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

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

It depends what you mean by long and short vowels. I only know the definition based on the real length, and in that case "bang" would have a long vowel because the vowel is followed by a voiced consonant. But the distinction between long

Dear all, I requested from my tenant 14% increment for the rent of my appartment (according to the Cyprus law). He refused and I suggested to suffering 4% as to reduce the increment from 14% to 10%. Then, he accepted my suggestion and I

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

History of English Language-Funny or reality? In the beginning, there was an island off the coast of Europe. It had no name, for the natives had no language, only a collection of grunts and gestures that roughly translated to Hey!Gimme!, and

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

James- I think the differences all could be accounted for by dialect. In American English, I have been taught that the only syllabic consonants are l and n, but not m. all of the words above such as london and gordon could be pronounced with a

(b) I really don't think that /w/ is a vowel-like sound at all... think of the difference in pronunciation between the word 'shah' and the name 'Shaw'. It's a subtle difference, but they produce different sounds. In my