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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 174th episode.

This episode is sponsored by Pauline Midwinter of Midwinter Tuition.

You can download her Android app, listen to our Ellicution podcast, or contact her for online

lessons at midwintertuition.co.uk.

Thanks, Pauline.

This is a really exciting episode to have a sponsor for, because we have the exciting announcement of who won our contest to guess how many total podcast downloads we've had over the past five years.

As of March 21, 2013, we have had 8,461,381 total downloads.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for all of your support over the past five years.

We appreciate all of the iTunes reviews, the emails, the questions,

and all of the ways you have interacted with us.

It's because of your eagerness to learn that we keep publishing year after year.

So the winner of the prize, an e-book version of pronunciation pages 2, as well as an

hour-long consultation with me, is Michael Kubot. How did Michael win this prize? He

added guesses to our Facebook page. I invite all of you to also participate with us through our Facebook page,

which is Facebook.com slash English Assembly. Now let's get on with our show.

Our 164th podcast about consonant clusters was really pretty popular,

so I decided to do a follow-up podcast today about three sound initial consonant clusters.

The clusters S-P-L, S-K-R, S-P-R, and S-T-R, all begin with the S-S- sound, then move into a stop sound, and then into either

the L sound or the R sound. That's three consecutive consonant sounds. For languages without strings of three consonant sounds in a row, these can be pretty difficult

sequences to pronounce.

You can read along with me as I talk today by going to www.pronuncian.com slash podcast,

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