Sapporo English Conversation Newsletter — Linking #5

2026.05.29

Linking with Prepositions: A Simple Way to Improve Your English Pronunciation

(この記事は、「英語の前置詞の発音練習をしながら、リンキングの習得を目指そう！」の英語訳です。）

When you speak English, do you tend to pause between words? And when you’re talking with someone who speaks smoothly and links their words together naturally, do you sometimes find yourself thinking, ‘Wait, what did they just say?’

If so, you’re definitely not alone. In fact, the problem for many English learners isn’t vocabulary or grammar. It’s linking.

Linking simply means connecting the end of one word to the beginning of the next. It’s one of the main reasons native English speakers sound smooth and natural rather than choppy and robotic.

Here’s something I’ve noticed. Many learners think linking makes English more difficult. In my experience, the opposite is often true.

If you pronounce every word separately, you have to stop and restart over and over again. That takes time and energy. After a while, speaking English can start to feel surprisingly tiring. But when you learn to connect words smoothly, speaking becomes faster, easier, and more natural.

But linking doesn’t just improve your speaking. It improves your listening.

Think about it for a moment. If you aren’t used to linking words together yourself, it’s much harder to recognize those same connected sounds when someone else is speaking. That’s one reason many learners have trouble understanding sentences in movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, podcasts, and everyday conversations.

But once you start practicing linking regularly, something interesting happens. You begin to hear those connections more clearly. The better you get at linking words together yourself, the easier it becomes to understand other people when they do it.

Over time, many students discover that linking is actually easier than separating every word. Instead of fighting against the natural flow of English, you’re working with it.

That’s why I encourage students to practice linking as often as possible. It’s one of the simplest and most effective ways to improve both speaking and listening at the same time.

In a previous post, Saying Phrasal Verbs for Linking Practice (Part 2), we spent a lot of time practicing how to link words together while pronouncing phrasal verbs.

As we worked through those exercises, I started noticing something interesting.

Many students think of linking as a speaking skill, but after you’ve practiced it for a while, you begin to realize that it affects much more than your pronunciation.

Have you ever noticed yourself silent pronouncing English words in your head while writing them down? The same thing often happens with linking. As you become more comfortable linking words together while speaking, you naturally start hearing those same connections in your mind when you’re taking notes, writing emails, or sending messages to friends on LINE.

In other words, linking gradually becomes part of the way you process English.

Something similar happens when you read.

At first, many learners read one word at a time. Their eyes move from one word to the next, and each word feels separate. But as your linking improves, you may notice yourself reading in larger chunks. Instead of seeing individual words, you begin to follow the natural flow of the sentence.

That’s one reason linking is such a powerful skill. It doesn’t just improve pronunciation. Over time, it can influence the way you listen, read, write, and think about English.

In the exercises at the end of this article, we’ll be using prepositions to practice linking.

At first glance, prepositions might not seem like the most exciting words in English. They’re usually short, easy to overlook, and don’t get nearly as much attention as nouns, verbs, or adjectives. But when it comes to improving your English, prepositions are far more important than many learners realize.

To begin with, prepositions are everywhere.

English is packed with prepositions, and it’s difficult to build even a simple sentence without using them. Depending on how you count them, there are well over a hundred different prepositions in English. The better you understand how prepositions work, the easier it becomes to understand spoken English and express yourself clearly.

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, prepositions are also essential for understanding phrasal verbs. Since phrasal verbs appear constantly in everyday conversations, movies, TV shows, social media, and informal writing, developing a good feel for prepositions can help you in many different areas of English.

Another reason prepositions work so well for linking practice is that they connect naturally with the words around them.

Although many prepositions are short words, they do a tremendous amount of work. They help connect nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and they often help us communicate exactly what we mean. Choose the wrong preposition, and people may misunderstand what you’re trying to say. Fail to recognize how a preposition connects to the words around it, and spoken English can quickly become confusing.

Here’s something else that’s interesting about prepositions.

Many of them begin with vowel sounds, such as at, on, and under, or with open, flowing sounds like with, within, without, since, through, and throughout. Because of this, they connect very naturally to the words that come before and after them.

