Hi everyone, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 109th episode. It's still free audiobook time.

Listen at the end of today's show to hear about this week's pick for a great

audiobook for non-native speakers, The Giver, by Lois Lowry.

Also, a quick announcement that we're going to go to an every other week schedule through

summer.

Seattle weather is often thought of as gray and dreary and rather unpleasant,

but that is only in the winter.

We have beautiful warm and sunny summer weather,

and instead of writing and recording every week,

I'm going to cut back and spend more time enjoying the beautiful place I live.

We plan to resume our weekly schedule at the end of September.

I hope you all understand.

For today's show, I'm going to compare four sounds that are all really close to one another.

The S sound, Z sound, S-H sound, and Z-H-sound.

Today's show is full of vocabulary related to learning about pronunciation.

Hopefully you're familiar with at least some of it.

If not, don't worry.

I'll explain everything that is necessary for understanding

these sounds. The S sound, Z sound, S-H sound, S-H sound, and Z-H sound are all fricatives,

which means we produce the sound by closing the vocal tract enough that friction and sound is created

when we push air out our mouth. Fricatives are continuous consonants, which means that the

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