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

This is episode 29, and my name is Mandy.

Last week, I talked about the H sound, and we practiced a few minimal pairs between words that begin with the H sound and words that are identical, except that they do not begin with the H sound.

Here's a repeat of a few of them.

Hair, air.

Hitch, itch. His, is.

Wards that are the same except one sound are called minimal pairs.

Minimal pairs are a great way to compare and contrast between two similar sounds.

They are important for training your ears so you can hear the difference between them

and then hear yourself to tell if you are saying the words correctly or not.

Minimal pairs are really helpful for today's topic, the short I and long e sounds.

I hear most of my students say these sounds the same as the long e sound.

Some of my first podcasts were about long and short vowels.

If you haven't heard them yet or haven't heard them in a while,

you may want to go back to episodes 8 and 9 and listen to them.

I want to make it very clear that the words long vowel and

short vowel do not refer to the length of time or duration, the vowel is said. While it is true that

some short vowels are said for less duration than long vowels, and

today's sounds do work out that way, it is not always true, and it absolutely does

not describe the difference between two different sounds.

The difference between a short A and a long A is not the length of time it is said.

In modern English pronunciation, those are just titles for sounds. You need to learn the length

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