Hi everyone and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast. My name is Mandy,

and this is podcast number 20. Today's podcast is exciting for a number of reasons. First, I'm looking for input from all of you.

I'm planning to start adding supplemental podcasts in addition to these regular ones that are language-specific.

I know I'm going to do one for Japanese speakers first and Spanish speakers second

because many of our listeners come from Japan,

as well as Spanish-speaking countries. After that, I'll go down the list of what I can

guess other listeners speak based on the country you're listening from. If you're listening

from the United States, I have no idea what your first language is.

I can't get that information through my podcast tracking software.

I need you to tell me.

In addition, I'm wondering what your language's specific problems are.

Send me a quick email and tell me what language you speak as well as what sounds or aspects

of pronunciation you find the most troublesome. The more I hear from a language group, the more

likely it is that I will do a special podcast for your language, and the more specific I can get

with resources to help you.

The second reason that this is an exciting podcast is because it is the first one in a set of podcasts about sentence stress

and the rhythm of spoken English.

It's a bit too detailed to be able to cover all in one podcast,

so I'm going to spend two or three weeks on it.

I've talked about the rhythm of English before during podcasts on contractions and reduced pronouns.

Those were episodes number 12, 13, and 16, but this podcast finally gets into some specifics

of how to deal with sentence stress.

...