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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 77th episode.

Today is a Back to Basics podcast exploring four vowel sounds that I have talked about in the past,

long e, short I, short E, and short U.

Today I'm going to talk about them as a sequence of sounds.

When I say sequence of sounds, I mean that these sounds occur in a related series of vocal tract movements.

The similarities between these sounds makes them extra important to explore as a series.

Learning how they relate to one another can help you learn to hear them,

and you must be able to hear the difference if you're going to be able to pronounce the difference.

Again, today's sounds are the long e, short I, short E, and short U.

We're going to explore them in that order.

Remember, don't get confused by the names of the sounds.

They don't really mean anything.

I call them by their well-known American names,

so I know that you know which sound I'm talking about. If I just said the sound, it would do no good if your ear is not trained to differentiate

between similar sounds, and these sounds are all very similar.

I'm going to start by giving you a minimal set that contains all four of these sounds.

I'll start with the long E, then go to the short I, then the short E, then the short E, then the short U.

Beat, Bit, bet, but.

Here it is again.

Beat, bit, bet, but.

The vowel sounds of those words were long e, short I, short E, short E, short U.

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