'four ears' or 'four years'?

The 'four ears' model says that a single message contains fact, self-revealing, relationship, and appeal:

Four-sides model - Wikipedia

The Art of Misunderstanding – The 4 Sides Model of Communication – CaseWORK

But that sounds exactly the same as 'four years'. Why?

We call this 'linking':

Linking Vowel to Vowel | Pronunciation | EnglishClub

And it's very important:

At its simplest, linking is the merging of multiple words together until they sound as if they are only one word. Native speakers of English all do this naturally. Linking is an advanced topic for non-native speakers, but learning to correctly link words can result in significantly more fluid and fluent sounding English speech. Failing to link words naturally results in spoken English which may have awkward pauses, extra, unnecessary sounds, and which will sound very foreign to native speakers.

Learn How to Link Words (Create Laisons) in English — Pronuncian: American English Pronunciation

It is important!

5 Connected Speech Secrets for Fast Native English Pronunciation

Connected speech 2 | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

In the case of adding a 'y' between words, it's called 'intrusion' - with other examples;

Linking and intrusive R - Wikipedia

Pronunciation: Linking /w/ - YouTube

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