Ok so now that you know a how to produce the schwa, let’s just start with some fun facts about the schwa sound. 

It is the most common sound in English. That’s crazy. 

Uh…the schwa sound is um...a sound that we produce all the time, unconsciously. We don’t think about it’s production, uhh, it just comes out of our mouths naturally. We say the schwa all the time. 

The som do schwa can be represented by any vowel. That’s even crazier. 

And serves as further proof that you written English doesn’t have anything to do with the way we speak. So for example with the letter /a/, we have words like. 

About. Above. What? What are you talking about. Around. Amazing. Another. Apartment. Again. Banana. Canada. America. 

Ah that is a good one. America. If you say Ah-merica-that is a dead giveaway that you are not from around here. America. 

But it can also be represented with the letter “e” like different, petition, celebrate. 

Or sometimes we use the “i” spelling like president, experiment. 

Or we can use the “o” like of, occur, develop. 

And then we have a ton of other crazy combinations like “cion”. Nation, education, permission. 

Or “sion”, like profession, depression. I think you might suffer from depression after this lesson. 

Ok, so the moral of the story here is that the schwa is everywhere! We use it all of the time and it is represented in almost every possible written vowel combination.