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

My name is Mandy and this is our 190th episode.

In our last episode, I talked about linking same and similar stops.

I'm going to stay on the topic of linking stops today and talk about how to link combinations of stops that are a bit harder.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, please go back and listen to episode 189.

If you haven't heard that podcast yet, this one might not make a lot of sense to you.

So it's not terribly difficult to link from a T sound into another T sound, as in the phrase wait time.

My vocal tract doesn't need to move at all to go from one word to the next.

Similarly, my tongue also doesn't move if I'm going from a G sound into a K sound, as in the phrase dog catcher.

I'm just transitioning from a voiced G sound into an unvoiced K sound.

However, if I want to link a K sound into a T sound, as in the phrase snack time, my tongue

needs to move quite a bit. Put the phrase snack time into your mind and hold it there for a bit while we talk about what happens during this phrase.

For the K sound at the end of the word snack, the back of the tongue is high and the tip is low. Then, for the T sound at the beginning of the word time, the back of the tongue drops as the

front of the tongue lifts.

And it needs to be done while making the K sound very small.

How do I make the K sound very small?

I make it small by not aspirating it very much.

That is, the puff of air that leaves the mouth at the end of the K sound should be minimal.

That's because it's at the end of the word.

Then my tongue moved into a T sound, stopped the air normally,

and released it with a full, unvoiced sound aspiration. Why does it get a full aspiration? Because

it's the first sound of the word. All that movement and careful aspiration needs to happen very quickly.

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