Can a plosive consonant in a word be pronounced as an unreleased consonant?
ESL teachers always tell people to suppress the normal release of the consonant "p b k g t d" if it's at the end of a word and the next word also begins with a consonant.
But what about words with a doubled consonant in them? Like accent, technology, do you produce the /k/ sound? Is it alright to not say it?
The Chinese people are not used to pronouncing a consonant directly after another consonant without a vowel between them, so some of us tend to remove a consonant (some may even add a vowel that isn't there); that's why I'm asking.
Solution 1:
In words like accent and technology, both consonants are pronounced with no vowel sound in between: [ks] and [kn]. English speakers tend to think of the [k] sound in these words as part of the end of the preceding syllable.
I think it would be difficult to understand a pronunciation of either of these words that moved straight from the vowel sound to the [s] or [n] consonant sound.
Adding a vowel sound between the two consonants is not the best way to pronounce it, but as long as you make the added vowel short and unstressed, this kind of pronunciation will probably be easier to understand than a pronunciation that deletes the [k] sound.
As mentioned in the comments, "bus station" and "related topics" are somewhat special cases. In "bus station", the two [s] sounds may be blurred together. In English, sequences of the same consonant sound are not very common, and when they arise between words, they are sometimes pronounced in a way that sounds like a single consonant sound. So in this case, it might be better to pronounce one [s] sound instead of inserting a vowel sound between the words.
In the case of "related topics", the two consonant sounds, while not identical, are produced in the same place in the mouth: [d] and [t]. The pronunciation of clusters like this is a bit complicated to describe, but in general, we can say that the first consonant become more similar in pronunciation to the second.