Hello, listeners around the world. I have to say, I am surprised at the international audience this podcast has been getting. I started producing the American English pronunciation podcast to give extra instruction to my students and to offer reminders for my

former students. So I'm excited to see that there are so many people from all over listening.

So far, Japan and Spain have the most listeners outside the United States. If you are listening

from outside the United States, please send me an

email and say hello. Tell me how you like the podcast. You can send emails to podcast at pronuncian.com.

If you are a new listener, welcome. My name is Mandy, and this is the Seattle Learning Academy's American English

pronunciation podcast, and this is episode number 10. We worked on vowels during episodes 8 and 9.

We studied the long vowels, which are usually the easiest vowels, then went down to short vowels.

If you can remember the key words from those episodes, hooray for you.

If not, here they are again.

The long vowel keywords are, and you should repeat after me if you are in a place where you can talk to yourself.

Cake, keep, bike, home, cute.

Remember, the long vowels sound like their letter names,

A, E, I, O, and U.

Much harder are the short vowels. Here are their keywords.

Cat, bed, sit, top, sun. Those sounds were

ah, eh, e, i, i, ah. Our final five vowels don't fit into a neat category, so I'm just going to call them the other vowels.

I want to say again that the linguists don't all agree on the number of vowels or which ones there are.

I teach what I have found to most help my students over the past three years of working with them on pronunciation.

At Seattle Learning Academy, and for this podcast, we teach 15 vowel sounds.

We aren't going to study all of the last five vowel sounds today,

because I want to be able to focus on the two harder sounds.

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