5: The American English /r/ and /l/
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Hello again, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English Pronunciation Podcast. My name is Mandy, and this is podcast number five. Today, we are going to continue our study of the two liquid sounds, the R sound and L sound. Today's practice sentence is, I would really like a little red wagon like Laura's. We'll come back to that later. Did you practice last week's practice sentence?

On Thursday, Thelma threw three red rocks. I'm going to start only going back and reviewing the past three shows' practice sentences, or word sets. Our S sound, Z sound practice with the S endings from two weeks ago was Cats love boxes. Dogs love beds.

Remember that the final sound of the word before the S ending dictates if the final S will be an S sound or Z sound. And our word set from Episode 2 was...

Last week, we talked about the fact that the General American accent is a rhotic accent, meaning we say our R sounds no matter where they occur in the word. Today, we are going to compare the R sound to the L sound. I find that students from Asia tend to have a lot of trouble with both of these sounds, and if your native language is Japanese, you probably already know the struggle with the R sound and L sound.

Many of my Japanese students come to me and not only can't say the sounds, but also cannot hear the difference when a native speaker of English says them. There have been many studies that link the ability to hear sounds with the ability to say them. If you're one of those people who can't hear the difference between an L sound and R sound, go to pronuncian.com, find the sound you want to practice, and click "Additional Practice."

Many troublesome sounds have minimal pairs for very specific practice. Minimal pairs are words like we practiced for the D sound, T sound show. There are two words that are identical, except for one sound, like dime, time. English has a lot of minimal pairs between the L sound and R sound. Can you hear the difference between the following words? Play, pray, climb, crime.

"Arrive alive." If you can't, be sure to do some listening practice. Also, speakers from a wide variety of backgrounds have trouble with the L sound when it occurs near the R sound. So even if you aren't from Asia, you aren't free of L sound trouble. The reason these sounds conflict with each other is because of how they are produced inside our mouth.

Remember, the R sound can have lots of formations at the tip of our tongue. The important thing is that it is the very back of our tongue, all the way in our throat, that is responsible for articulation in the General American accent. The L sound, however, happens way at the front of our mouth, with our tongue touching the tooth ridge in the same place we touch it for a T sound.

That requires a pretty large movement of our tongue to go quickly from an L sound to the R sound. I also want to say that the back of our tongue is low for the L sound, not high like it is for the R sound. People from India tend to have another problem with their L sounds. Just like people from many languages of the Indian subcontinent retroflex their T sound and D sound, they do the same for the L sound.

Retroflexing is placing the tip of the tongue too far back, behind the tooth ridge, instead of at the front of it. Let's say some easier words with the L sound at the beginning of the word before we combine it with the R sound. Repeat after me: laugh, like, let, list. Were those easy for you or hard for you?

If they were hard, please practice the L sound word list on Pronuncian.com. Now let's practice some words that have both the L sound and R sound in them. Ready? Repeat after me. Girl. World. Learn. Early. Really. Let's say all of those again. Girl. World. Learn. Early. Really.

Really. I want to make sure that you can clearly pronounce the words word, W-O-R-D, and world, W-O-R-L-D. I have a lot of students who cannot say these words clearly enough for a native speaker of English to hear the difference. You need to make sure to add the L sound to the word world. Let's say them both. Word, world, world, world.

So let me give you the practice sentence for today. Again, I have to say, this is one of my favorite practice sentences of all because it hits a number of sound issues, many of which we haven't even talked about yet.

We'll come back to this sentence in the future, so you might as well memorize it. I would really like a little red wagon like Laura's. There you go. Hopefully you now better understand the R sound and L sound. But we aren't finished yet. As I said last week, another aspect of the R sound is R-controlled vowels.

For people who learned Received Pronunciation, the British standard of English pronunciation, you will have some major habits to overcome if you're trying to learn an American accent, and many of those habits are elements of our controlled vowels. I hope you're enjoying this podcast. Please let me know what you think by emailing me at podcast at pronuncian.com. You can also go to pronuncian.com for show notes and transcripts.

If you liked the show, you can let me know your appreciation by writing a review in iTunes. That's it for today, everyone. Have a wonderful week and have fun practicing your American English accent. Thanks for listening.