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

My name is Mandy and this is our 82nd episode.

This Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States.

Since it's a holiday week, I'm just going to do a simpler, shorter review show today.

In honor of Thanksgiving, we're going to review the TH sounds. Listen to the following sentence.

This Thursday is Thanksgiving.

Listen to the TH sounds.

This Thursday is Thanksgiving.

This Thursday is Thanksgiving.

The TH sounds are fricatives, meaning they are a smooth, continuous sound that is created when air is pushed through a small opening in the vocal tract. To create the

voiced and unvoiced TH sound, the tip of the tongue is placed very close to the front of the tooth ridge,

and then air is pushed through the small opening between the tip of the tongue and the tooth ridge.

The tooth ridge is that bony area right behind the top front teeth?

The voiced and unvoiced TH sounds are identical,

except that the voiced TH uses the vocal cords and is voiced,

and the unvoiced TH does not.

You can go all the way back to our first podcast episode for more information about fricatives and voiced and unvoiced sounds.

Listen to just the voiced T.H. sound.

Z.

And now listen to the unvoiced TH sound.

Here's a quick practice for all of you who have trouble with the TH sounds.

It's only two sentences and one of them I've borrowed from previous TH sound shows.

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