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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 79th episode.

Here we go with another week of vowel comparisons.

Every week, when I meet with my individual students, I'm reminded of the power of comparing vowel sounds. Vowels are just hard. They're

much more difficult to hear, and it is hard to feel exactly where your tongue is inside your mouth when it

isn't actually touching anything. For instance, it's much easier to feel a T sound, T, or even a T-H-sound,

than it is to feel a vowel sound like ah or a.

Because of these troublesome aspects of vowel sound production, we'll continue to compare

vowels that have similarities. Hopefully, that will help you tune your vowels correctly, just like we tune

musical instruments. Today, I'm first going to compare the long A and long I, then compare

those sounds to the long E sound. I also recently added new free pronunciation lesson

comparing these three sounds on pronuncian.com.

If you learn better by reading descriptions and seeing the illustrations,

check out these new lessons.

Go to the sounds page and click Lessons.

All the lessons there are free.

The long A sound and long I sound are both two sound vowels, also known as diphthongs.

A two-sound vowel includes a Y sound or a W sound in its pronunciation.

The long A sound and long I sound, both end in a very slight Y sound.

I hope you remember that long vowels sound like their letter name.

So the long A sounds like A, and the long I sounds like I, just like the letters A and I.

Just like the letters A and I.

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