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

My name is Mandy, and this is podcast number six.

If this is your first time listening to this podcast, you should know that this is the third of three podcasts dealing with the L sound and R sound.

You may want to go back and start with podcast number four.

I hope you've all had a chance to visit www.pronuncian.com and see the other free practice activities we offer on that site,

as well as read the transcripts if they help you understand this information.

Did you memorize last week's practice sentence?

I would really like a little red wagon like Laura's?

How about the sentence before that?

On Thursday, Thelma threw three red rocks.

Before that, we had the S-S-sound-Z-sound practice in the sentence,

"'Cats love boxes, dogs love beds.

Today we will learn about

R-controlled vowels, and we will practice the sentence,

learning early in the morning can be fairly hard work.

So what are these R-controlled vowels I've been talking about for two weeks now?

All of the sounds I've talked about so far have been consonant sounds. In the Latin alphabet, the alphabet

English uses, we have 26 letters. 21 of those are consonants. For example, the letters T, D, S, Z, L, and R are consonants.

The letters that aren't consonants are vowels. We have five vowels, A, E, I, O, and U.

These five vowels are used to represent 15 different sounds.

How do we have so many sounds for so few letters?

Well, think about the words top and home.

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