Hello again, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

This is podcast number three.

If you've forgotten or listening for the first time, my name is Mandy.

Remember, pronuncian.com is where you can find transcripts and

show notes to all our podcasts, as well as each practice sentence or word set. Today's practice

sentence will be the sentence, cats love boxes, dogs love beds. We'll come back to that later.

I hope you still remember our practice sentence from

podcast number one. Think about this thing, that thing, and those things. I hope you also

practiced our D sound, T sound minimal pairs from podcast number two. Dime, time, dense, tense, code, coat, tied, tight, spend, spent.

When I say that this is an American English pronunciation podcast, I'm referring to what is

known as the general American accent. The accent is considered to be the most neutral accent

for the United States. Canadian accents are quite similar to an American accent, or at least are more

similar to an American accent than, say, a British accent or an Australian accent. Certainly,

there are variances in English spoken around the world as well as within English-speaking countries.

Certainly, there are variances in English spoken around the world as well as within English-speaking countries.

I grew up in the United States, and since I teach in the United States, and most of my students are longtime residents of the

United States, I know far more about American accents than any other accent of spoken

English.

Wikipedia has a map of where the general American accent is most prevalent.

I've linked to that site from pronuncian.com.

I'm from Wisconsin, just north of the area shown on this map. However,

since I'm actually from northern Wisconsin, I had a strong accent from that area when I moved to

...