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

podcast. My name is Mandy and this is our 129th episode. Episode 127 covered the

vowel sound issues faced by native Portuguese speakers.

Now let's get into some issues with consonant sounds.

Here's a warning.

I'm about to give you a lot of information all at once.

If this is the first time you're hearing all of this, you'll want to go back and listen to related podcasts, or it will just be too much to fully understand.

Also, for complicated episodes like this one, reading the transcripts while listening is a good idea.

You can find transcripts and links to the free

pronunciation lessons associated with this episode at www.prenuncian.com

slash transcripts. Here we go. Native Portuguese speakers tend to have a fair

amount of trouble with discontinuous consonants.

Discontinuous consonants are all the sounds that require the air to be stopped at some point before leaving the vocal tract.

In English, we have eight discontinuous consonants.

Six are stops and two are africates.

Let's start with the stops.

All the stop sounds occur in voiced and unvoiced pairs,

meaning that the overall shape of the vocal tract is the same for the voiced and unvoiced sounds.

The B sound, D sound, and G sound are voiced, while the P sound, T sound, and K sound are unvoiced.

The voiced sounds require our vocal chords to vibrate, and the unvoiced sounds do not.

Another equally important difference between the voiced and unvoiced stops is aspiration.

Aspiration is the puff of air that comes out when the stop is released.

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