Hello, everyone. It's me, Mandy.

Welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

This is podcast number four.

Today we are going to begin a series of podcasts dedicated to one of the most

hated sounds of English, the R sound and L sound. These are very complicated sounds, and it will

take us a few shows to get through them in their entirety. In fact, today we aren't even going

to talk about the L sound. Our sentence for

practicing the R sound today is, on Thursday, Thelma threw three red rocks. It is no accident that we are

putting so much emphasis on the R sound after the unvoiced T.H. sound in that sentence.

Before we begin talking about the R sound and L sound, let's review our sentences and word sets

from podcasts one through three. First, the T.H. sounds. Repeat after me. Think about this thing, that thing, and those things.

Then our D sound, T sound, minimal pairs. Dime time, dense, tense, code, coat, tied tight, spend, spent.

And finally, our S-sound, Z-sound practice with the S-sendings in the sentence,

Cats love boxes, dogs love beds.

All of these practice sentences are in the show notes, along with the audio for them,

as well as the transcripts for each show at www.

.prenuncian.com. Now back to the R-Sound and L sound. First, let's give these sounds a category.

We'll use the common linguistic term, liquid, for these two sounds. Liquid is the most consistent

term I've found for these sounds. When speaking in the general American accent, Americans use

erotic R, which means we say it in all parts of the word, including when it occurs after a vowel sound.

This is one of the major differences among accents of English.

I tell my students, where you see an R written, pronounce the R sound.

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