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

My name is Amanda, and this is our 220th episode.

Today I'm going to talk about the NG sound, which is not just a reverse of the G plus N sound that we practiced in the

last episode. As a quick reminder, the G-sound plus N sound is created when the end of the G-sound

briefly overlaps the beginning of the N sound, as in the words ignore and signal.

The NG sound is a completely different thing.

When I'm talking about the NG sound, I'm talking about the single sound,

as in the words song and bring.

In linguistics, when two letters are used to create one sound, it's called a digraph.

Think about the S-H sound.

It's called the S-H sound because it's frequently spelled with the letters

S-H. But the pronunciation of the S-H sound has nothing to do with the individual S-S- sound or

H sound. They are a new sound, the SH sound. Sh.

The N-G sound is the same idea.

The N-G sound is not an N- sound followed by a G sound.

Instead, it is one single nasal sound created with the back of the tongue in the same place as the

G sound.

It sounds like, hmm, and I think it's the hardest of the three nasal sounds in English.

If you remember from our last episode, the other two nasal sounds are the N sound and M sound.

Listen to me say the word song.

I'm going to hold the end of the word so you can really clearly hear it.

Song.

...