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

My name is Mandy and this is our 173rd episode.

We're coming up on our five-year anniversary of this podcast, and to celebrate, listen

to the end of today's show to learn how you can win a free e-book copy of pronunciation pages

two and a free hour-long pronunciation consultation with me.

We've been having a lot of fun posting to our English Assembly Facebook page based on podcast themes lately.

We've also gotten to learn some things about the way our audience thinks about pronunciation,

which has been fascinating.

A few weeks ago, I published a podcast about silent letters and then posted a word with

an unexpected silent letter to the Facebook page every day.

From this, I learned that a lot of people view silent letters the way that I view digraphs

and trigraphs. Diagraphs and trigraphs.

Diagraphs and trigraphs.

Those are two words I'm pretty sure I've never used before on these podcasts.

Even if the words are new to you, I'm pretty sure you already understand the concept.

A digraph is simply the combination of two letters to represent I'm pretty sure you already understand the concept.

A digraph is simply the combination of two letters to represent one sound.

For instance, the SH spelling is a digraph.

When we see the letters SH, we expect the SH sound, SH, as in the words dish or shop.

When we see the letters T-H, we can expect either the voiced or unvoiced T-H sound, as in the words the and think.

A trigraph is a three-letter spelling, like the T-C-H spelling being pronounced as the

C-H sound in the words watch and catch. Although both vowel sounds and consonant sounds use

...