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

My name is Mandy and this is our 189th episode.

I'm excited to say that I'm nearly finished with a brand new e-book on the topic of linking.

At its very simplest, linking is how we move from one word into the next when we're speaking.

Unfortunately, linking is a pronunciation skill that is too often overlooked by pronunciation teachers.

It might even be the least sexy topic when it comes to pronunciation.

Hopefully that's going to change.

Linking is kind of a magic skill.

When I've got students who are really struggling with the rhythm of English,

it often helps tremendously to practice simple linking, practice it often, and practice it in

different contexts. The context I'm going to talk about today is linking to and from the same stop sound and linking

to and from voiced and unvoiced pairs of stops.

To understand how to link same and similar stops, you have to understand a couple of things.

First, you have to know that stops are created

when we use the vocal tract to briefly, completely block the air. Second, you have to know that the

release of the blocked air is called aspiration. And third, you have to know that stops occur in voiced and unvoiced pairs.

English has six stop sounds, T and D, P and B and K and G. I just listed them in their unvoiced and voiced pairs.

An unvoiced sound is created without engaging the vocal chords, whereas the vocal cords

do vibrate during a voiced sound.

When it comes to linking, the most important aspect of unvoiced and voiced sounds is that when an unvoiced sound is released,

the puff of air that comes out of our mouth is bigger than the puff of air that comes out

when we release the voiced counterpart. So, to review, a T sound is unvoiced and a D sound is its voiced counterpart. The T will have a bigger

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