We don’t have to use a glottal stop in the situations listed on the previous page, but I believe it’s increasingly common to do so.
Listen to examples of words with and then without glottal stops: chocolate
stop teaching football
You may hear the glottal stop as an abrupt pause.
It’s not essential for non-natives to learn the glottal stop – but it’s useful to be aware of it because it’s used so frequently in native speech.
Some non-natives will overuse the glottal stop and reinforce/replace voiced plosives, which does not happen in the Standard Southern British English accent. Usually this happens when a syllable-final voiced obstruent (= plosive, fricative, and affricate consonants) is fully devoiced and replaced with [ʔ]. For example: bad [bad] -> [bat] -> [baʔ].
