Name: Assimilation in American English: N + M, P, B = /m/ | Speak More Naturally
Uploaded: 2026-01-30T18:13:23.000Z
Duration: 3 min 12 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The comparative

Are you trying to sound more natural when you are speaking English?

Then I think you are looking for some assimilation rules.

Present continuous

Assimilation is when one sound changes because it's anticipating the next sound.

These change based on place where your tongue is and your lips are when you're making a sound, manner, how the sound is made, how the air is moving and voicing.

For today we are going to be talking about place assimilation with a nasal sound.

So we have the nasal sound N and when we make that sound, the tip of the tongue is behind the top front teeth and air is moving out of the the nose.

When this sound is followed by sounds that are made with our lips, P B M then what we are going to do is keep that place and we are going to change the place of the N to a lip sound so that is going to become an M.

What we are going to keep is we are going to keep that nasality of the end N.

Air comes out of the nose, we're going to keep that nasality but our lips will be closed so the sound will sound like an M.

So we have a lip sound after this N. The N will change to an M.

So instead of saying on point I might say on point.

Instead of saying in bed I might say embed and instead of saying in my I might say in my.

Now people will sometimes use assimilation and other times they will not depending on how they are connecting words in a sentence.

So I can still say on point and that is totally fine.

I can still say in bed that is totally fine and in my totally fine.

But a lot of times I do use assimilation and then my sound changes to point embed in my.

So let's give those a try on point embed in my.

I know people are going to notice the difference.

I hope you enjoyed this assimilation lesson.

It's a little bit different so let me know your thoughts.

The good, the bad and the ugly in the comments below.

And I really just want to say thank you always for these being here.