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

My name is Mandy.

Today we are going to continue our lesson about linking, so if you haven't listened to

episode 14 yet, I'd suggest you do so before listening to this one today.

As a review, linking is a technique used to help with the rhythm of English.

Linking means to join two or more words together without pausing between them.

Last week, we studied linking a consonant sound to a vowel sound.

I hope you remember that we must share the final consonant of the first word

with the word that comes after it in order to link them.

As an example, linking the words wake plus up sounds like, wake up.

The final word, up, is said nearly identical to the word cup in that sequence.

Wake up.

Linking vowels is a bit more difficult, however, because instead of sharing a sound between two words, we need to

add a sound, specifically a W sound or a Y sound. Let's listen to an example. In the phrase, I asked,

the first word ends in a long I, and the following word begins with a short A.

To fluidly link the words together, we add a Y sound between them.

Listen again.

I asked.

I asked.

Now listen to an example that uses a W sound to link the words. Go away. Did you hear the

W sound between the words? Listen again. Go away. So how do you know if the vowels should link with a

W sound or a Y sound? Well, I could list all the sound combinations, but really it becomes very

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