Welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

This is podcast number two. My name is Mandy.

I hope you enjoyed our last podcast, the TH Sounds Podcast.

I also hope you went to www. www.pronuncian.com for more TH

sounds lessons and practice. Pronuncian.com is also where you can find transcripts and show notes

to all our podcasts. Today's practice will be five sets of minimal pairs. Dime, time, dense, tense, code, coat, tied, tight, and spend spent.

We'll come back to those later.

I introduced the concept of voiced and unvoiced sounds during the TH Sounds podcast.

In case you've forgotten, we have both a voiced and an unvoiced TH sound.

I also hope you remember that TH sounds are a type of sound called fricatives.

Frickatives are continuous sounds that are created by allowing only a small amount of air to leave

the mouth.

Today I'm going to tell you about another kind of consonant sound, the stop.

Specifically, we are going to explore the T sound, T, and the D sound, D.

These sounds are called stops, because to create them, we briefly stop all

air from leaving the mouth, and then we make the sound when the air is released. Do you remember

from last week's show that consonants often have a voiced and unvoiced pair? The D sound and T sound is another pair.

Before we talk about how to correctly create the English version of these sounds,

I want you to play with the inside of your mouth with your tongue.

Don't feel silly. Nobody can actually see you doing this.

Notice that right behind your upper teeth, you have a hard, bony bump.

That bump was necessary for creating the friction of our TH sounds last week.

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