Name: Intro to Linking: American English Pronunciation
Uploaded: 2017-11-28T15:37:34.000Z
Duration: 3 min 20 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...

To-infinitive

Today I simply want to introduce
the concept of linking.

Past simple

I’ve had my blog for
almost two years now,

and have yet to explicitly mention
this in a video as a topic.

If everything else is
pronounced correctly:

stress, the particular sounds of a word,
but words are not linked together,

it will still sound pretty
strange to native speakers.

Let’s take for example the sentence,
He told her to go to the park today.

That last time I said it, I tried to
put a tiny pause between each word.

It’s an important first step to
be able to hear the difference.

To native speakers, this tiny gap
between each word sounds very choppy.

when they pronounce wordsand sentences
that way, that it feels very sloppy.

If your native language is
really different from English,

then when you pronounce
English correctly,

it might feel very
strange in your mouth.

Linking is related to
reduction, or reducing sounds.

What is reduction? As you may
already know from other videos,

words in English will either
be stressed or unstressed.

Unstressed words and
syllables may be reduced.

This means that a sound is
either left out or changes.

For example, the word ‘can’
has the ‘aa’ vowel sound.

There the word ‘can’ is actually
pronounced with the schwa sound: cn.

I say that linking and
reduction are related.

And that is because if you
are reducing something,

you’re either leaving off a sound
or substituting a quicker vowel

you don’t want to make your
phrase longer by adding gaps.

So linking is the idea that you will
take all the words of a sentence

and you won’t put any gaps between
for a smooth and fluid sound.

For example, in the sentence
I can be there by three.

I-c, I-c: you can hear how the
kk sound of the second word

So keep this in mind as you listen to native
speakers and do your best to imitate it.

There will be videos in the future
that will cover specific concepts

in linking and reduction
to help you practice this.

That’s it, and thanks so much
for using Rachel’s English.