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This is an all English podcast, Episode 15 48 English pronunciation myths debunked learn one way to say the past tense.

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Welcome to the All Ears English podcast downloaded more than 200 million times. Are you feeling stuck with your English? We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection, not perfection, with your American hosts. Aubrey Carter, the child's whiz, and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer coming to you from Arizona and Colorado.

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You as a how do you know when a verb ends in the tea sound in the past tense in English today, find out how you can tell and get tons of examples, plus some interesting and native new English vocabulary.

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Hello again, Lindsay, how's your day going? It's going great. It's Sunny here in Denver, so I'm feeling good. Feeling good? What about you? Hey, what are you guys still buried in snow there? We've got some snow.

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Yeah, we got a little dusting last night. And yeah, I think it's more like out in Oregon.

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Over there they are buried. Yes, I know. It's crazy all over. This is going to come out maybe when the snow is gone. But right now we're buried in snow. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. But I'm glad we're here podcasting because we're talking about pronunciation, right?

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Yes. This is great, you guys. This is the second part of our pronunciation series. And we had our student, Metrobus, ask us to talk about the different pronunciations of the letter T in the American native accent, and there are quite a few.

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So this was sort of a continuation of answering that question. Yes, we talked about it in episode fifteen forty three.

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So if you missed that, definitely check it out for the times when T sounds like D and sometimes that has the Trute. And today we're going to talk about Eddie's words and the past tense. That and Ed, but that sounds like t got it.

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So we're separating this series out based on how the tea sounds. Right. That's good, right?

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I like that. Exactly. Yeah. So this is going to be a good one. I'm excited. I, I want to share with our listeners, though, if you haven't had a chance yet, guys, we have created a quiz that only takes two minutes. If you go to Oliver's English NORCOM fluency score, you can take it and find out what level your English is.

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And then you can also get resources that we've created for your level that are free. So definitely check it out.

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Definitely. So is your fluency score 50 percent, 65 percent or 80 percent, guys? That is the question. And you can find out one more time by going to all areas, English dot com slash fluency score. So go there now. Cool.

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All right. So, yes, this is the thing pronunciation.

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We're always getting questions from our listeners. We know you guys are concerned about pronunciation because it can cause miscommunication if words are pronounced incorrectly.

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So there are a lot of tricky things about English pronunciation to be aware of.

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Right. And this is one of them. It can be very easy to not know exactly how to pronounce it when you see at the end of the word.

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But there are specific rules that dictate how it is said. So we're going to share with you today so you know exactly how to say it.

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Yeah, this is really one of the most common questions that students have about this is uniquely difficult about, I guess, English, American English. It's tricky, right? It's really, really tricky. So guys, you know, grab a piece of paper, take some notes today and listen in. Yes.

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So the first thing we want to share is just that.

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When does it sound like t when it's at the end of a word and it has to do with whether sounds are voiced or voiceless.

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If the verb base ends in a voiceless sound, then it sounds like t so let's talk about that. Lindsy what does it mean for a sound to be voiceless.

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OK, so I mean this is how I was taught this and this is what I've taught students over the years. Right.

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But it's also a little strange to walk around with your your finger on your throat. Right.

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Right. So this idea, guys, if you put your finger up to your throw, if you feel your vocal cords moving, that means that it's voiced like you're using your voice, right?

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Exactly. Exactly right.

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So if you if you touch your throat and say like de la and you feel that humming or vibration on your throat, that's a voiced sound.

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And so then a voiceless sound means no noise is made by your vocal cords. Like for people you don't have any mouth. Right.

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Exactly. It's on the mouth. The lips. There's no vocal cord usage. Exactly.

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Yeah. OK, so that's really what it is right there. So is that how we're going to know how are we going to know if something is voiced or.

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Yeah, you have to know which letter sounds our voice to the voiceless and yeah, that's that's the trick. So we're going to let you know which letter sounds today are voiceless and would then the EDI's would then sound like ti.

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So we'll give you example words. And this is going to be kind of fun because for each we're going to give you a few words for each letter and then we're going to pick one on the fly to come up with the first sentence we think of on the fly. Good one. Good one for our listeners. By the way, what does that mean with no planning? Like we haven't thought about example sentences. So that might be a little weird.

