 Hello, students! It's Shayna, your teacher from EspressoEnglish.net, and today I want to teach you about a pronunciation mistake that a lot of students make when pronouncing the letter U in English. I first noticed this mistake when I was doing pronunciation evaluations for the students in my pronunciation course. So if you'd like to join this course and get your own evaluation of your pronunciation, click on the link in this video or in the video description for more information and to register. Alright, so what's this mistake? Well, I noticed that a number of students, when they said the word public, they would actually pronounce it like public, which is not correct. It's the difference between the uh sound and the ooh sound. Both of these sounds exist in English, and we're going to practice them both today, and they can both be written with the letter U. So let's do some practice. First, we'll start with the uh sound, which is also known as the short U sound. I'm going to say some words. They're going to appear on the screen, and I'd like you to listen and repeat to improve your pronunciation. Ready? Public, but, cup, lucky, fun, hug, underwear, uncle, ugly. Okay, so all those words had the uh sound as in public. Now let's work on some words with the uh sound. Listen and repeat. Rude, stupid, tube, student, flute, June, include, rule, tulip, duty. All those words that we just practiced had the uh sound spelled with the letter U, but actually this sound can also be spelled other ways in English. We have O-O as in the word food, E-W as in the word news, U-E as in the word blue, and U-I as in the word fruit. Those are all the same sound. They're all the ooh sound. So if you see a word written with the letter U, how can you tell if it's supposed to be pronounced uh or ooh? Well, it's a little difficult, but there is a pattern, and that is when you have U plus a consonant and then the end of the word as in tub, or U plus a consonant and then another consonant as in the word public, then it's usually the uh sound, the short U sound. But when you have U followed by a consonant and then a vowel as in the words tube and tulip, then it's usually the uh sound, the long U sound. The exception is when we have U-R. A lot of words that have U-R, it's actually pronounced er as in urgent. So as you can see, English pronunciation and spelling are very complicated. There are a lot of exceptions, but it's really important to improve your pronunciation because this will make you sound more confident and more fluent in English. So if you'd like to do that inside my pronunciation course, again, click on the link in the video for more information. Thank you for practicing with me today, and I hope you enjoyed today's lesson.