Search results for 'tag:Grammar tag:Consonants' matching tags 'Grammar' and 'Consonants'

Re: A unexpectantly came out

Avangi — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:43:50 GMT

New2grammar
she embarassedly screamed.

Dagnabbit, New2, you guys are such great spellers, I assumed I was wrong about another of my famous double consonants! I even started wondering about "occurrence" and looked it up. Okay, two sets of doubles. Why not look up "embarrassed" while I'm at it? Hmmm. Two sets of doubles, the way I've always done it - until this thread! - A.

Re: Which language is most difficult language for people to learn?

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 11:27:38 GMT

Forbes
I think Polish simply has the reputation of being difficult because of the way it looks on the page; it appears to have some fearsome consonant clusters. Even then, whilst it does have consonant clusters that English lacks, appearances are a bit deceptive; the combination szcz looks like four sounds, but is in fact two.

I don't agree with you. In Polish not only sounds are difficult, but also grammar is horrible! Believe me even Polish people don't speak Polish very well. http://hubpages.com/hub/Most_Difficult_Languages_-_Polish - this is a page where you can see a Polish grammar. And I know one Spanish who lives in Poland 9 years and he speaks bad Polish despite he had learned for a long time.

Forbes
Again, Japanese has the reputation of being difficult because it has the most complex writing system of any language. The language itself is just as easy/difficult as any other language.

And I don't agree with you again. I have a friend who is Japaneese and my sister is learning Japaneese too. This language has so crazy rules in grammar! For example: when you're counting some things you use different numbers for things which are flat and different for big mammals.

This two languages are really difficult.
The reputation is from somewhere, huh?

Re: MM's 10-letter word

Tanit — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 13:24:52 GMT

Does it start with a vowel or with a consonant?
Is it countable?
Can you have it? Can you dream it? Can you put it into practice?

Grammar Geek
Okay, this one is for Tanit.

Hope this does not mean I'll be the only player here!

Re: Long instead of short vowels

Avangi — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:23:51 GMT

Hi Kooyeen,

You're way more into phonics than I am, though as a choral conductor I'm always screeming at singers to sustain the vowel portions of the words, since the consonants (generally) cannot be sung. I'm not really going to address your question. I just wanted to caution that "long vowels" to a native speaker, or anyone who's been through "native" grammar school, are the ones which "say their own names." ( Some are dipthongs.) IMHO, what you're talking about would be called "sustained short vowels" as opposed to non-sustained short vowels, COP being an example of the former.

Very best wishes, - A.

Re: Help Me!

Philip — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:11:44 GMT

Anonymous

Ishmael Reed is a(n) poet.

A. ancient

B. nineteenth century

C. contemporary

D. medieval

I believe it is either B or C but I can't find what contemporary means and if he is.

5. In "Beware: Do Not Read This Poem" by Ishmael Reed the poem supposedly has the power to:

A. put readers to sleep.

B. reflect an image.

C. drag readers into its world.

11. Alliteration means:

A. using vowel sounds over and over.

B. repeating consonant sounds.

C. using words whose sounds seem to express or reinforce their meanings.

D. none of the above

Also what does personifies mean?

Contemporary means "with the time" [current]. The question itself has nothing to do with grammar.

5. Again, the question has nothing to do with grammar.

11. Which do you think is the correct answer?

Personification: a literary device giving human characteristics to inanimate objects [the flowers danced in the sunlight].

Re: No Vowvels but using "AN" with it why ??? ...

Madame_butterfly — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:03:08 GMT

Thank you Grammar Geek for your compliment, I am glad to be here with you sharing and learning. In fact I have also meant what you said. If the pronunciation starts with a consonant sound then it takes "a", as in "university". Besides, as in "hour", the pronunciation starts with a vowel, and it takes "an". I think we agree on the same idea. I hope I could make myself clear enough

Re: Which language is most difficult language for people to learn?

Hoa Thai — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:43:06 GMT

CalifJim wrote:
I read somewhere that Mario Pei, the linguist, tried to learn a different language every year. He supposedly claimed that Vietnamese was the most difficult.

CJ

I disagree with the linguist Mario Pei not because I am a Vietnamese. It is because I have seen, in my country, a couple of TV hosts and many shop owners speak our language fluently and write better than most of our people do. Amazingly, all of them have lived in Vietnam for only a few years. For instance, Joe Ruelle, who has been in Vietnam for only 3 years or so, has his own blog written in perfect Vietnamese and speaks the language without a foreign trace. People say that Joe is a Vietnamese who had plastic surgery in order to look like a Canadian!

For me, after years of learning French, English, Japanese, and Korean in that order - I find that:

1. Korean is the easiest to learn. After learning its unique phonetic vowels and consonants, one can arrange them together to form / spell various monosyllabic words; and string the words together, using a few grammar rules, to make sensible sentences. After two years learning the language, I now can comfortably watch KBS TV- programs.

2. French is second. Its grammar is structural and without exceptions. Spelling the words is as they sound. The hardest part is to memorize the gender of its vocabulary (i.e., masculine vs. feminine).

3. English is next. This multi-syllable language has the richest dictionary in the world with all of the borrowed words from a score or more foreign languages, including Latin / French / German / Japanese / Vietnamese, etcâ¦you name it. It also has too many exceptions in both grammar and pronunciation, along with its homophones and all of its nym's (homonym, capitonym, etcâ¦) that give Spelling-Bee contestants nightmares.