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Just whatever we first think they're going to be weird, but it is as far as pronunciation, you do want to keep in mind that natives blend the tea together with whatever consonant came just before the previous consonant. It's not pronounced as an extra syllable.

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So for this first letter, you're going to notice for the letter P. When we say kempt, it's like the it's like a P and T blended together kempt. So we're not making that extra syllable the end, right.

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Is that what you mean? It's all just one syllable. Yeah. And I hear this mistake a lot by intermediate or beginner students. Right. Saying something like. Help it or jump it, but don't do that, guys. It's got to do right. Yep. So after this episode, you'll know exactly why and you can practice them and you'll start noticing you'll start noticing them. When you're listening to podcasts and listening to natives and watching TV, you're going to see the differences and it'll make it so much easier for you to use them correctly.

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Yeah, it's all about noticing once you know it. Right. Know it and then notice it and then use it correctly.

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So. Exactly right. OK, so let's start with the letter P. This is a voiceless sound. Just so our example. Words are kept, helped and jumped. Yeah. All right. Give us one in a sentence, OK.

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Was something simple. I camped three times last summer. Perfect. Easy. Easy. How about the next one? Olbrich.

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Right. So cooked. Winked, debunked. Yeah, that's the Senate.

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I debunked the theory that my children would go to bed at 10 p.m. if I just asked them to.

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I love that word, by the way. Debunked. That is a great word. Right?

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You guys need to be using this one. It's a it's a higher level way of saying proved wrong. Like if you prove something wrong, you've debunked it and you'll hear it used by, you know, scientists and doctors. But you can just use it any time you're talking about something you found out wasn't true. I mean, like, well, I debunked that theory.

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And it's kind of funny when you use that for your own life, like you had a theory and then you it it's kind of cool because you take like a scientific way of speaking and move it into your personal life. It's kind of cool. Yeah. So next one.

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OK, so the next one is S.H. So our words are crushed, washed and hushed. OK, I'm going to throw out a sentence.

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I crashed my mother's car when I was 16. Not true.

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Thank you.

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I actually did crash a car when I was about 16, so that was true for me. How did your next one is?

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S.H. guys. The sound and the words are marched, watched and parched.

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OK, and I am so thirsty. I'm really, really parched all the way to save that one because.

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Yeah. What does that mean. Extremely thirsty. Right.

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Really thirsty. Yeah. And you can just be like, oh I'm really thirsty. I'm so parched. Somebody does anybody have some water.

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Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. OK, what's the next. So the next is the sound that's made by F and this is written as g h in words like coughed and laughed and then also as f f ing like cuffed and huffed.

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Good.

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OK, awesome. And let's see, I could say something like he laughed in my face when I fell to the ground last night when I was walking.

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He's awful.

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I did actually take a digger last night. I was walking my dog and it was icy on the sidewalk and I just went down. I like to take a digger.

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I heard that. That's really fun. I'm going to start using that to dig really hard.

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Yeah, yeah. And fell. All right. Next one is an F F, so two on that one.

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So those are together, right? Just the sound F can be spelled as either or F, so that's tricky. It can be spelled two different words.

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Two different ways. Right. Yes.

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Yes. I love that. OK, so what's next. Obree. So next is t h ok. All right. So like bathed and breathed.

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Mm. OK, so what would you make for a sentence here. Note I'm realizing I've got the wrong examples because those are giving us a D bathed breathes we're going to talk about on the next episode. Guys take the out of there thinking about what after linked.

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That's not a word. Has Ed at the end ends with like the voice.

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Because this is the voice. Yeah. Right. For bathed and breathed but the voiceless light will have to update our listeners on that in the next one.

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Yeah. There you go. Let's move on to the next one. I'll try to think of something by the time we get there. OK, that sounds good. So the next section guys is s that sound. So words like hest kissed and missed. Yes, I kissed my husband this morning. Your example somewhere nice. OK, s..

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Yeah. Go ahead Dexters. See the. Well that sounds sort of like an s glance so like glanced, danced and chanced.

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OK, so I could say something like I glanced across the room and saw someone staring at me. I glanced. I like that verb right to look.

