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

My name is Mandy and this is our 41st episode.

Don't forget, our first video podcast will be released in just a couple of days on January 1, 2009.

I decided to start talking about a few odd silent letters that seem to get missed when many non-native speakers are first learning English.

The accidental addition of these silent sounds

won't usually cause miscommunication.

It'll just make you sound a little more fluent

if you are aware of these small rules.

Today I'm going to talk about the silent B

in the M.B spelling, like the word

climb, C-L-I-M-B. The silent B in the M-B spelling only happens at the ends of words,

and it only happens in about 10 words, but I want you to know about it.

Just because you see the B at the end of the word does not mean that you need to say it.

The final sound in the word climb is the M sound, not a B sound.

Climb, not climb.

This rule is simple.

If a word ends in the letters Mb, the B is silent.

Let's look at some examples.

I already told you the word climb.

Some others are thumb, comb, crumb, lamb, limb, limb, balm, and dumb. I want to make it clear that we can still add the necessary grammatical suffixes to the word.

So the B is silent in Climb, Clim, Climed, or even climber.

The word no longer ends in M.B., but the B is still silent because the original root word ended in M.B.

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