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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 93rd episode.

Did you know that English words don't end in the W sound?

This is initially hard to believe because so many words end in the letter W.

Words such as the following, cow, snow, saw, few, and chew.

Two of those words, cow and snow, do end in two sound vowels that include a W sound in their

pronunciation, so it is natural to think that there is a W sound there. Technically, however,

it's just the full and complete pronunciation of the OW sound, ow, as in the word cow, and the long O sound,

O, as in the word snow.

The word saw ends in an AW sound,

view ends in a long U sound, and Chu ends in an O-O sound.

You can study all of those sounds separately if you want to know more.

However, the W sound is not what I actually want to talk about today.

I want to talk about the L sound.

Specifically, I want to talk about the L sound when it occurs at the

end of a word. I want to talk about words such as the following. Bowl, still, little, circle, and couple.

A problem I often hear with words that end in an L sound is an accidental substitution with the W sound.

I don't like to generalize languages too much

because I think it makes people tune out

when they don't hear their language mentioned as one that

typically has this problem. However, I must say that more often than not, it is Asian students

that have come to me and substituted a W sound for the L sound at the end of a word. Many of my

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