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I kind of casually looked across the room. Would you like to know how fluent you are in English? Get your fluency score now. Find out if you were at fifty percent fluency. Sixty five percent fluency or eighty percent fluency. And our simple two minute quiz just go over to all ears. English dot com forward slash fluency score.

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Yep, exactly, yeah, yeah, and then the last one ex, like mixed and fixed. Mm hmm. OK, and he said it's there for a while for us. See, my husband fixed our plumbing yesterday because there was a leak in the pipe that was soaking a ceiling. He had to remove drywall.

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And if it was a huge mess, like he was able to do it instead of putting it in the is very handy.

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Luckily, again, I heard about that crazy stuff, by the way, that's going on in Texas right now with all the freezing pipes.

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Right. So crazy, guys.

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I mean, we're recording this in February, mid-February, but there's some crazy stuff going on with the power grid in Texas where people have had their electricity out for a couple of days now. It's insane.

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I do have my husband's on a call with someone and they said we have power, but we don't have heat because it's natural gas that we use to heat our house. And the lines are frozen so they don't have any heat. They're like sitting in their car to stay warm.

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It's really scary what a lot of people are going through.

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That's insane. We don't know how long it's going to go on. So just a little a little event update, guys. There was a big snowstorm there. So that's why that's happening. But so crazy.

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So I came up with a couple examples for, OK, so like frothed, like if you if you stir your coffee and get foam at the top, you'd say it's frothed.

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And so that ends with t h or mouthed though some people say mouthed but was if you birth a child and passed, you'd say I birthed a child.

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So that's tricky because t h is can be voiced or voiceless depending on the word. So that's probably the hardest one here is that you have to know which one.

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So like verbs ending, that's about the only ones I can think of is like birth or earthed.

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But, you know, we just don't use that very often. Yeah. Unearths like to dig something up. We unearth something, you know, something like that verb.

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Yeah. So guys, that one is the outlier. That one's your challenge. Right. If you want to move up to the advanced level, that's the one to really understand. But if we're intermediate than the ones we've just shown you, the P, the K, the S.H., those are the ones to really focus on. We want to focus on getting the 80 percent of them. Right.

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OK, we've got a role to play here. I tried to cram as many of these in as I could. I'm ready to go. Oh, my God. It's the craziest thing happened this morning. I missed the bus, so I took a cab. But then the taxi crashed into a tree. Oh, no. Were you hurt now? Luckily, it wasn't too serious. No one was injured. There were people nearby, watched it happen and then helped us out of the car and called the police.

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Why did the driver hit the tree, the glance down at their phone, didn't they? Oh, I can understand why you'd assume that, since it's seems like every action is caused by distracted driving.

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This one debunked that theory, though. A jaywalker ran out in front of us and he swerved to miss him. The guy jumped out of the way just in time.

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I'm glad no one was hurt. I bet you were pretty shaken up, though. Yeah. Yeah, I went home and washed up. I was parched, so I got a drink of water. Then I crashed.

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Nice. I like that. There were two very different uses of crashed there. Right. First the car crashed and then the second one meaning to fall asleep.

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You're so exhausted that you just crash. Exactly.

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For our listeners, if they don't know that second use, they might be really confused because then I crash.

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Wait, you already talked about the crash? No, that means I went to sleep because I was exhausted.

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And that's that's a really common way to use to go to sleep. And it's a way of going to sleep. Right. That you, like, fall onto the bed trying to emphasize you're so tired.

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Yeah. Now, you wouldn't be like I took a little nap, so I crashed.

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It means you're super exhausted. You, like, fall on the best about out of exhaustion. Exactly. OK, let's go over the vocabulary we used.

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OK, let's do it. So here's what you said. Yeah. Yeah, I missed the bus.

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I missed the bus. But what's interesting here, right, is that when you say it in a sentence, I almost don't even say anything at the end. I mean, it is of sound. I miss the bus. I missed the bus. I don't even hear the tea at the end. So that's the tricky part, guys. It's definitely not emphasized, right.

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When they're put into a chunk, sometimes you don't even hear anything. But we know it's past tense. You just know from the scenario. Mm hmm. Exactly.

