Do NOT say the D in these 105 Common Words!

by elmaroma
Every language has its own characteristics. One of the characteristics of English is smoothness,
and in order for Americans to get this, they often drop T’s and D’s in common words,
without even realizing it. Americans drop the D in many common words and phrases,
and we’ll go over more than a hundred of these, take these two words.
In most cases, most people will pronounce them the same. This is ‘tens’, and they’ll drop the D here
making it sound like ‘tens’. Tens of thousands of people were there. He tends to be right. Tens,
tends. Honestly, it’s hard even to pronounce that with an audible D. Let me try.
Tenndz, tendz.
No. Almost every native speaker will say “tens.” Now don’t just go dropping any old D. There is a
specific pattern happening here, which we’ll go over. But first, let’s look at another word with
a dropped D and see if you can guess the pattern. The word is “friendship” . But let’s first look at
the word Friend. My friend is here. Friend is, friend is, dis, dis, d, d, d. We say that
word D. But in the word ‘friendship,’ we don’t. Instead of ‘friendship,’ we say ‘friennnnship’.
The D is completely gone. Nine times out of 10, if not more, you’ll hear Americans drop this D.
This is the most common pronunciation. Why? D is a stop consonant. So by leaving it out,
by NOT doing the stop, we get more smoothness in our speech. American English is full of this
smooth quality. And one of the things that has evolved in spoken American English is dropping D
in the pattern N, D, consonant. In the word ‘friendship’, D comes after N before SH.
Drop that D for more natural spoken English. Friendship. But in the phrase ‘friend
is’, the sound after D is a vowel. Don’t drop the D. My friend is here. Friend is. Dududu. Little
light d. But Friendship, drop the D. Friendly, drop the D, Friends, drop the D. N, D + consonant.
This is true in words that link too. For example, My friend was there last week. Frien-was. Linking
‘friend’ into a consonant, the W sound here, drop the D. My friend was. Friend was.
What do you think? Have you been trying to pronounce that D? Friendddd was. Or
have you been dropping the D without realizing it, because that’s what you hear happening around you?
To make sure we’re hearing it correctly, let’s go back to those examples,
other people saying ‘friendship’, and play them in slow motion.
We should hear no D, but the N linking directly into the SH, Friennnnnship.
This dropped D really sounds very natural in the full sentences.
If you want to know more about the right mouth position for the English sounds,
Click here or in the video description to get a free cheat sheet on the sounds of
American English, it’s a great reference tool and even I use it quite a bit.
There are lots of words with N, D, and another consonant,
and when you include linking, there are even more cases. We’ll go over more examples with clips,
and then we will give you a huge list. Think of it, all these words without a stop,
that will smooth out your English and simplify your pronunciation.
Before we get to our next common example, I want to pop in for a huge thanks to all my
supporters here on YouTube, everyone who has joined my channel, they get special badges to
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