How to make the sound:

Video Text:

Yy as a consonant.  Is it a consonant, is it a vowel?  That doesn't really matter.  What I want to talk about here is how it is different from the vowel ee.  So we have the word ear, ear, but we also have the word year, as in day, week, month, year.  For people who don't have these two sounds in their native language, it's very difficult for them to hear a difference, and, therefore, very difficult for them to make a difference when they say it.  But it's an important sound.  It starts the word year.  Yesterday.  You.  So, how to make it?  How is it different from the vowel ee?  Well, the mouth position is the same.  But what is different is how you start it.  You start it from here.  Uh, uh, as opposed to here, ee.  You almost start it with this sound:  uh.  So, if you start with the mouth in the ee position but you start the sound down here and quickly bring it up, you get the proper sound.  I am going to do it very slowly and alternate between ear and year, as in day, month, year.  Ear, year, ear, year, ear, year.  Sample words:  you, yikes, yahoo.  Sample sentence:  Yesterday, you celebrated New Year's.

International Phonetic Alphabet symbol:  []

I have seen many resources that represent this sound with the [y] symbol, which is not IPA, but rather the Americanist Phonetic notation system.  I am going to stick with the correct IPA symbol.  See Wikipedia's page for more information, inlcuding it's occurrences in other languages.