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And the same, a taxi crashed into a tree. That's when there's a vowel on the next word. That's where you hear that ti a little more like crashed into because you wouldn't say crashed into it. I mean, it's so hard to even make yourself make that sound. So it comes out as a T.. Yeah.

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And so we got to pay attention to how they really come out in the real world. So there were people nearby who watched it happen. So there I did hear my DNA because it starts with a vowel. So you hear it. Yeah. And then helped us. That one I definitely heard because again, there's a vowel at the beginning of the next word helped us out of the car, OK?

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And then I said they glanced down at their phone. Right. And again, the next word starts with a consonant. So you don't hear it as much. You almost don't hear anything. The T is very soft a glance down. You really don't do.

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So that's interesting. So when we say it in isolation, guys, we say glanced. Yes, that's great. But words are never in isolation. OK, that's the reality, right, of real English.

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And you say glanced up. You hear that t but glance down, you basically don't say anything at all. It. Exactly. So you got to be ready for that guy, so this next one here is my favorite verb, this one debunked, let's say it real debunked that theory. Again, if I say it in a real way, I actually don't even hear the T.. That's the crazy part. Debunked that theory. And then he said the guy jumped out of the way, jumped out of the way.

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You still hear the T because the next word starts with a vowel.

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That's it really does seem to depend. Is it a consonant immediately following it or is it a vowel? Right. Yeah. OK then. Yeah, I went home and washed up again. I can hear the T because up is my next word. I was parched so I got a drink of water. I was parched so I got a drink of water again.

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So it's a little more there because of the pause in the sentence. Right. So I was parched. So I got. You've got that transition of so you there's that break. So you do hear it a little bit.

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I was parched, so I got out of drinkable parched. I just depending on where you want to stop, doesn't Aubrey I mean, this depends on the speaker. If I want to emphasize that I was so thirsty, I was parched.

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So I got a drink of water.

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Yeah, but if you don't want to emphasize that, you would just roll right through and you may not even hear that ending.

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Yep. And then you said then I crashed and you're going to hear that because of the last word in the sentence.

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It's the end. Yep, exactly. So you guys may have noticed that there were some words in our roleplay that didn't and didn't make that t sound. They had that Ed like happened, injured, called, caused, swerved and then distracted where it actually sounds like ID like Idy.

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And so in the next episode you guys don't want to miss it.

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We are going to share words that end in those sounds, examples, sentences, and so be sure to tune in for that one guys.

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Yeah. This is great. This is why you guys have to go check your app wherever you're listening right now, make sure you are subscribed and that you are coming back to the show because you'll miss series like these which string together important episodes. Right. So that's so important to make sure you are subscribed.

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And here Obree, where can our listeners go to get their fluency? SCHAUDER To take our quiz. Yes guys, check it out.

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Olian English dotcom fluency score. You'll take a very quick quiz and then get free resources that are at your level and you'll find out what is your level that will really save you time because you'll know what types of resources to be using to really make progress quickly.

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It's so true.

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I mean, we are not all starting in the same place. Some of us are starting at that fifty percent fluency score level or sixty five or eighty.

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You want to know where you are. So, you know, make sure you're doing the right things. Yes, exactly.

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And with this series, we just we don't want pronunciation to be a stumbling block for you. We don't want you to, you know, to hesitate to make those connections of people and join a group conversation because you're worried you'll be making pronunciation mistakes because it can be confusing and tricky. So we're trying to break down some of the most common errors so that you guys can have confidence in those conversations.

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It's all about that confidence and it's also about curiosity. Like I think about curiosity here. Now that we know how to pronounce these words and how the endings are pronounced, get curious. When you hear native speaking, think about is this a TI ending? Even if I didn't hear it because it was in a chunk, it was in a sentence, how would that really and get curious and get observant of the like, really good right now?

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This is really fun, Lindsey, so thanks for hanging out today. I'll see you in the next one of this series very soon. See you later. Bye bye.

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Thanks for listening to all ears English. Would you like to know your English level? Take our two minute quiz. Go to all ears, English dot com forward slash fluency score. And if you believe in connection, not perfection, then hit. Subscribe now to make sure you don't miss anything. See you next time.