Hi everyone and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast. My name is Mandy, and this is our 34th episode. I want to start today by thanking Keoki, Monica, and Shorthair for starting topics in the

forums. I'm really excited about the learning opportunities we all have as the online community

builds at pronuncian.com. If you haven't checked it out yet, just click the forums link on the right-hand side of

any pronuncian.com page. Join the discussions about the NG sound, ZH sound, coffee versus

tea, or start your own new topic. It is free and it is for everybody. If you're a teacher and listen to these shows,

please add your input too. I have to say, the discussion about the nasal G sound in Japanese

compared to the NG sound in English has me very curious. If you are a native Japanese speaker, let us know what

your opinion is. It would also be great to have some other non-native speakers' comments about

the Z-H sound. Short hair, I'm not exactly sure if I answered your question or not.

I wasn't exactly sure what you were asking. Let me know.

Wherever you are from, whatever your first language is, go to the forums at pronuncian.com, and let's all learn together.

Well, today is the final day of the topic of syllable stress. and let's all learn together.

Well, today is the final day of the topic of syllable stress.

Five weeks is a long time to spend on any topic.

So I hope these in-depth podcasts have been useful to all of you.

Syllable stress is more important than I feel most teachers realize.

It's not just sound that causes miscommunication, and the rhythm of English builds on syllable stress. So if your syllable stress is off, your rhythm and intonation will also be off, and that

will make you sound less fluent.

We've learned a lot of things already about syllable stress.

We learned the two-syllable word rule, which states that two-syllable nouns, adverbs, and adjectives are usually stressed on the first syllable,

and that two-syllable verbs are usually stressed on the second syllable.

Then we learned that suffixes in English control which syllable of many words receives the stress. Words that end in the

...