As I have created a new series of sound videos that use photos with parts of the mouth drawn in, I wanted to go over those parts of the mouth.

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All of my sound videos have photos of the mouth with the parts of the mouth drawn in. So I want to take a quick minute to talk about those parts of the mouth. Most of them are obvious: tongue, teeth, throat, but I want to talk a little bit about the hard and soft palate. The hard and soft palate are what make up the roof of the mouth. So if you take your tongue and slide it along the top of your mouth you can feel the hard palate. And when you get way further back, the soft palate. So the soft palate is very far behind there and it feel soft compared to what comes before it.

Now the soft palate is raised in all sounds of English except for three consonant sounds. The N, the M, and the NG []. This is probably not something that you need to think about or worry about too much. I do want to tell you about it because it appears in all the photos. But it's quite natural to raise the soft palate. The thing that I will say about it is that if someone is telling you your sounds sound too much in the nose or too nasal, that probably means that your soft palate is lowered when it should be raised. The soft palate raises naturally when you yawn. So that is one thing to help thing about how to raise, what it feels like back there to raise the soft palate.

Now I will step through all the parts of the mouth, as they are not identified in every sound video. These represent the front teeth in the mouth, both top and bottom. And here the rest of the top teeth. This is the hard palate, the soft palate, raised here because this is the 'ah' as in 'father' vowel [], the throat, and the tongue. So this is the anatomy of the mouth as I draw them in the sound videos. And of course in each sound, things like the soft palate and the tongue will be in different positions.