As your linking improves, you’ll also become better at hearing how native English speakers connect these words in everyday speech.

And because prepositions appear in so many different combinations, practicing them gives you a tremendous amount of linking practice in a relatively short time. In a sense, every time you practice linking with prepositions, you’re also training yourself to link English more naturally in general.

People often contact me because they want one-to-one English lessons to improve their pronunciation and listening skills. And very often, I hear the same story.

“I’ve been taking group English conversation lessons for years, but I still can’t catch what people are saying in Netflix dramas, YouTube videos, or movies. I can read English fairly well, but when people speak naturally, I get lost.”

Some students tell me they can’t understand the lyrics of their favorite songs. Others tell me they feel nervous speaking with foreigners here in Japan or when traveling abroad, because they aren’t sure what the other person is saying.

So what’s going on?

In many cases, the problem isn’t vocabulary or grammar. It’s linking.

Most learners spend years studying words, phrases, and grammar patterns, but very little time learning how words actually connect together in real speech. As a result, they become accustomed to hearing English one word at a time. Then when they encounter natural spoken English, everything seems to run together.

If you’ve never spent much time practicing linking yourself, it’s surprisingly difficult to hear other people doing it.

This is especially common in group lessons. Students spend most of their time listening to other learners rather than listening to someone who naturally links words together in English. Instead of developing a natural rhythm, they often get into the habit of saying one word at at time. Before long, their speech begins to sound stiff and mechanical rather than smooth and natural.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching private lessons so much. When I’m working one-to-one with a student, we can focus on linking in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Little by little, students begin to hear and produce English in a more natural way. That’s one of the reasons private lessons with a qualified native English-speaking teacher can be so effective.

Of course, your opportunities to improve don’t end when the lesson finishes.

Even here in Japan, there are many chances to hear and use English. One of the best things you can do is spend time around English speakers and make an effort to befriend them.

Here in Sapporo, for example, there are actually thousands of native-level English speakers. Some live here year-round, while others are visiting for work, study, or tourism. Many people assume there aren’t many opportunities to use English in Sapporo. In reality, there are far more than most learners realize.

Make the effort to talk to people whenever you can. Real conversations provide the kind of listening and speaking practice that simply can’t be reproduced in a textbook.

Linking isn’t something that develops overnight. It takes practice, repetition, and attention. Even native English speakers spend years refining their pronunciation and developing a natural flow when they speak.

One place where native English speakers get a lot of practice reading smoothly and naturally is at school.

Teachers regularly call on students to read passages aloud from textbooks. This doesn’t happen only in English class. It happens across many subjects throughout elementary school and junior high school.

As students take turns reading aloud, everyone else follows along in the textbook, waiting to hear whose name will be called next. There is always a little suspense in the room because sooner or later it will be your turn.

And when one student reads particularly well, everybody notices. The other students follow along in their textbooks and think, “Wow, she’s really good at reading aloud,” or “Wow, he makes that sound easy.”

When it’s your turn to read aloud to the rest of the students in your class, you naturally want to do a good job. You want people to understand you. You want your reading to flow naturally from one word to the next and to sound loud and clear.

This process of learning how to link clearly and smoothly doesn’t stop in junior high school. Native English speakers continue developing these skills throughout high school, university, and adult life. Every time they read aloud, give a presentation, tell a story, or speak to a group, they are continuing to refine the flow and rhythm of their speech.

You can develop the same skills by working through the exercises below.

As you listen to each audio track, pay close attention to the prepositions and how they connect to the words before and after them. Repeat each phrase and sentence three times. Then listen again and repeat until you can say each one smoothly without pausing.

As you move from one track to the next, you may begin to notice something interesting. You may notice your listening beginning to improve. You begin hearing connections that you may not have noticed before. And little by little, speaking English starts to feel easier and more natural.

Over time, you’ll find yourself moving away from a word-by-word speaking style and toward something much more fluent and conversational 🌈🌃😇

① Part 1, Section 1

Linking with about, above, across, after, against, ahead of, along, among, around, as and at.