It seems to me that you are wrestling with the "Second-Letter Rule", which says that a single vowel letter (i.e., not combined with another vowel letter in a digraph) is pronounced tense if the second letter after it is another vowel letter,

I want to explain to my students the reasons behind the difference in pronouncing 'write' and 'written' is that 'written' has double Ts. How can I tell them about this? Whether it's written with 2 t's or 3 t's or no t's has absolutely nothing to

to communicate in English if we know 1000 words. IT IS THE EASIEST LANGUAGE!... The language of the future

This is really badly off topic but I couldn't resist the temptation to comment on your correct observation. I understand very well that native speakers of English mispronounce foreign words because foreign languages are not studied much in

I also pronounce "young" and "love" with the same vowel. The reason that "love" has an "o" in Modern and Middle English is because: "The pronunciation of written o in son, love, come, etc. is due to Norman spelling conventions prohibiting

>> Native speakers can make mistakes with pronounciation. Unfortunately with English, the spelling does not always give you a clue to the pronounciation, so if people learn a word from seeing it written, they can make mistakes. <<

To tell you the truth, I've never heard any foreigner (unless they learned English when they were very young, or had lived in an English speaking country for at least a decade, and had extensive, and personalized accent coaching) ever be able to

Pronunciation is very important, but with English that means stress patterns. Getting the stress patterns right for a whole phrase is often more important than getting every single word exactly right. The vowels can be off a bit, but the stress

A late contribution on spelling and pronunciation. I would willingly abolish some of the more absurd spellings. Think of the AmE spelling jail , which many of us Brits find far preferable to the old BrE gaol (!!!). The problem arises, however,

I don't know of any rules that dictate the pronunciation in that regard. I tend to believe that every language has some element that is particularly difficult to learn and with English, it's the pronunciation and spelling. Seriously, for what