddah - buddah gudda, guddah-buddah -
buddah gudda

Note that in this round you only do three sets of repetitions, again, full
voice and at a fairly good clip. If you stumble and miss a sound here and
there, DON’T slow down to get it correct. Do the corrections over a long
period of time to the full-volume, fast tempo versions of the exercise.

To summarize, in this first round of exercises, you have a number of
variations to practice:

a-b, a-b, a-b, a-b
b-a, b-a, b-a, b-a
a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a
b-a-a-b, b-a-a-b, b-a-a-b
These are the basic articulation and diction exercises that you will find
yourself doing over the course of many, many years. They warm your
equipment up, they loosen your tongue and tighten your abilities to get
your mouth around complicated syllables.

While these exercises are repetitive to the max, if you simply zone out,
and not think about what you are doing, you won’t benefit from their
ability to strenthen those delicate muscles in your mouth, throat, lips and
neck that you use to form the sounds needed to speak properly.

Once you have mastered that original list, from “guddah-buddah” to
“lip-sips”, we can move on to some complicated short phrases and sayings.
More on them next installment. In the meantime, keep breathing deeply!