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

short 'the' (before a consonant sound) French le Oddly e nough, a large p e r centage of unstressed English vow e ls "reduce to schwa" in rap i d speech, including those underlined here. It varies, depending on the

Maybe the muscles in our lips, tongues, and throats get so used to certain patterns of motion that we just can't break the speech habits that we developed at an early age. Yes, but if someone practices hard enough, and they are also a bit

I just thought ealrier today that "th" and "d" in fast unclear speech must be indistinguishable, after I heard something on youtube. I'll try to find it again. (EDIT: On second thought I think that depends a lot on the

syllable Segment of speech usually consisting of a vowel with or without accompanying consonant sounds (e.g., a , I , out , too , cap , snap , check ). A syllabic consonant, like the final n sound in button and widen , also constitutes a syllable.

Hi everyone! I've read people can omit /t/ sounds when speaking in informal situations. Could you help me? What do you know about this? Is this true? There's even a rule saying " In informal speech we sometimes omit the /t/ when the

You need to learn to speak from scratch, as if you were a child. That means you should start to learn the vowels and the consonants, then put them together to create phonemes, then connect them to form words, then learn to join words and say short

It's not a figure of speech; it's a grammatical structure. Many grammarians would prefer the nobler, the humbler because both adjectives are disyllabic and end in a consonant (b) + le . CB

I don't have any >> formal ESL training or certification, but I do tutor some >>foreign >> students in English ... >>> my speech. I'm not in the business of telling them I'm right and >>> they're

The explanation (which I find convincing, but your mileage may vary) is that the puff of air is *unvoiced*, whereas all vowels are, by definition, voiced to some extent. If you try the hand-over-mouth experiment with the word "peak", for