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

This is podcast number seven, and my name is Mandy.

We've just finished up three shows dedicated to the R sounds and L sound,

and we had some pretty difficult practice sentences associated with those sounds.

Do you remember on Thursday, Thelma threw three red rocks?

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

And finally, last week's really hard sentence,

learning early in the morning can be fairly hard work.

Let's talk a bit about last week's practice.

Remember, I told you that the practice sentence has all four R-controlled vowels.

The schwa plus R is in the words learning, early, and work.

The OR sound, or, is in the word morning.

The A-R sound, R, is in the word hard, and the A-I-R sound, air, is in the word fairly. Did you get that? I hope so.

Today's sentence is going to be, will you watch TV quietly while I'm working? Because we are going to learn about

the Y sound and W sound. The Y sound and W sound are in the linguistic category of semi-vowels.

They're also known as glides. Semivowel means that they are not quite vowels and not quite consonants.

They are similar to vowels in the way the sound travels through our mouth,

but dissimilar in how they affect syllables.

Vowal sounds have two important attributes.

First, there is little constriction in our mouth for these sounds. Vowel sounds don't create friction like the TH sounds or R sound in some languages.

Vowels don't stop air like the T sound or D sound, or touch the tongue directly to another

part of our mouth, like an L sound.

...