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

This is podcast number 17. My name is Mandy. I'm going to get back into some sound practice for a few weeks because there are still quite a few sounds to study.

Since it's been a few weeks, I'll review a little bit of the vocabulary from earlier sound

podcasts. Today we are going to study the voiced, unvoiced, fricative consonant pair,

the S-H sound and Z-H sound.

Most students are well aware of the S-H sound,

the first sound in the words she and show.

The Z-H sound is a less common sound. It sounds like j-h,

and is in the words usual and casual.

We'll have a practice sentence for these sounds today.

It is, vision is usually measured with special machines.

I'll come back to that sentence later.

The S-H sound and Z-H sound are fricatives. If you've been listening since the beginning

of these podcasts, you may remember from the first podcast, which was about the voiced and unvoiced

TH sounds, that a fricative is a continuous sound that is created by allowing only a small amount of air to leave the

mouth, which causes friction and sound. Something special about fricatives is that we can continue to

make the sound for as long as we have breath in our lungs. I'm going to say both the S-H sound

and the Z-H sound so you can hear the friction,

and so you can notice that I can continue to say the sound for a long time.

Another special thing about the S-H-Sound and Z-H sound is that they are a voiced, unvoiced pair.

We've studied three sets of voiced and unvoiced pairs so far, the voiced, unvoiced T-H sounds,

the S- sound and Z sound in episode 2, and the S sound in Z sound in episode 3.

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