Full of hot air.

The most serious difficulty I've had with this language and this passage throughout the semester has been aspiration. Binisaya does not aspirate initial consonants. This was a difficult thing to catch and the single most salient difference between the accent of a Visayan speaker and an English accent. In English, our unaspirated consonants are limited to stops in consonant clusters. When my father came to visit, I even had to point this out to him, a native Visayan speaker. He'd never noticed the addition of breath when speaking English. After working on this for so long, I think I can safely claim that my cousins could rightly say that Americans are full of hot air. To work on aspiration for this recording, I put my hand in front of my mouth, and if I pronounced a stop with aspiration, I repeated it until I couldn't feel anything during the consonants. This was especially difficult when the stop was in front of a breath heavy lax vowel like 'a'.