Search results for 'tag:Present perfect tag:Pronunciation' matching tags 'Present perfect' and 'Pronunciation'

A short video and two questions

Kooyeen — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 23:50:41 GMT

Hi,
this is a duplicated post. I posted this in the grammar section, but since no one seems to care about this there, I decided to post it here too. Here's the original post.
PS: the character speaks pretty fast, maybe listening with headphones will help notice strange features or slight variations in pronunciation.

Hi,
I decided to post this question here, because it is about comprehension... but it involves grammar. Move it to the pronunciation section if you think it is not ok to have it here.
Ok, this is a video.

http://www.filenanny.com/files/44f7b9c9f14e0/package.avi

The last things he said, according to subtitles and transcripts:
Oh boy, I've never gotten a package this big. I've always wanted to have a huge package.

This is what I heard, instead:
Oh boy, I'd never gotten a package this (?date). I'd always wanted to have a huge package.

Questions:
1 - What does he actually say?
2 - Regardless of what he says, in that exact situation, would both the present perfect and the past perfect be ok? (I've never gotten... I've always wanted - I'd never gotten... I'd always wanted)

My answer: I think he uses the past perfect, but the present perfect would have been ok too in that situation. But I'm confused... maybe the past perfect doesn't sound very good.

Watch this video - I've/I'd never gotten

Kooyeen — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:21:32 GMT

Re: has,had,have

Phuongninhbao — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:31:31 GMT

Modal verb: I have to study Grammar all the time.

Present perfect: I have been in Dalat for twenty years. She has been..........

Present perfect continuous: I have been eating She has been eating.

Causative: I have my car serviced

If -clause; If I have time, I'll go with you

If I had time , I would go with you

If I had gone by car, I would have saved time

Bare infinitive: Let's have a look about your translation

Infinitive: I try to have a good pronunciation

Imperative; Have a nice day

And a lot of kinds of sentences such as It's isn't necessary that she have a lot of advices to him,. you needn't have gone to the office yesterday.....

Phuong ninh

Re: Present perfect tense question

Goodman — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:07:44 GMT

Umâ¦.Where do I begin? Well, I am almost sure one or two of you on this forum may have already heard the story before. As Iâd said many time before, learning English is much harder for Asians than Europeans for the simple fact that Asian langauges are not made up of alphabets, except Vietnamese. For Asian born Chinese, the movement of their tongue and jaw has been trained into the muscles from speaking their native dialects. Itâs difficult to re-train them to move in the ways English speaking demands them of moving which in turn causes pronunciation problems for them.

So for a young immigrant who never learned the basics of English, it would seem extremely impossile to learn this language, as least for a period about 2 years. I was 17 when I arrived Calif. But not until 2 years later that I really seriously spent a lot of time studying. The way I learned English is not what you would call academic. In fact, I donât have a college degree because I had to work right away to survive. I couldnât go to regular high school for I wonât understand anyway. My existence for next 5 years was working in the Chinese restaurant at night and went to ESL classes during the day. After I felt confident with my English, I enrolled into a technical college to take the next step, not knowing if I could make it through. I can confortablly now tell you, if you had enough will in you, you can conquer almost anyting. Through my experience, I found out if you are humble to learn people will teach you. Through the years, Iâve kept up with this attitude of practicing what Iâd learned and refining it.

Iâd also like to shar ewith you that television, up till today, has been my best learning tool. It helped me build my speech patterns and word usage by listening and visuals. I am still trying to keep improving my written skills by emulating others writing style. Thatâs why I want to do what little I can to help others because I know how confusing, depressing and frustrating it can be to become fluent in English. To answer your question about proficiency, I would say this, I feel condifident about my English and my ability to express my thoughts clearly. Whether my English is better than native American is not really imporatant to me. Hope my story didn't bore you to tears!

Re: I Want To Be Fluent English Speaker How Please?

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 11:22:20 GMT

Improving your motivation

Before you start reading, you should know this: Learning English requires action. You may know all the learning tips, but if you don't start doing things, you will achieve nothing. Therefore our method is not just for reading; it is for reading and doing.

You need two things to learn English well â passion and effective learning methods â and passion is the more important one. Why? Because passion makes you want to learn English; the learning methods only tell you how to do it faster.

If you love learning English:

You will do it regularly and spend more time on it.
Learning English will be easier for you. It will be easy for you to remember new words and grammar structures. It's because the brain easily remembers information on a subject that you like. (For example, some people like history and know everything about World War II. If you told a "normal person" to memorize all these facts, they would never do it.)
We know you may not love learning English. And even if you love it, you will sometimes not want to do it. This is how human psychology works â sometimes we are so lazy, bored, and tired that we don't want to do even the things that we like.

Here is what you can do when you don't feel like learning English:

Imagine yourself in the future
Imagine you can talk to native speakers just like you talk in your first language. Imagine other people wanting to speak English as well as you do. Imagine the possibility of writing e-mail to people from all over the world.

You should know that it is possible to learn English really well. Just look at other people who have done it.

Remember that you are already good
You already know some English (you're reading an article in English right now). That's a big success! Now it's time for more successes. Time to start using powerful methods of effective learning. Time to gain an impressive knowledge of English.

Remember there is a lot that you don't know
You are good, but your English probably isn't perfect. You probably can't understand English-language TV, read books in English, talk to native speakers easily, write letters without mistakes, etc.

You should never think your English is perfect. Even if you are the best student in your class, always try to find your weak areas and work on them. When you've learned to speak English well, your problems will be quite small: punctuation, rarely used grammar structures, rare words, understanding "street language". Right now, your problems are probably more basic: mistakes in pronunciation, small vocabulary, grammar problems with the present perfect tense and conditional structures.

Use your English whenever you can
This is very, very important. The more you use English, the more you will want to learn it.

Because English is so popular, you can use it everywhere. You can use Yahoo to find English-language websites with interesting information, you can watch American cartoons, you can play adventure games on your computer, you can read interesting books in English, or you can do other things that we write about.

If you do these things, you will not only have fun and learn English. If you see that a new English word lets you understand your favorite TV show (or communicate with people, or beat a computer game), you will want to learn more words. So you will learn English more, use it more, learn it more, use it more... If you also use effective learning methods, your English will grow faster than you can imagine.