Hi again and welcome back to the American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Amanda and this is our 217th episode.

Listen to the end of this show to hear how our sponsor, audible.com, can help you learn better English pronunciation.

Our last episode was about the cardinal vowels, those vowels in the corners of the vowels

diagram. The cardinal vowels in English are the long E, O, O sound, short O, and short A.

E, O, A, A. The O sound, O, and short O, are in the right side of the diagram because we create them using the back of our tongue.

The long E, and short A, are both forward vowel sounds and they are shown on the left-hand side of the diagram.

We create these sounds using the front of the tongue.

Today I'm going to compare the long E to the two front vowels below it on the diagram,

the short I and the short E. Before I get into the descriptions of how to say the vowels, I want to remind everyone,

or mention it for the first time, if you're a new listener to this podcast, that the terms

long vowel and short vowel aren't actually describing the length of time we say the vowel sounds.

These are just the names that people in the United States tend to use for these sounds. I use these names here because I know that if you

want to learn more about these sounds, you can search online using these names and find more

information about these same sounds.

The International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are great for displaying which sound we're talking

about if you can look at a chart. But since we only have audio here, we need to also have a common

term for sounds. Now, as I said in the last episode, the long E is a sound that exists in many languages.

When I say the sound, E, the front of my tongue is high and very near my tooth ridge.

The tooth ridge is that bump right behind my top front teeth.

Take a second and use your tongue to feel the tooth ridge.

Feel it?

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