4. Finally, Japanese is the hardest with its two syllabaries: hiragana and katakana, plus about 8000 kanji's. This multi-syllable ideographic language is too culturally, hierarchically, and gender sensitive. I was told, one needs to know about 2000 kanji's to reach college-level proficiency and 2000 more or so to be considered as a scholar. In number, those are not huge compared to hundred-thousands in English but they take a decade or more to learn! Thus, the language is VERY difficult.

After 2 years learning the language, I can only manage to limitedly engage in daily, social conversation and no more. Now my Japanese friends rather use their broken English to talk to me! I owe them a lot since they have to deal with the language, to them, is the most difficult one in the world.

Having said that, I must say all languages are equally difficult for foreigners, who are not familiar with the cultures in which they are used, to learn. Absorbing literal meanings might be manageable, but understanding the deep connotation is often impossible.

CIAO,

Hoa Thai

Re: Is grammar essential for learning a language?

Feathers — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 16:11:39 GMT

Thanks, anon. Without your post, I would have missed this thread.

Goodman wrote:

Hi CJ,

What an impressive thread you have posted. You have slowly made me a fan of yours.

Yep!

CalifJim wrote:

In any case, the struggle for the learner is always making the conversion from 'computing' utterances (assembling them by applying grammatical rules) to generating meaningful utterances spontaneously. The more role models the learners have, whether in terms of number of speakers they have contact with or in terms of the number of written and spoken resources they have available, the smoother the transition. At the extreme, if the learner is thrown into a sink-or-swim situation -- immersion -- it may be possible to shortcut the 'computational' period considerably. The final goal is the same in any case: meaningful language that is automatically produced and instinctively felt without any further consciousness of or need for the 'computational' (grammatical) aspects which were so prominent and necessary in the learning stages.

How true.

I'm reminded of Prof. Stern's comment (University of Connecticut), as an additional tip for us learners.
_______________________________________________________________________________

when people are really acclimating themselves with American English, I think one of the first things that makes native English speakers more comfortable with a non-native speaker is not necessarily even the pronunciation of the individual vowels and consonants, but whether the inflections are moving in the direction that the listeners are used to hearing. Whether the rhythm of the language - some languages that are in a totally different rhythm, and if a speaker of that accent simply starts to elongate the syllables and change the pitch some, then a native speaking listener is going to become much more comfortable with that speech pattern.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Re: IS "w" A VOWEL

Anonymous — Sun, 27 May 2007 06:19:47 GMT

Dear Cyndi:

You have actually asked two questions in your posting: (1) Is the letter w a vowel? and (2) For how long have schools been teaching that the letter w is a vowel?

Regarding (1), the answer is that w can be both a vowel and a consonant.

Regarding (2), at least since 1861 in the United States.

My proof is the following: I quote from an American English grammar textbook from the year 1861:

What I find particularly interesting about the following section I quote is that, at the very end of it, the author points out that the letters u and i as well can be either vowels or consonants.

"The vowels are a, e, i, o, u; also w and y, when not followed by a vowel sound in the same syllable [emphasis added].

"They can be sounded alone, and represent each several inarticulate elementary sounds. (Except w.)

"Ex. -- Fate, fare, fat, far, fall; me, met; fine, fin, fatigue; no, not, dove, prove, book; use, us, full; city, cry; brow, dew, boy.

"The consonants are all the letters except the vowels.

"They are so called because they can not be sounded alone; or rather, when they are uttered alone, the sound of a vowel is always heard with them.

"Ex.--B, c, d, f, m, k, are pronouned as if written be, se, de, ef, em, ka.

"W or y is a consant when a vowel sound follows it in the same syllable; as in water, young, year, Iowa, Buynan.

U and i are consonants when equivalent to the consants w and y; as in persuade, poniard.--X=ks, gz, or z; as in tax, exalt, Xerxes."

Re: Trading accents

Marvin A. — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:41:33 GMT

Lesson 1: Basic Pronunciation
The following will make you sound Southern to non-Southerners:

Pin pen merger: Pronounce "pin" and "pen" both as pin [ pIn ] . Any /E/ followed by an /n/ should be sounded as /In/
No yod dropping: therefore "
No wine-whine merger: Pronounce words such as "whine" "white" whales" with an "hw" sound.
Pronounce /aU/ as [ eU ] : down -> dayoon
Pronounce /aI/ as [ a ] except before voiceless consonants (p,t,k,f,theta,s). For those, use [ aI ] .
Distinguish /ær/, /Ér/, and /er/ in "marry" "merry" and "Mary"
Before "l" make all vowels lax: thus feel->fill fail->fell
Many nouns are stressed on the first syllable that would be stressed on the second syllable in other accents. These include police, cement, Detroit, Thanksgiving, insurance, behind, display, recycle, and TV.
Pronounce /u/ and /o/ in the front of the mouth, with unrounded lips
Merge "cord" and "card"
/i/ at the end of words -> [ E ] : so happy -> happeh

Pronounce /æ/ (as in cat) as first [ æ ] , but hold it for twice as long as other vowels, then add "yuh" [ j@ ] to the end of it: so cat -> caaaa-yut [ kæ:j@t ]
Pronounce /E/ (except before "n") as in "exit" as [ E ] , but hold it for twice as long, and add "yuh" to the end
Pronounce /I/ as /I/ , but hold it for twice as long and add "yuh" to the end of hit.

Pronounce both "cot" and "caught" as [ ka:wO:t ] So the /A/ or /O/ sound should become [ a:wO: ]

Lesson II: Grammar