Happy New Year again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English

pronunciation podcast. My name is Mandy and this is our 204th episode. Yes, here I am with

another podcast episode right on schedule. Yay.

In other good news, our January coupon code of Happy 2015 is still good for 15% off any book,

e-book, or class purchase from pronencian.com or Seattle Learning.com.

That was H-A-P-P-P-Y-2015 for 15% off your purchase.

This special ends on January 31st, 2015, so don't put it off.

I recently received an email from Nick, asking about pronouncing the word have, H-A-V-E as half specifically he wrote I found it really

confusing that sometimes people say the word have as half especially when they are doing

it to the phrase have to why do people do that and when to use that I'm really puzzled

Nick realized two important things here first he's right we do often say the word

have as half second this is more likely to occur when the word two follows it. Nice job, Nick.

What Nick is asking about is the informal contraction, Hafta, usually spelled H-A-F-T-A.

After I received this question from Nick, I searched pronuncian.com for the word hafta,

expecting to see that I had talked about this particular informal contraction in the past.

I was surprised to see that in the past 203 episodes, I never actually talked about Hafta.

So, thanks Nick for bringing this to my attention so I can do a podcast about it today.

The word hafta is an informal contraction that joins the word have to the word to. We use it in sentences like, I have to call my mom.

Do we really have to go?

Or, you have to see that movie.

Now, I said havea is an informal contraction, but what are informal contractions?

Contractions in general are words that are created by combining words in order to shorten them from their original form.

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