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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 111th podcast.

In our last show, I talked about the V sound and F sound, and the similarities between those

sounds and the B sound, P sound, and W sound.

There are three main points I want you to remember from that show.

First, the V sound is voiced and the F sound is unvoiced.

Second, the F sound and V sound are fricatives, and fricatives are continuous consonants.

To create continuous consonant sounds, air must come out of the mouth smoothly and softly and evenly. The air must never

completely stop during an F sound or V sound, or something similar to a B sound or a P sound may

accidentally occur. And third, the F sound and V sound are created when the air is pushed out of the mouth

between the back side of the bottom lip and the front side of the top teeth. The top lip must not be

involved in a V sound or a sound similar to a W sound may accidentally occur.

Today I'm going to expand on those ideas to tell you how to link to and from a V sound and an F sound.

Linking is smoothly transitioning from word to word in connected speech.

The problem I most hear when non-native speakers are linking other sounds to or from a V sound or

an F sound is that the speaker adds a slight vowel sound between the words.

This usually occurs because the speaker is curling the bottom lip under the top teeth.

I blame us, the ESL and ELL teachers for this mistake.

When we are teaching very new English language learners, the sounds of English, we tend to

overemphasize the sounds. We make the sounds big and dramatic so that the learners can see

and hear what we're doing. If your first language does not include a V sound or an F sound,

your teacher probably taught you to curl your bottom lip under your top teeth, then blow air

...