Kooyeen, I'm African American and being black has NOTHING to do with pronouncing the word "sword" nor does it have anything to do with Ebonics. That is an ignorant, stereotypical statement... It was just a guess, since CB said he

I don't fully understand what a contraction is. So if I put an 's, 'll, 'd, 've, etc after any word does it make it a contraction? Only in spoken English. But in written English, some contractions are not usually written that

You definitely would not use "that" if you are referring to something that you know is fact. Hi, was there a mistake there? Did you mean "You definitely would not use IF"? Well, what I was saying is that I suspected that

Very interesting. Phonemes helped me a lot, but if I had known the expression "un" I might have understood correctly. From Longman: (BrE spoken) a short form of 'one', used to say that someone or something is good, bad etc. As

American-English was British-English, except that it was altered significantly by all of the various influences (immigrants/languages from other countries) that learned to speak it in America. Everyone in the UK knows how to communicate in English

Are you sure they speak standard American or British English? It sounds like it might be from a sort of dialect of English. Where I live nobody puts that pronoun there. The only meaning it might have, to my ear, is a sort of enthusiastic emphasis,

AJ Hoge's "effortless english" is a waste of money. I made the mistake of buying it for a friend who doesn't speak much English and she doesn't even use it. I don't blame her because it takes a lot of effort to learn with

I haven't the patience to read through all of that thread, but there is no single American pronunciation. We have several regional dialects, all of which are acceptable. The Webster's pronunciations that I have already given you are fine– what

TinyPixie, you are absolutely correct about the use of these prepositions, but there exists one nuance that you should take into consideration. Thus, on is used for giving phone numbers in British English, eg : Call us on 0800 0900017 , while at

According to both the Cambridge Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary, "bag'gel" is not the British pronunciation of the word "bagel". If those two dictionaries are any indication, the British pronunciation is basically