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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 74th episode. Last week, another forum post came up that I thought

would be great to demonstrate in a podcast.

This question about the pronunciations of four-f-O-R and four-f-o-U-R came from short hair,

and really linked well into last week's episode about the word of asked by S.V. Crow.

S.V. Crow left me a comment about last week's show, saying that it was still difficult to hear the linking of the word of.

So I thought I'd repeated again this week before getting into the new question.

Last week, I said that the word of O-F is often said as shua, and will sound like a,

when the word coming after the word of begins with a consonant sound.

I also said that we tend to reduce the word of so dramatically because it is a function word serving a more grammatical purpose than content

words. Remember, content words give the main content of what we're saying.

I'm going to link the reduced form of the word of to the word questions.

First, I'm going to say it as of with the V sound, then without.

The phrase is, a couple of questions. Now, here it is, with the

V sound. I'm going to say it's slower than you would typically hear, but I'm still going to link

the words. A couple of questions.

One more time.

A couple of questions.

And here it is reduced to just the

a, or schwa sound.

A couple of questions.

One more time.

...