Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode 9 of Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

If you are a regular listener, you know we are in the middle of learning about vowel sounds.

If this is your first time listening to this podcast, I'd like to say hello.

My name is Mandy.

As always, a transcript for this show is available at www.orgon.com.

You will also find a link on pronunciation for buying the book,

pronunciation pages, Sounds

of American English, published by Seattle Learning Academy.

The book is available as an e-book download or as a physical copy to be shipped to you.

Along with your purchase, you get six months full access to the pronunciation website. Let's get back to vowels.

Last week, we started talking about vowels and learned the five keywords for our long vowels.

Do you remember them? If not, they were

Cake, Keep, Bike, Home, Cute.

Long vowels are easy to remember because they sound like their name, A, E, I, O, and U.

Today we will talk about short vowels, which are way more difficult to say and hear.

Like long vowels, I have key words for short vowels.

Since short vowels will take longer to get through, I'm going to jump right into them today.

The short A sounds like ah.

The key word for short A is cat.

To create the short A sound, we need to lift the middle of our tongue and push it forward and

into our bottom teeth a little bit.

Short A is a pretty forceful sound.

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