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

My name is Mandy and this is our 196th episode.

I received an email from someone named Chow a few weeks ago.

Chow was a native Chinese speaker who's having

trouble with words that end in L-E and asked me to do a podcast about it. Like many other

Chinese speakers, Chow is substituting a long O sound for the L-sound at the end of words. After nearly 200 episodes,

I was sure I'd covered this topic before, but after some digging, I realized I hadn't

exactly covered it. The closest I've come is talking about the syllabic L in episode 142. While the syllabic L is related to this problem,

this is a little more specific. When I got the email from Chow, it really struck a chord

because Queenie, an in-person Chinese student of mine, is having the exact same problem.

Chow mentioned the following specific words, which I'll say first,

then you'll hear Queenie say in her natural Chinese accent.

People. People.

Table. Table.

Bottle. Bottle.

Cuddle. Cuddle.

Struggle. Struggle.

Even if your native language is not Chinese, it's really easy to accidentally do the same

thing that Chow and Queenie are doing.

While we think of the L being created by careful tongue placement, this specific issue

is caused much more by what the lips are doing.

You see, even if your tongue is in the right place, if your

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