Hi again, everyone. This is Mandy, and this is Seattle Learning Academy's American English

pronunciation podcast. This is podcast number 14 and the beginning of a couple of podcasts about

linking. Last week I talked about informal contractions, words like

Wana and Gunna and Lemmy. The purpose of informal contractions is to help with the rhythm of English.

By combining some words that occur frequently together into a single word, we can easily reduce those words

and stress the words surrounding them. Linking two words together also helps us control pauses

between words and use rhythm to its fullest. Some other teachers use the word blending

in the same way that I use the word linking.

Not all linked words blend together, though, so I find linking to be a more accurate term.

Linking, in its simplest terms, is joining one word into the next with no pauses between them.

We aren't creating a contraction because we aren't removing sounds or parts of words. We're just linking the final sound of one

word to the beginning sound of the next word. We use different strategies to link different

sounds together.

Native speakers do this intuitively, but it must be taught to many non-native speakers.

We usually link words all in a row until we come to a reason to pause.

That might be because it is where we would have punctuation in written English, or we are pausing

for emphasis of a word. Today, I am only going to talk about linking a consonant sound to a vowel

sound. If you are a new listener and aren't clear which sounds are consonants and which are vowels,

it would be a good idea to go back and listen

to some of the previous podcasts. For today, I'm just going to practice linking two or three

words together. When practicing linking, always think about the sounds that are next to each other,

but not in the same word.

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