Hi everyone and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast. My name is Mandy, and this is our 50th episode. I hope you enjoyed last week's video podcast about the long eye and short eye sounds. Next week, I'll do another video podcast that

compares the short eye to the short e and long e. I hear so many people who cannot say the short

eye properly that I think it's well worth the time to compare those three similar sounds.

Plus, I really want to focus on what these sounds look like from outside the mouth,

so I want you to be able to see me say these sounds.

Today, since I'm getting good feedback from people saying that they're enjoying these topics,

I'm going to continue talking about words that have unusual silent letters.

You can send me your thoughts about past or future shows as well.

Send comments to podcast at pronuncian.com,

or you can also post them on the forums on the

pronunciation website. Today's topic is the silent T in words like listen and whistle. That's right,

those T's are absolutely silent. Don't say them.

There are two different spelling patterns here to be aware of. The S-T-E-N pattern, as in the word listen,

and the S-T-L-E pattern, as in the word whistle.

Both of those patterns are pronounced with no T sound.

Let's look at the first word, listen.

Listen to the word.

Listen.

You are not hearing listin. What other words follow this pattern? Well, there aren't a lot of them,

but enough for me to call it a rule. Here are the words that end in the spelling, S-T-E-N. They all have a silent T. Listen, moisten, fasten, glisten. I know, it isn't very many words,

but if you happen to be an engineer, you may say the word fasten or fastener quite often.

And we all need the word listen.

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