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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 184th episode.

In our last episode, I talked about the difference between the SH sound and S-s-sound.

I hope you remember, and I hope you've been practicing, because today I'm going to move on to

the Z-H sound, and the Z-H sound is closely related to the S-H sound.

The S-S-sound and S-H sound in our last episode were both unvoiced sounds.

Neither sound required our vocal cords to vibrate in order to produce the sound correctly.

Both of these sounds have voiced counterparts, however.

Those counterparts are the Z sound and the ZH sound.

Although the difference between voicing or not seems so small that you could think that

nobody would notice if you're using voicing correctly or not. Believe me,

it is noticeable. So let's practice it. First, let's review the SH sound. The SH sound

is created with the front of the tongue somewhat flat toward the back of the tooth ridge.

The air passes in a flat stream between the front of the tongue and the back of the tooth ridge.

It sounds like,

SH.

Say that sound after me.

SHH SH. She, shine Say that sound after me. Shhh.

She, shine, mesh.

Now I want you to say just the SH sound, and while you're saying it, place two fingers on the front of your throat. Do it with me.

Shh. Notice that you don't feel a vibration against your fingers when you say that sound.

Now let's turn the SH sound into a ZH sound by activating our vocal cords deep in our throat.

...