Hi everyone. Welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American pronunciation podcast. This is podcast number 16. If you're just joining us, my name is Mandy.

I decided to stay on a topic related to rhythm today, since that is what we've been studying since episode number 12.

In fact, today's podcast about reduced pronouns had a lot of similarity to podcast 12, which was about common contractions.

If you don't remember the grammatical term, a pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun.

It is a word like he or she or they.

We use them all the time.

While there are no surprises with the pronunciation of most pronouns,

there are four in particular that have unusual pronunciation issues.

He, him, her, and them.

These four pronouns, when they are not the first word of a sentence or clause,

become very similar to a contraction.

With the words, he, him, and her,

we will omit the H sound at the beginning of a word

and link the remainder of the word to the word before it using the linking rules we learned

in the last two podcasts.

Here's an example.

If I reduce the pronoun and link the words, watch plus him, I get watch him. I take off the H sound of the

word him, then I link the C-H sound at the end of the word watch to the first sound of the word

him because it now begins with a vowel sound. Listen carefully again. Watch him. Watch him.

Listen to an example with the word he, and I'll add an informal contraction also, just for fun.

Does he want to come along? Did you hear it?

Does he? I removed the H sound of the word he, then linked the final Z sound of the word does to the long E sound of the reduced pronoun he.

...