Hi again, everyone.

This is Mandy with Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

This is episode 28.

Today we're marking a grand occasion.

Today I will introduce the last sound of English pronunciation,

the H sound. The H sound doesn't always get much attention, but it should. After today,

I'll begin going into more detail about specific sounds and refer back to these earlier podcasts for general

information about sounds and their categories. I will also spend some time talking about

syllable stress. Eventually, I'll get into intonation, which I know everyone wants to know more

about. We did talk a little about the H sound way back in

episode 16 when I talked about reduced pronouns. If you haven't heard that show yet, it would be a

good one to go back and listen to. The H sound is a fricative, so it's in the same category as the TH sounds,

the S-H sound, Z-H sound, F-sound, V-sound, S-sound, and Z-Sound. All of those sounds have voiced and unvoiced pairs. The H sound is different

because it doesn't have a voiced counterpart. The H sound can be pretty hard to hear through

microphones and I'm surprised how often it sounds like a speaker doesn't use the H sound when I listen to the radio.

I'm pretty certain that those native speakers are actually saying the H sound,

but the filters on the microphone block it because it's such a small and quiet sound.

So I will try to make the sound so my microphone will pick it up, yet not over-exaggerate the

sound and distort it. Here it is. H sound. That sound comes from way down in my throat. I'm restricting

the space in my throat just a little bit while

pushing the air out. Listen again. H sound. I hear three errors with this sound. The first error is

using too much friction. I'm going to attempt to create a sound like I hear from some non-native speakers.

...