Hello professor Thank you so much for your priceless advice and interesting guidance. I love your way of teaching and excellent explanation. I really appreciate your job. I wish you peace and happiness under the sky of prosperity. Your Student from Algeria.
Nobody REMOVES these sounds, we just pronounce them less due to the speed of our speech. When I say all of those words I am NOT thinking about "changing" or "eliding" ANYTHING. I am thinking, and saying the entire word. The speed of natural speech causes some sounds to be greatly reduced. Americans are NOT trying to reduce these sounds. You'll confuse yourself trying to learn stuff like this. Just listen to people speak naturally and gain experience with natural English and you won't need to think about any of this.
NO ONE speaks normally in the manner suggested to be FORMAL SPEECH. If you will, that's more like BOOK English. In fact no one should think that is is anything but a demonstration of sounding out all the sounds of the text, which could turn into a bad fossilization in cases such as island, could, would, should, and so on. Do not give the impression that to be more formal, one should sound like s/he is reading BADLY from a TEXT. √
Absolutely agree, though I suspect the narrator meant to slow down and disconnect the segments to make it easier for beginners to understand her pronunciation.
I think you're going way too far with this. You'd only totally not pronounce them if you were speaking incredibly improperly. Instead, you DO pronounce them, but they get drasitically reduced. If I say what sounds like "Rock 'n' Roll", I didn't think about "eliding" the d in "and", I simply said it QUICKLY which tends to reduce the d sound quite a bit. It's wrong to teach people to simply not pronounce them. You'll make people think they shouldn't pronounce them, which is just not true. You naturally soften the pronunciation once you have the experience to speak at a natural level.
