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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 191st episode.

You might think that I've said all there is to say about the importance of understanding stop sounds

and how the differences of their aspiration are especially important for linking.

But no, I'm not done yet.

These linking techniques contain a lot of advanced levels of details,

and we could get pretty deep into these topics.

So far, I've talked about linking the same stops, voiced and unvoiced pairs of stops, and

different stops into each other.

Today I'm going to explain linking vowels and stops.

When thinking about linking vowels and consonants, it's easy to think that we just blend

of the sounds, and somewhat we do.

But because of differences in aspiration or the puff of air that occurs when we release

stops, we can describe very tiny details that can help you achieve

native-like English pronunciation and have an accent that's more easily understood.

We're getting to know quite a bit about types of sounds called stops.

Let's review what we know. 1. We have 6 stop sounds.

2. Stop sounds are the sounds where we completely block the air using our tongue or lips,

hold the air for a tiny amount of time, and then release it.

The release of air is called aspiration.

3. The T, P, and K sounds are unvoiced stop sounds.

4. The D, B, and G sounds are voiced stop sounds.

...