I struggle with giving each of my characters a unique voice and while I realize there are books and articles covering this, I don't feel like my characters have a great voice. Can anyone offer any tips or insights? It's very easy to become

I agree with raindoctor. You can't learn like babies do, and some kind of natural acquisition is only possible when your English is already good enough for you to understand the context. ESL students in school are artificially picking up the

. They also claim that our fascination with native speakers' accents and desire to sound like a native speaker is rather a matter of constraint than a conscious choice Well, wanting to imitate native speakers is something that comes naturally

1. Have you ever thought about retaining some aspects of your first language Generally speaking, no, because English is a separate language. Of course it's easy to make mistakes because of the influence of my native language, but as I said, I

I know that adjectives in English comes before nouns in the majority of cases. But I get doubtful sometimes. Can anybody tell me how to proceed and why? Thx! director of photography or photography director? sun gate or gate of the sun?

Perhaps to a certain extent, but accent is much more a pointer to geographic region. Very well educated (upper class) people will usually speak standard (or 'Oxford' English), but some people are proud of their origins and will keep the

Nobody in Britain speaks like the Queen, apart from a few of the idle rich. I wouldn't say RP or how they speak on the BBC is the same as how the Queen speaks. Upper class English has its own accent. Even the younger royals are trying to break

Don't agree. My university specialized in teaching english with American accents and I've known plenty of people that grew up in other parts of the world that learned english with a British, maybe imperfect, accent.

Hi Yizhivika, I agree with you on all counts! As for the difficulty (as I wrote in the other post) these exercise are meant for students who are sitting for the Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (CPE) . This exam is made up of five

I remember at school there was a combined volume of "Billy Liar" and "The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner" ubiquitous to the "English Rooms". I thought the latter to be the better story, better written; but