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

This is our 218th episode, and today we're doing a special kind of show.

One of the comments I frequently hear from my students is how working on pronunciation greatly

improves their listening comprehension.

It's true, practicing, pronouncing specific sounds has the fantastic side benefit of training

your ears to hear things that you may have never heard before.

You see, it's very difficult to pronounce something that you can't hear,

and our brains, after we're 13 or 14 years old,

stop easily hearing sounds that we haven't been exposed to.

The good news is that that doesn't mean you can't learn to hear sounds,

even if you're older than that. And we're going to practice that today. In the past two episodes,

I talked about a number of different vowel sounds. Today I want to do some listening practice,

comparing a few of those specific sounds that I know non-native speakers have trouble distinguishing.

First, we're going to review the sounds.

Let's begin with short A and short E.

The short A is pronounced a and is the vowel sound in the word cat.

A, cat.

The short E is pronounced E, and is the vowel sound in the word bed.

A, bed.

Listen to the short A, short E, comparison.

A.

E.

...